“The worst designer is someone who is only making nice things. You’re just a decorator then.” -Jurgi Persoons
In a landscape where surface beauty often seduces, Jurgi Persoons emerged as a designer uninterested in decoration. His work—raw, obsessive, and charged with psychic tension—rejected polish in favor of provocation. A decade after the Antwerp Six redefined the boundaries of Belgian fashion, Persoons stepped from their long shadow with a voice all his own: quieter perhaps, but no less disruptive.
Born of the second generation of Royal Academy of Fine Arts graduates in Antwerp, Persoons made his debut in the late 1990s following an apprenticeship with Walter Van Beirendonck. Like many of his peers, he collaborated with makeup artist Inge Grognard and photographer Ronald Stoops—two visual architects of Belgium’s underground fashion language. Yet while others veered toward abstraction or theatricality, Persoons’s collections dug inward, toward emotional interiority and the tactile ritual of handwork.
His Fall/Winter 2001 collection, often referred to as “Mirrors”, stands as a haunting articulation of his vision. The presentation—a nontraditional installation rather than a catwalk—placed models on mirrored floors, forcing them into a precarious dance of balance and reflection. The audience, too, became implicated: in glimpsing the garments, they saw themselves. Here was not fashion as fantasy, but fashion as confrontation.
The garments themselves resisted spectacle. Navy blues, blacks, and ashen greys shrouded the body in sculptural wool, cashmere, and cotton—fabrics rendered grave and gothic. Skirts dropped low on the hips, some ruffled, others pleated in raw geometric folds. Many pieces bore Persoons’s hallmark: erratic, “nervous” seams stitched visibly by hand, as though sewn in a trance. His asymmetry was not rebellion for its own sake—it was personal, even obsessive. Each uneven hem and crooked dart whispered of psychological unrest. In his hands, imperfection became a form of emotional rigor.
The “Mirrors” show, likely staged in the underground parking of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, encapsulated Persoons' approach to fashion as a kind of quiet violence: intimate, constructed, and unapologetically unstable. It was not beautiful in the classical sense. It was beautiful in the way broken glass glitters underfoot.
Persoons would go on to present three more seasons before closing his label in 2003. The fallout from 9/11 proved fatal. With American buyers unable—or unwilling—to travel to Paris, his primary market vanished. His collection, reportedly lost in transit at JFK on the day of the attacks, never reached its audience. Fashion, always a precarious business for those who resist the market’s rhythms, moved on.
Yet to those who saw his work—not just in museums or digital archives, but in person, in rooms where models hovered above mirrors—Persoons left a lasting impression. He was not a decorator. He was a designer who dared to make fashion sense.