Where else would you be able to witness Matthieu Blazy deep in conversation with Anthony Vaccarello in one corner, while Julien Dossena and Nicolas Di Felice joke with Lea Peckre in another, and Marine Serre, Julian Klausner, and Olivier Theyskens roam the same room? Only in Brussels.

This surreally friendly gathering of creative directors from across today’s luxury fashion landscape took place at La Cambre Mode[s] school, the extraordinary alma mater which binds all of them together. With fellow independent alumni Marie Adam-Leenaerdt, Louis Gabriel Nouchi, and Cedric Charlier, they’d dropped everything to serve as the graduation jury for the department’s 40th anniversary. In particular, that is, to applaud Tony Delcampe, the educational powerhouse who formed them.

In case that roll-call sounds like too much insider name-dropping (which is very much not a Belgian thing), we should spell it out. Blazy has his second Chanel haute couture show just around the corner. Vaccarello is working on the Saint Laurent men’s collection he’ll present in a couple of weeks; ditto Julian Klausner for Dries Van Noten and Louis-Gabriel Nouchi for his own lable. Julien Dossena released his Rabanne resort collection last week. Olivier Theyskens just caused a frisson of excitement over the launch show for his new enterprise, Boloria, due on July 5. Lea Peckre, meanwhile, is working behind-scenes with Nadège Vanhée on the much-anticipated Hermès couture debut.

Marine Serre put her finger on the leveling atmosphere of the La Cambre reunion of many generations. “We love to see each other, and I think we understand each other a lot. The joy and the pain,” she laughed.

“We were so close and collaborative,” Peckre added.

“When you look around, you see that they have a kind of joy” Olivier Theyskens exclaimed. “When you see all the names of the past students, and you see where they are, it’s amazing.”

In true Delcampe style, the organization of the Show Off event, as it’s called, combined professional runway polish with low-key democratic interaction between the jury and students in a showroom set-up. Following a runway show for the Masters students (both years one and two), the jury and other guests talked to each graduate. It was two hours devoted to intense conversation, with no one on their phones, which may be some kind of record.

Tracking back, Theyskens was the first designer to burst on the Paris scene from La Cambre with his dramatic gothic-romanticism in 1997 when he was just 20. (Madonna immediately snapped him up.) “I’m the veteran,” he joked. That was the first time the fashion world became aware that there was another Belgian fashion school, other than the Antwerp Academy, which had famously generated the Antwerp Six, a decade earlier.

And so it began. Delcampe, a designer who also graduated from the school, decided he’d rather apply his knowledge to being an educator than be involved in the industry. The discipline he and his team instill during the La Cambre course is a slow-burn, informed by close contact with and a radical critique of the ways of the fashion world. “We don’t do mood boards or sketches, because that just repeats what exists. You cannot imagine from that,” he said. “Students work on the stand, with materials, with volumes, draping. It’s real.”

La Cambre grad Ester Manas recalled the technical boot-camp of the first year, and is grateful for what it taught her for later. “You must understand a shirt, a coat, a trench coat. To exactly understand the wardrobe, and after you know that, you can become creative,” she explained. There’s more to La Cambre’s pre-eminence than that, though. Several structural dimensions distinguish it from the rest in seeding the careers of so many of today’s most successful fashion professionals.

It takes five years to graduate from this highly selective Belgian government-funded course. That length of study would cause a nightmare of expense and debt (and financial exclusion) to students at any equivalent college in the US or UK, but part of the beauty of La Cambre is its low-fee structure. The finances mean that Delcampe and his team choose who they want to teach strictly on the basis of talent and promise, rather than needing to pack in high-paying entrants to boost funds. Intake is limited to 50 to 60 students across the BA and MA programs. Tiny numbers. Off-the-charts success rates.

The entrance test takes a week, and you need to be competent in French. Marie Adam-Leenaerdt (the youngest of the jury) remembered, “you have to produce a magazine, and with it an idea of what you would want to design from it, and then explain your vision.” She thought “it was fun,” but of course she was one of the few to get through that year. Now, she still lives and works in Brussels, while showing in Paris.

Proximity to Paris, while being able to work in Belgium is another financial and lifestyle plus for La Cambre grads. Manas is based in Brussels, Julian Klausner works at Dries Van Noten in Antwerp, and Olivier Theyskens has a studio in that city too. Matthieu Blazy mentioned how happy he was to be able to stay overnight with his parents in Brussels for the trip.

The real decider, though? In every year of their study, La Cambre’s students are expected to do an internship. Lea Peckre worked with Martin Margiela. Marine Serre managed to get to Alexander McQueen in London (“I learned English for him!”) and then to Margiela (“ I worked for Matthieu on the Artisanal collection”). Ester Manas said, “With my experiences in fashion houses, sometimes it was not specifically in design, it was also in studio coordination or collection planning, anything. I wouldn’t be able to do my own collection without that. It was super-important for my understanding.”

Some graduates go on to start their own labels, like Manas, Vaccarello, Serre, Gabriel-Nouchi, and Peckre, and Theyskens before them, but it’s far more normal for La Cambre people to be hired straight into the industry, where they begin their slow, phenomenal rise to the top spots in Paris houses. Di Felice and Julien Dossena both started at Balenciaga under Nicolas Ghesquière at the hottest mid-2000s time for the house. Di Felice laughed, remembering, “I got my internship there and I never went back [to school] for my last year.” After joining Raf Simons at Dior and working at Louis Vuitton for Ghesquière again, he then spent five years making a big mark as creative director at Courrèges. (He was tight-lipped over where he might be headed next, but it’s bound to be a top job.)

Such is the known level of student experience and talent that La Cambre’s graduation show is an industry hunting-ground. Raf Simons was on the La Cambre jury the year Blazy graduated, and hired him straightaway, starting the young designer’s prodigious behind-the-scenes climb through designing Maison Margiela’s Artisanal collection, working for Phoebe Philo at Celine, going to Calvin Klein with Simons, and then emerging in his own right to spectacular acclaim as creative director. Stepping into the limelight from the studio at Bottega Veneta when Daniel Lee left, Blazy made such a success of it that he won his appointment at Chanel at the age of 40.

Being on the 2026 jury was a full-circle moment for Blazy—who graduated in 2007—and for all of his compatriots. A great leveler, too. “We all remember what this day was like for us,” he smiled. Down to earth and ‘normal’ is the La Cambre factory-setting, and it’s quite something to watch when some of the industry’s starriest achievers at real-world rival houses are acting like a relaxed bunch of friends having a catch-up.

It’s Tony Delcampe, of course, who’s forged the collective energy of that pragmatic attitude to work and life—the opposite of fashion’s notorious pretentiousness and snobbery. “We’re making clothes, here, not a circus,” he shrugged with a Belgian understatement that belies La Cambre’s reputation. Still, it’s phenomenal that all these designers with packed diaries all agreed to take part. “Tony called,” said Julian Klausner. “He insisted. So it doesn’t matter whatever we’re doing, we’re all here to celebrate and thank him.”