MARINA YEE: IN MEMORIAM

“I consider myself more as an artist who does fashion and not the other way around” – Marina Yee

Marina Yee, the member of the legendary Antwerp Six, passed away today after a prolonged battle with cancer. Although Yee stepped away from fashion spotlight early on, she was seen by the insiders as a key figure not only in the success of the Antwerp Six, but in building the Belgian fashion approach that relied on conceptual thinking and which in the early ‘90s ushered in an era when subtly cerebral clothes supplanted the facile glamour of the ‘80s. Her work influenced Martin Margiela, whom Yee was dating early on, and she was instrumental in the launch of Dirk Bikkembergs’s womenswear.

I met Marina Yee in 2013 in Antwerp, when the Royal Antwerp Academy of Art was celebrating its 350th anniversary, and its fashion department, where the Antwerp Six graduated from, was celebrating its 50th. Yee was hiding from the spotlight in the Academy’s courtyard. I don’t remember what we talked about exactly, only that she was teaching fashion at a university in Ghent, but I remember her crisp level-headedness. She looked at the hubbub around us with amusement, not an affected detachment, but an observant curiosity. When she told me later, “I’m a lone wolf,” I understood what she meant.

Yee was fascinated by clothing since she was a child, making garments for her Barbie dolls when she was ten years old. Preternaturally good at drawing, Yee saw herself more as an artist who chose fashion as her medium. She ended up at the Antwerp Academy in the late ‘70s, just as punk hit Antwerp like a truck, upending all cultural values, including those of fashion. Yee described her school years as teeming with newly discovered possibilities with no visible limits.

Speaking about her work, Yee told me in an interview this summer, “I like simplicity, because it’s hard to make, you have to peel away all the extras.” She had both the respect for classic garments and their immaculate construction, and plenty of punk spirit to take them apart and reshape them in new, unexpected ways. “All of the Six have references to classical clothing. Martin has it too,” she said. “We have that in common, appreciation of craftsmanship, for the inside of the jacket from the 1930s, hidden details, what’s on the inside. It’s something precious and modest. When I started to make clothes, I threw clothes on the floor to see what would happen. Like a Dadaist, very conceptual in theory, but really it’s playing around. I was looking for my own style, I did not want to make something that already exists. I started making patchwork and graphics that did not match at all. Kind of ugly almost. But if you do it right, it can be strange, beautiful, and interesting. That’s how I challenged myself, to make beauty out of ugliness.”

Much changed after the heady years at the Academy, as the Six and Margiela began to build their careers and started to drift apart. After Margiela’s runway debut, Yee decided to quit fashion. “He is the guy who made me stop,” she told me. “He took my person as an inspiration, the way I was cutting clothing, putting underwear over. I was the muse, and you take things that feed your creativity, the persona, the hair, the makeup. Some people said it’s Marina who’s walking there [in Margiela’s first show] and it was.” Describing her reasoning behind stopping her line, she said, “I wanted to be my own inspiration and not inspiration for someone else.”

Yee went on to do other things. She had a child, she opened a cafe in Brussels, she designed for other brands. She became a teacher. But some in fashion never forgot her work. In 2018 Yee quietly relaunched her line, first as a capsule collection for a vintage store in Japan, and then as a full wardrobe offering. I recently saw some of her pieces at Dover Street Market in New York. Amidst the sea of ironic fleece and trying-too-hard frills, they still retained that ineffable and effortless cool of the ‘90s deconstructed sartorial sobriety.