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Maxime Van De Wiele: Retaliation Against the Mundane

Brussels’ art scene through the lens of fashion

Drawing on Situationist philosophy, Baudelaire and his Belgian childhood, Maxime Van De Wiele’s Westminster 2023 graduate collection diverges from a set path. Modest tailoring erupts into plumes of feathers; embroidered sequins dazzle flowering urchins. The result is a concoction of modesty to modernity.

Entitled Mimesis, Maxime’s graduate collection explores the vulnerability of domestic life. Inspired by Situationist thought, the designer searches for meaning in an increasingly digital landscape. Family friend Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels spored the mycelium of Mimesis. Confronting the meaninglessness of postmodern life, the three-hour classic stages a woman cooking, cleaning and peeling. The audience is confronted with the horror of existence: to be suspended in life is at once a pleasure and a plight. Maxime’s Westminster studies were plunged into an intense inertia by the Covid-19 lockdown. His year group at Westminster “never really got the chance to fully develop all these skills that over years we would have.” This meant “it was sort of all crammed into our final year, which made it so exciting.” Once out of lockdown, design internships at Feben and Harris Reed, to name a few, enriched Max’s skill set while he crafted his final collection. After the boredom of confinement, Mimesis flourished in humble extravagance. “There’s such beauty in modesty,” explains Maxime as he depicts his muses. Every illustration is a fragment of friends or film characters, with “shoulders … probably all scrunched up because they’re shy.” Humble tailoring winks amidst the froth of grandeur, “telling a story in the composition of a garment.”

Rather like the Situationist practice of dérives, these bold details were born from serendipitous ventures to London trade shows. Islington fabric fairs enlivened Max’s art and literary references. Flemish Singerie paintings intertwined with feather plumes and spectacular trimmings. Mongolian sheep skins and ornamental buttons animated the writing of Baudelaire and paintings of Ross Bleckner. Mimesis is an invitation to dance in life and creation, escaping the hegemonic digital landscape. In pursuit of ‘dirt’, Max has escaped the corporate art world of London in favour of Brussels. As art becomes commercialised on social media platforms, Maxime searches for meaning. Situationist Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle explains the reduction of human life to images. Of the mindless content we are consumed by, Max believes “the people who scream the loudest are often the ones who have the least to say.” Creators are looking to make “a drastic impact without necessarily having the goods to back it up.”

In the bleached Metamodern age, Max calls for an exodus to his childhood city of Brussels, where the creative scene is ‘dirty’ and alive. Not dirty in the literal sense, but uncommercialised and untouched. Enriched by the city which Baudelaire once described as stinking of “black soap,” he sees “beauty in what’s sort of dirty.” On a trip to Naples, Emperor Nero’s blackened paintings reminded Maxime of Ross Bleckner and Baudelaire’s tortured writing on Brussels. A victim of a Mount Vesuvius eruption, the paintings were charred and aged. Like his silk printing experiments, this concoction swelled in Max’s imagination to produce “one of the favourite parts of the collection – this pair of trousers that are printed with this messy, dotty, purple, orange and red print.” Inspired by window shopping trips to Savile Row, tempered tailoring underpins Mimesis. However, storytelling and print eclipse conservative craftmanship.

Concerned with living in creative ‘dirt,’ Max intends to continue his career in Brussels. Before Covid-19, he saw London “sort of how some people saw the American dream,” as a city of opportunity and prosperity. Yet he explains that “Brexit happened and I saw Belgium under a completely new light.” In the metropole of art, “everything has its own form of beauty.” Currently interning with Dries Van Noten, Maxime is enriched by the “constant stimulation of thought and context,” suspended by the “mutual ideological energy” of his team. He references 19th century painter James Ensor’s awe of Brussels, whose beauty plunged him into weeklong existential crisis after each visit. As the sun embraces its Art Nouveau architecture, Max spends his Saturday in pursuit of the latest exhibition – not forgetting to return his library books.