Meet The Icons: The Designers Who Shaped Fashion

Dries Van Noten’s design aesthetic is hard to define yet easy to recognize for those in the know. As a member of The Antwerp Six (the group of Belgian designers who graduated from the prestigious Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1986), the brand’s eponymous founder always thought outside the box, never shying away from offering a different point of view. His collections were always filled with an abundance of clashing color combinations, high-shine textures and artful prints that in theory should never have worked, yet in his skilled hands, always did.

Following Van Noten’s retirement in 2024, creative director Julian Klausner took the helm and is forging his own path with a level of exuberance and unbridled joy that would make his predecessor proud. “Heritage and legacy is more than images or shows,” Klausner told i-D magazine on his appointment. “It’s in the clothes: the clothes people kept, that they wore many, many times, and that they still wear. It’s really about the clothes in the wardrobe in the end.”

Maison Margiela has never had any interest in playing by the rules. Founded in 1988 by enigmatic Belgian designer Martin Margiela, the brand finds beauty in imperfection through its innovative use of materials and pioneering deconstruction techniques. “My love for Margiela didn’t start with specific pieces, but with the overall visual aesthetic of the brand and the idea of anonymity – it completely fascinated me,” says Berlin-based collector Angelina Nagornova. “I was looking through old campaigns and runway photos and couldn’t explain that strange yet magnetic feeling they gave.”

Since joining as creative director in 2025, Glenn Martens – who also hails from Belgium and studied at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts – has brought his own radical vision to the maison while honoring the house codes intrinsic to Margiela’s DNA. Some of the most iconic signatures include the ‘Bianchetto’ brushstroke treatment on everything from footwear to denim, the four white stitches sewn onto every garment, and perhaps the most iconic of all, the ‘Tabi’ – a shoe inspired by the traditional 15th-century Japanese sock of the same name.

Rebellious, dystopian, avant garde… These are just some of the words used to describe Rick Owens’ aesthetic, but if you ask Owens himself, he’d call it ‘glunge’ (a blend of glamour and grunge). “Clothes are about aspiration. If I can make weirdness aspirational, I will have done what I set out to do – to expand a somewhat strict set of accepted aesthetic rules,” Owens told AnOther Man in 2017. The California-born, Paris-based designer has earned a cult following for his effortless, everyday separates that fuse The Matrix-style futurism with a rock ‘n’ roll edge – think biker jackets with exaggerated funnel necks, asymmetrically draped dresses and distressed cotton tees – and are all crafted using exacting, couture-level techniques.

Rei Kawakubo may dismiss ever being called an icon, but it’s impossible to overstate her influence on fashion since she founded Comme des Garçons in Tokyo more than 50 years ago. A true iconoclast, she pushes the boundaries of traditional dressmaking and rejects all conventional beauty standards to create clothes in exaggerated, subversive shapes that feel like works of art. “Comme des Garçons is pure art and forms, where clothing no longer exists to highlight the body, but instead stands as an independent sculpture,” says Angelina Nagornova, who is also a keen Comme des Garçons collector (one of her first, most cherished pieces is a rope-detailed jacket from the spring/summer 2003 collection).

In a rare interview with AnOther magazine in 2021, Kawakubo said: “For me, to live is to work, to create. Nothing else. I can only do what I can […] I am happy if I can make something that inspires some people. If you want to make something, you must make an effort and never stop.”