The Antwerp / Tokyo Master Guide
The road map to all our favorite designers and makers from the two fashion mega-hubs
Since our inception, the Hellish Materials Research Center has made it our mission to document, analyze, link, and bridge the many intricate links between the two countries that best embody fashion to us — Belgium and Japan. Two cities in particular, Tokyo and Antwerp, are the metonymic embodiments of the gateways to this shared portal, and the two entry points we fixate on documenting.
In the end (if there ever is one..), we hope to fully trace the lineage of anti-fashion, deconstruction, and the long-standing tradition of outsider art and design — movements first pioneered by the Japanese designers who overtook Paris in the 70s and 80s, and then carried on by Martin Margiela and the Antwerp Six. Drawing from the intertwined fashion histories of these two ports, we focus primarily on the years from the late 1980s until the mid 2000s: a period when both cities became cultural fountainheads that continue to shape fashion today.
Over the last decade, we’ve sifted through secondary markets, long-forgotten fashion forums, and endless piles of Japanese periodicals and dusty designer monographs to assemble what we see as a road map to our version of true and enduring fashion. This guide is not a definitive catalog of everything, but rather a cartography of the nodes and fuse points that comprise our worldview, studies, and methodologies. The following sets of Belgian and Japanese designers (or, metonymically, Antwerp & Tokyo) are arranged from best-known to most obscure, based on available research, sourcing difficulty, and cultural visibility — a framework to navigate the cosmos of designers we love and cherish.
This guide will remain a living, breathing document, replete with original, rarely-before-seen scans, research-supported designer biographical information, market recommendations, comprehensive research sources including monographs, magazines, and additional media.
This guide is something we will always be updating, specifying, and growing; think of it as an autonomous, metastasizing web that one may continually pluck from. We hope you’ll join us.