I arrive. It is cold. The studio is vast, and grey. This is Belgium.
It is the middle of the 2010s. I am sent to photograph the A.F. Vandevorst studio for the press. It is Anne-Françoise Moyson, fashion journalist at Le Vif/L'Express, who calls me, as she often does, to illustrate her piece. A commission. But this house is one of the sharpest in Belgian fashion. An and Filip met at the Antwerp Academy, on the first day of class. She was Dries Van Noten's first assistant. At their second show, in Paris, they laid the models in thirty-two hospital beds. The international press still talks about it. Today their pieces are at the Met and at MoMu in Antwerp. This is who I am walking in on that morning, cameras in hand.
The place grips me at once. It reminds me of the Museum Dr. Guislain, in Flanders, a former asylum turned museum, one of the strangest places in the flat country of Jacques Brel. The studio has that same soul. Deeply weathered, fascinating. You cannot tell whether it is controlled to the millimetre or completely raw. Something unsettling and very precise at the same time. Is it beautiful? Yes. I think so. There is something of David Lynch in it.
Red brick, winter, a grey sky. Belgitude, as they say here. I am not Belgian, but I have lived here for more than fifteen years, and I understand it. Do you have to be an insider to love it? I do not know. But the place is inhabited. And so are my hosts. We are worlds away from the smooth, sweetened studios. It is exactly the opposite. The place, in real life, looks as if it were black and white. And it is very beautiful to see.
The pinhole
For the portraits, I bring out the Hasselblad. The precision, the skin, the gaze that holds. Filip and An deserved that gravity.
But the studio did not ask for sharpness. It asked for time. For blur. That dreamlike image that prints itself without ever quite revealing, that leaves the imagination to do the rest. So I did what a press commission never expects: I took my old Nikon and turned it into a pinhole camera. No lens. A hole. A flash mounted on top so I could shoot handheld, on the move, as close as possible to the materials.
Not for one moment did I tell myself, “this is for the press.” I told myself: this is for Anne-Françoise. So let us make something that looks like them, and like me. A house that subverts the uniform and the hospital bed deserved to have the camera subverted too.
What remains
A.F. Vandevorst closed in 2020. Twenty-two years of a house. Their iconic boots are still on sale. But what remains, for me, is above all an impression of authenticity. They, whom I met only once, breathed sincerity: a vision, a concept, pushed all the way. A real force, human and creative. I am no great fashion specialist, but I have met plenty of people in that world, and they, I can tell you, do not leave you indifferent. Perhaps that is what moves me even more today, at a time when everyone is looking for that kind of sincerity.
A new chapter, then. Antwerp, the cold, a makeshift pinhole. And a house that taught me that a true image is not a clean image. It is an image that looks like its subject, and like the one who takes it.
Julien Claessens
