In March 1986 a rented van crossed the Channel with five young Belgian designers and the collections of a sixth inside it. Ann Demeulemeester was pregnant and stayed home. Dries Van Noten, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Bikkembergs, Dirk Van Saene, and Marina Yee made the trip, encouraged by Geert Bruloot, who ran a shoe shop in Antwerp called Coccodrillo and had decided that the clothes coming out of the Royal Academy needed to be seen somewhere other than Antwerp. They were heading to Olympia for the British Designer Show, and they could not really afford it individually, which is why there was one van.

They got a booth on the fourth floor, set among the bridal wear, several flights above where the buyers were actually working. Day one passed almost without visitors. By the second morning they had printed a flyer themselves, captioned "The SIX Belgian Designers", and were handing it out in the corridors below. A buyer from Barneys followed the flyer up the stairs. He ordered from all six. By the afternoon there was press in the booth, and the buyers from Bergdorf and Liberty were on their way up too.

The English-language press could not pronounce the names, so they shortened the problem and called the lot of them the Antwerp Six. The label is misleading in every important way. They never had a manifesto, never showed together as a collective again, and never agreed to be six. Van Noten makes prints from his Indian workshop. Van Beirendonck does fluorescent latex and BDSM references. Van Saene cuts cocktail dresses with bow details and those carefully shrunken cardigans that everyone tried to copy later. Bikkembergs went to military boots and then bought an Italian football club. Demeulemeester put women in slouchy black suits and read Rimbaud at them. Yee, who died of cancer during the run-up to the MoMu retrospective, kept moving across menswear, womenswear, costume, nothing settling. Six careers that share a graduation year and a diploma from the same small fashion department, and almost nothing else.

What they did share was a starting condition. Belgium in the early 1980s had a state-funded campaign called Fashion: It's Belgian, designed to keep a collapsing textile industry alive by manufacturing some designers to put inside it. There was a competition, the Golden Spindle, that they all entered. Linda Loppa was running the fashion department at the Royal Academy and pushing the students out into the world before the world had asked for them. Paris and Milan were the centres. Antwerp was a port town known for diamonds. Nobody in the trade was expecting anything from there, which meant nobody had a frame ready to receive them.

That absence of a frame is the thing I keep returning to. The Six did not arrive into a defined slot in late-eighties fashion. They invented a slot that did not previously exist, and they invented it from a fourth-floor booth that the buyers were not supposed to visit, with a flyer they had run off themselves because nobody else was going to. Forty years later the MoMu in Antwerp is opening a retrospective on 28 March, running through to January 2027, the first time the work of all six has been gathered in one room. The press release calls it a celebration of "radical individuality". That is the right phrase, and it is also the joke. They were always individuals. The collective was the convenience of the people who had to write about them.

Dries Van Noten later built a house large enough to acquire a perfumer and to retire from his own brand on his own schedule. The others moved in their own directions, at their own paces, with their own defections and their own returns. Margiela, who had already left for Jean Paul Gaultier in Paris by 1984, is sometimes folded into the story as the seventh, and sometimes politely left out of it. The exhibition seems to settle on Antwerp 6+1, which is the most honest title anyone has tried.

The van is the part that stays with me. Not the breakthrough, not the orders, not the museum show. Just the practical fact of five people pooling petrol money because none of them could afford the trip alone, and a sixth's collection riding along in the back without her, and a printer somewhere in West London running off flyers at short notice because nobody was coming up the stairs.

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