The Art of Looking Again
Marina Yee, the unfinished life of a garment, and the difference between making more and making something matter.
“There’s no need for anyone to buy my clothes, only when they feel like it.”1
It is a curious thing for a fashion designer to say. Most of the industry is organised around removing hesitation from the act of buying. Marina Yee, speaking in an interview with 1 Granary in July 2025, seemed content to leave that hesitation intact.
The remark was not a rejection of fashion. It was an expression of confidence in something less easily measured than demand: the possibility that a garment might find its place in someone's life without being pushed there.
On 1 November 2025, the Belgian designer died at the age of 67.2 A year later, her work offers an unusually relevant question. Not simply how fashion might produce more responsibly, but how we decide what is worth owning in the first place.
It is a distinction worth examining.
A Different Measure of Success
Marina Yee is most frequently introduced as one of the Antwerp Six. In 1986, six designers trained at Antwerp's Royal Academy of Fine Arts travelled to London for the British Designer Show, helping transform an overlooked Belgian fashion scene into an international creative force.3
Her contemporaries included Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester and Walter Van Beirendonck. Each developed a distinct language. Some went on to build internationally recognised fashion houses.
Yee took another route.
After establishing her label Marie in 1986, she withdrew from the conventional fashion business around 1990.4 She opened a café and creative studio in Brussels, continued designing for other labels, worked on theatre costumes and pursued painting, collage and other artistic disciplines. She would later spend years teaching fashion.
It is tempting to describe these decades as an absence. Yet that would suggest that creative work becomes significant only when it enters the marketplace.
Yee never stopped making things. What she relinquished was the expectation that every creative idea must become a collection, every collection a commercial opportunity, and every opportunity a step towards a larger business.
Her career was not a straightforward refusal of commerce. She struggled with confidence and the practical demands of fashion, and spoke candidly about both. Her independence was neither effortless nor uncomplicated.
Perhaps this is what makes her experience so instructive. There are different ways to sustain a creative life, and not all of them produce the kind of success that fashion has traditionally celebrated.
The Beauty of What Remains
Consider a denim jacket from Yee's Spring–Summer 2025 work, preserved in the collection of Antwerp's MoMu fashion museum.4
Across its front is a visible repair fashioned from old jeans. The intervention is not disguised. It becomes part of the jacket's visual character.
Conventionally, repair is intended to restore something to an earlier condition. Yee approached it differently. The previous life of the material was not an embarrassment to conceal, but something with which to work.
Her interest in discarded clothing began long before upcycling became an established part of fashion's sustainability vocabulary.
She collected vintage menswear, studied the construction of familiar garments and reworked existing pieces through cutting, folding, stitching and reconstruction. Parkas, trench coats and tailored jackets offered her a vocabulary of shapes that had already proved their usefulness.
What interested her was not necessarily the creation of an entirely unfamiliar object. Often it was the possibility of changing a familiar one just enough for us to see it differently.
There is a particular intelligence in knowing how little needs to change.
A collar adjusted, a section of fabric displaced, an unexpected seam or hand-worked detail: such interventions can transform the character of a garment without erasing what made it useful in the first place.
Yee was especially drawn to coats. In a 2018 interview with Vogue, she explained her interest in their longevity. A coat, unlike many more transient fashion items, can remain relevant through successive changes of season and taste.
She also insisted on small, time-consuming details.5 For her 2018 designs, hand-embroidered stitches at the edges of pockets mattered enough that she resisted a manufacturer's wish to remove them.
These decisions did not necessarily make the garments more visually conspicuous. They offered something to discover through use.
And perhaps this is where the relationship between sustainability and design becomes more interesting.
A garment's long life cannot be secured by durable material alone. It must also retain a reason to be worn.
The People Who Kept Looking
Yee's relationship with Japan offers another way of understanding how value survives.
In 1984, Sonja Noël, the founder of Brussels boutique STIJL, recognised Yee's work and offered to sell her prototypes. More than three decades later, Japanese vintage specialists Hideo and Yukiko Hashiura of LAILA TOKIO sought her out after encountering her designs.
Their invitation led to Yee's public return to fashion in 2018.5
The Tokyo presentation brought together archival work and five new pieces under the M.Y. Project name, including shirts and coats developed through her longstanding study of secondhand menswear.
The significance of that encounter extends beyond a designer making a comeback.
Her earlier work had retained its value to collectors even after she had largely disappeared from the international fashion conversation. People continued to look at it, preserve it and recognise something that had not been exhausted by its original moment.
Without those collectors, the next chapter might never have happened.
This is an often-overlooked function of a good fashion retailer. A boutique does more than introduce new collections. At its best, it can recognise talent before consensus forms, preserve interest when attention moves elsewhere, and bring existing work to a new generation.
