Students and teachers from the Department of Fashion and Theatre Costume Design on a school trip to London, 1966. Mary Prijot is on the far right.
Students recalled that there was little interaction with the other disciplines and that it took a long time before the Fashion Department began to receive any recognition from the students and the faculty of the more traditional art disciplines.
Mods, Hippies and Swinging Antwerp The fashion-conscious, often well-heeled students who followed the fashion programme under Mary Prijot in the 1960s and 1970s tended to stand out amongst the bohemians and hippies populating the painting and sculpture departments at the Academy. Jo Wyckmans, a member of one of the Fashion Department’s first graduating classes, recalls, ‘There was really a gap between the fashion students and the other students, the artists. We had no contact with them. When I was a student, it was the time of Panamarenko and the Provos, with their long hair. Those of us in fashion walked around as exactly the opposite: super-bourgeois, wearing expensive shirts. My clothes were English in style; my suits were bespoke.’22 The 1960s saw the rise of concurrent but contradictory images of fashion. Classic fashion, inspired by haute couture, now had competition from fashion that had evolved from the street up. Young people, especially teenagers, inspired international innovations in fashion and cultural life. In London, this ‘Youthquake’ was further stimulated by Mary Quant, who introduced the miniskirt. New icons such as Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton became a prominent presence in the international media. London in particular was a tremendous attraction, with Carnaby Street and King’s Road as shopping Meccas for both mods and hippies. The fact that London had become an important fashion centre had certainly not escaped Antwerp. The Fashion Department, together with the Commercial Art and Advertising Faculty, organized a number to field trips to London in the 1960s and 1970s. The 1966 trip was led by Mary Prijot, Marthe Van Leemput and Piet
Serneels. In addition to the requisite points of interest — the Parliament Buildings, Windsor and Hampton Court — they visited the Fashion Department of London’s Royal College of Arts and the costume studios of the Royal Opera House. The rest of the programme included visits to museums and the city’s most important shopping streets.23 Cultural excursions of this kind were not exceptional: students also travelled to Brussels to attend performances choreographed by Maurice Béjart and visited museums in Paris and London. Prijot found it crucial that students kept their eyes and ears open, stimulating creativity. She encouraged her students from the perspective of her own cultural background and training in art.24 In Antwerp itself, the Swinging Sixties also left their mark. As a driving force for international trade, Antwerp was directly connected to two of the most important cities in the international hippie movement: London and Amsterdam. The influence that these cities had on the drowsy provincial capital was considerable. The hippies and the Provos found their way to the City on the Schelde, where they had a major effect on contemporary art. In 1966, Anny De Decker and Bernd Lohaus founded the Wide White Space, and artists such as Hugo Heyrman and Panamarenko, an Antwerp Academy graduate, strove to bring about cultural change and progressive policies on culture. In Flanders, the international student revolt, heralded by the Leuven Vlaams January Revolt in 1968, generated a vehement artists’ protest that was concentrated in Antwerp, centred around the A 37 90 89-group and the Vrije Actiegroep Antwerpen (vaga, Antwerp Free Action Group).25 A lively art and fashion scene arose in Hendrik Conscience Square, with, among others, the eccentric designs, boutique and performances by Ann Salens, whose colourful crocheted garments won her international fame. The small shop, Akke Boe, owned by Akke Haarsma, from the Netherlands, would also attract countless young people, as an expression of the spirit and the fashion of the 1960s and 1970s. Initially, not many of these new street-generated fashions were noticed at the Fashion Department of the Antwerp Academy of Art. Under the influence of Mary Prijot, the programme was primarily focused on Paris chic. Prijot had a profound aversion to the unkempt hair and looks of the hippie students: ‘In these last few years, fashion has gone mad. Surrounded by these rapidly changing trends, it takes a great deal of effort to keep a cool head in order to preserve a wearable, elegant and practical fashion. The beginnings of that were something that we tried to pass on to our students.’26 Prijot wanted to design apparel for a femme-femme, an elegant, extremely feminine woman: a lady. She preferred to see her female students with their hair cut short or gathered in a bun, with skirts that hung preferably below the knee. Nonetheless, Prijot was not ill-disposed to international developments in the field of fashion. She was full of admiration for the emergence of ready-to-wear fashion in the 1970s: ‘On the other hand, I do find it positive that
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