The Wardrobe with
Marie Adam-Leenaerdt

A copy of Guy Debord’s 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle sits on the large circular glass desk in the anteroom of Marie Adam-Leenaerdt’s Brussels atelier, right next to her computer. It is, Marie tells me, unread. The five years since she graduated from La Cambre – the visual arts school a 15-minute cab ride away – have been beyond hectic, affording the 29-year-old little time for kicking back with philosophical tracts.

Still, there’s something of Debord’s dismay at the performative in Marie’s assessment of the arena in which she is a rising star. “In fashion there are a lot of brands that work very hard to create buzz with nothing behind it,” she says. “Instagram has really assisted them in that.” Marie, who was a finalist for the 2024 LVMH Prize, is wary of the ephemerality that comes with having – or creating – “a fashion moment”. With her eponymous label, she aims to supply more sustained, sustainable alternatives. Marie Adam-Leenaerdt’s clothes are neither jolie nor laide. Her five collections to date seem to result from a thorough interrogation of the building blocks of a woman’s wardrobe – both what they are and what they represent.

Marie’s current premises, in a huge chambre de bonne at the top of her parents’ grand-bourgeois house in the Schaerbeek district, are packed with references that other designers might dismiss as too unglamorous, too commonplace to warrant scrutiny: a white plastic garden chair here, a 1980s hardback guide to table decoration there. “I love the specificity of these books,” Marie says, as Gudu, one of her two cats, tongues the adhesive on a lint roller. “I like to take something that the majority of people would find unremarkable and make it beautiful.”

Those dinner-party how-tos, for example, provided the template for the voluminous white “napkin dresses” in Marie’s debut collection, for Autumn/Winter 2023, which she presented off-schedule in a conference room of the Crowne Plaza Paris-République – and which propelled her decisively to a prominent slot on the following season’s official programme, a highly unusual feat for one so young. Her very Belgian knack for this kind of conceptual alchemy is accompanied by a practical desire to make the resulting pieces – which she tries on throughout the development process – perform double, sometimes triple duty for the wearer. Thigh-high boots unzip at the knee; jumpers can be worn back to front; a clingy baby-pink gown has reinforced eyelets near the hem so stilettos can become one with the garment for a novel silhouette.

The meticulous fabrication required is performed in nearby Rotselaar by the seamstresses of Gysemans Clothing Industry, a company that also produced for Raf Simons and Walter Van Beirendonck. “I see a garment like a piece of well-chosen furniture; I want it to have the same status, for it to be a timeless object,” Marie says.

Appropriately for a brand whose clothes encourage a degree of thoughtful engagement from the wearer, Marie’s shows are a riposte to the fashion system’s tendency towards Debordian detachment. She presented her fourth collection, for Spring/Summer 2025, at the Terminus Nord brasserie at Gare du Nord, inviting the habitually atomised fashion pack to share booths and a meal. “People facing forwards in a row, everyone on their phone – I didn’t want that,” she says. “I wanted people to eat together, to have conversations.” It worked. In her show report for The Cut, subtitled “Marie Adam-Leenaerdt can make women of any age look cool – a rarity nowadays”, Cathy Horyn described the animated banter between French and American journalists – another rarity.

The roots of Marie’s confident engagement with fashion extend back through the maternal line. Her mother, Anny Schmit, is the managing director of the Belgian division of Sony Pictures, bringing the likes of Wicked to Walloon and Flemish screens, with all the subtitling that entails. Having worked for a modelling agency in her youth, Anny is no stranger to the world Marie now inhabits. The abiding inspiration, though, is Anny’s late mother, Hannelore Klees – a “super fresh, super positive” corporate wife who died a couple of years ago at the age of 100. “My grandmother dressed chic, with a bit of madness. She’d wear an exquisite outfit, then throw on a child’s hat.” A black-and-white photograph of Hannelore, beaming in a voluminous blazer and sleek grey ponytail, is permanently on the mood board.