Commercial success is not the only evidence of cultural value. Sometimes the strongest evidence is that someone continues to care long after a collection has left the shop floor.
In 2021, Yee established M.Y. Collection with collaborator Rafaël Adriaensens, developing limited-edition collections that brought her artistic principles into a viable commercial practice.
In 2024, she received the Jury Prize at the Belgian Fashion Awards.6
Recognition had arrived again, but this time on terms much closer to her own.
Sustainability Without the Halo
It would be easy to make Marina Yee into a reassuring symbol of sustainable fashion: the independent designer who worked with old clothing, rejected excess and remained true to her principles.
The reality is more useful than that.
In her 2025 conversation with 1 Granary, Yee acknowledged the difficulties of achieving complete sustainability. She discussed the compromises involved in selecting materials and operating a commercial label.
She also described cutting old jeans into patches for newly produced bomber jackets. The base garment was new; her intervention introduced reclaimed material and made individual pieces distinct.
This was not a perfect circular system, nor did she pretend it was.
Her approach exposes an uncomfortable limitation of the way sustainability is often communicated. Recycled content, responsible materials and small production runs can all matter. But none, by itself, guarantees that a garment will be worn for years rather than discarded after a season.
A beautifully reconstructed jacket can still become another unwanted possession.
Equally, a garment made from conventional materials may remain in active use for decades, repaired, altered and eventually passed to someone else.
The distinction is not an argument against responsible material choices. It is a reminder that sustainability extends beyond the production of an object into its life after purchase.
Yee's work occupied that less easily marketable territory.
It asked what could be done with material already in existence, but also what might make the resulting object desirable enough to survive its next encounter with changing taste.
Reusing material is a design decision. Keeping a garment is a relationship.
Neither is sufficient without the other.
What Survives the First Owner?
Fashion has developed a sophisticated language for explaining why something is desirable now. It has been less successful at explaining why that same thing might remain desirable ten years later.
Newness is visible. Longevity is harder to photograph.
Yet a garment's value does not necessarily peak at the moment of purchase. A jacket may become more personal as it softens with wear. A carefully chosen coat may accompany different versions of its owner. A piece no longer wanted by one person may be exactly what another has been searching for.
These are not qualities that can be fully established through a product description, a sustainability certification or a designer's intention.
They emerge through time.
That poses an interesting responsibility for everyone involved in fashion, including those who sell it.
If we believe in the lasting value of design, we must be willing to consider what happens after the initial transaction. The quality of construction, the possibility of repair, the relevance of a silhouette and the potential for a second owner should be part of the conversation.
So should restraint.
Not every object deserves to be preserved. Not every purchase becomes meaningful. The ability to distinguish between the two is part of developing personal taste.
Yee seemed to understand that creating desire was different from manufacturing urgency.
Her work did not ask us to abandon fashion's pleasures. On the contrary, it suggested that pleasure might deepen when we allow ourselves more time to recognise the details of what we own.
This year, MoMu is marking the 40th anniversary of the Antwerp Six with a major exhibition.3 Yee's work stands within a history that transformed how the world understood Belgian fashion.
But her more enduring contribution may be found outside the museum, in a much smaller act of reconsideration.
A coat taken from the back of a wardrobe. A repaired seam. An old jacket seen with different eyes.
One year after her death, the most interesting question Marina Yee leaves us is not whether fashion can make something new out of something old.
It is whether we can learn to recognise the value of something before we decide we are finished with it.
Perhaps the future of fashion depends as much on what we choose to keep as on what we choose to create.
SOURCES
- Wonne Scrayen, “An in-depth conversation with Marina Yee, the Antwerp Six enigma,” 1 Granary, 15 July 2025. https://1granary.com/miscellaneous/marina-yee-antwerp-six-interview/ The opening remark was made while discussing STIJL founder Sonja Noël’s choices as a retailer.
- “In Memoriam: Marina Yee (1958–2025),” MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp. https://www.momu.be/en/magazine/in-memoriam-marina-yee
- “The Antwerp Six,” exhibition (28 March 2026–17 January 2027), MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp. https://www.momu.be/en/exhibitions/the-antwerp-six
- Anaïs Huyghe, “Marina Yee,” Collection Stories, MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp. https://www.momu.be/en/collection-stories/marina-yee
- Monica Kim, “Finding a New Home in Tokyo, Antwerp Six Designer Marina Yee Is Ready for Recognition,” Vogue, 19 October 2018. https://www.vogue.com/article/marina-yee-my-project-tokyo-interview
- “Edition 2024” (Jury Prize: Marina Yee), Belgian Fashion Awards. https://www.belgianfashionawards.be/2024-2/
