Archive: An interview with the late Jenny Meirens
Originally published in November 2016.
By Jeppe Ugelvig
In the current whirlpool of our increasingly corporatised fashion industry, visionary creativity is often reduced to individual authorship. This authorship is individual because it is the entity that is most easily instrumentalised when, say, taking up roles as creative directors at major international fashion houses — just look at the abrupt break-up of Parisian brand Vetements’ collective spirit as only one of its members, the Georgian designer Demna Gvasalia, was appointed at Balenciaga. It is individual because in fashion, what is fetishised and mythicised is the maker, the genius, the couturier. The modern fashion designer is largely understood as a kind of lonely artist accidentally placed inside the machinery of capitalist consumption, the latter of which rarely receives any attention and certainly not accolades. But of course, behind every great designer story, there’s an even greater business story. For better or for worse, avant-garde design’s strength lies in its impact on everyday lives, and through consumption.
One of such stories is that of Jenny Meirens. The Belgian businesswoman co-founded the most important brand of the 90s, Maison Martin Margiela, and ensured its financial and creative viability for almost two decades. Having defied fame to an even greater extent than her business partner (who famously never gave an interview, and whose absence at his own brand was only realised a few years after his departure), Jenny was the quiescent backbone of an entirely new way of doing fashion — a legacy whose immensity only continues to expand today in fashion schools across the globe. As I try to explain this to her over the phone on a sunny day in Spring, overwhelmed with the fact that she’s within communicative reach, Jenny states, humbly: “Thank you. Thanks a lot.”
But in fact, Jenny’s story begins much earlier, as she was already an established name in the Belgian fashion industry before the fruitful synthesis with Martin Margiela (then still a student at the Royal Academy in Antwerp). Entering the booming textile industry of Belgium through her marriage, she ran a notable concept store in Brussels in the 80s with prominent avant-garde Belgian and European designers; most notably, there was also Yohji Yamamoto. “I was very interested in the Japanese when they arrived,” she recalls clearly — so much so that she opened and operated an exclusive Comme des Garçons franchise in Brussels only a few years later.
She first met Martin when she sat in the jury of the Golden Spindle, the famous state-sponsored design competition hosted by the Royal Academy in Antwerp, conceived to promote Belgian designers and the textile industry. “Antwerp and Brussels were quite different: there was more happening in Brussels than in Antwerp at that time,” she recalls. “Several experimental dance groups were setting up in the city, so there was a lot going on in the music industry. But on the fashion side, more things had been happening in Antwerp.” The Antwerp Academy instituted its famous fashion department in the 1960s, but rose to national and international prominence under the tenure of fashion educator Mary Prijot in the 80s, leading to the graduation and international export of the Antwerp Six in the same decade (notably, Jenny refers to the group as the Antwerp Seven, referring to the uncredited member Margiela). In her six-year term, the fierce educator oversaw the training of Dries Van Noten, Marina Yee, Dirk Van Saene, and Ann Demeulemeester amongst others (Demeulemeester won the inaugural Golden Spindle in 1982, the year of Bikkembergs’ graduation) — and of course, Martin Margiela, who Prijot once claimed “was strong from the very beginning.”
“Although he never won the competition, it was through there that I met him several times, and came to know him better,” Jenny explains. “Afterwards, he was very interested in the way I did my shop, and he would often visit it in Brussels. I organised exhibitions and shows, and each time, he would come. That’s how we became friends, and started talking about different things.”