Unusually for a Belgian, Marie wore a school uniform until the age of 12 – “all blue, with a skirt that had three pleats at the front, one at the back.” She remembers choosing a round-neck jumper over the compulsory V: a serious infraction. The taxonomy of clothing had begun to fascinate her. “I like spotting the archetypes: denim skirt, pencil skirt, wrap skirt, pleated skirt. Sometimes I take a blank sheet of paper and list as many as I can.” But instead of fashion, Marie thought about doing business studies. “I just couldn’t see myself as cap-able of being a designer,” she says. All that changed in 2018 after an awakening at MoMu, Antwerp’s fashion museum, with its greatest hits of the Antwerp Six. “Something clicked and I thought, I can do this.” The entrance procedure for the fashion design course at La Cambre (alma mater of Matthieu Blazy and Anthony Vaccarello) begins with a boot-camp-style residency during which applicants create a 20-page brand book and a dress. Marie succeeded on her second application, with a supermarket theme.

It was at the multidisciplinary La Cambre that Marie met her boyfriend, the sculptor and gallerist Romain Zacchi, who shares her affection for the possibilities of the quotidian. In 2022 Marie took part in Cendar Brussels, a group show at his Galerie Zotto that invited 100 artists to create ashtrays. Marie’s contribution was “Servez-Vous”, a twisting tower of disposable aluminium ashtrays that could be the maquette for a Qatari skyscraper. Romain’s brother Alexis created Marie’s deceptively simple company logo while she was studying for her master’s, also at La Cambre, which necessitated the production of a capsule collection, labels and all. Look closely and you’ll see its capital letters gradually “grow” serifs as you read left to right. “I wanted something classic but also bizarre,” Marie says.

This spring, she will fly the family nest and relocate to a house in the south of Brussels, near the Place Eugène Flagey, with Romain. Around the same time, she’s moving her atelier to a spacious office building in the nearby European Quarter. “I like the corporate atmosphere there – all that grey,” she says approvingly.

These moves, she hopes, will provide a hitherto elusive measure of work/life distinction – although she will miss 7pm dinners with her parents and sister, Louise, in the marble kitchen, after which Marie and Anny stay on to tackle the invoicing. “She helps me every single day,” Marie says. Her father, Philippe, who also works in media, can be heard taking a call in the cavernous atrium, where Marie’s glossy black Labrador, Falco, lies on a black leather sofa covered in a dust sheet.

There is no question of leaving Belgium. Marie lived in Paris for six months after graduating in 2020, designing ready-to-wear for men and women for Balenciaga. It was a largely positive experience, she says – “I got to work on everything from a puffer jacket to eveningwear” – but Paris in general felt “too beautiful, too pressurised, too competitive” to be creatively fertile. “I just had this feeling that there were too many eyes on everything.”

Before her contract at Balenciaga came up for renewal, Marie resolved to move back home and make manifest her plans for a label incorporating shoes, bags, even jewellery – something she achieved with help from Dimitri Jeurissen, the fashion-savvy creative director of the international branding agency Base Design, who had spotted her master’s collection on Instagram. “We had an introductory coffee, and soon we were travelling all over the place, picking the brains of this older generation of Belgians about their experiences,” Marie says.

Among the go-sees was one with Etienne Russo, the founder of the fashion show production powerhouse Villa Eugénie, who has created shows for Chanel and Dries Van Noten. “I wanted it to be a Belgian show,” Marie says of her Crowne Plaza debut. “Belgian music, Belgian models.” Compatriots on the catwalk included Marie’s twenty-something friend Tessa Dixson, a goth-pop musician, and veteran Kristina de Coninck, often referred to as Margiela’s muse. The atmosphere was collegiate, Marie says. “Brussels is a small town; everyone kind of knows everyone.”

First to place an order was Sonja Noël of the multi-brand boutique Stijl, in Brussels. “She opened the very first Martin Margiela store in the world, so her interest felt like an accomplishment,” Marie says. Requests from Dover Street Market, Bergdorf Goodman, Ssense and Net-a-Porter duly followed. Ironically, the speed with which Marie has been fêted in Paris has vindicated her sense that “more is possible for me here in Brussels, that I can get things done quicker.”

In a field where main character energy abounds, Marie has the manner of a quietly determined director. “In my opinion, when you find your line you have to follow it and never deviate. At some point, it will work.”