“WHAT WOULD YOU like to know about me?” Van Beirendonck asks. It is evening in the village of Zandhoven, a 30-minute drive east of Antwerp, where Van Beirendonck lives in a large 19th-century house, which sits on an expansive property covered by wild grass and old trees. He is about to travel to Tokyo to collaborate with Kawakubo on a new T-shirt.

Van Beirendonck was born in 1957 and grew up in the same small village where he lives today. His parents owned an auto-repair garage and gas station, and Van Beirendonck was mostly raised by his grandmother and his oldest sister. At 12, he was sent to boarding school in Lier, southeast of Antwerp, where he kept to himself, sketching and writing in his diary. He knew he was gay at 14, and came out to his family without much of an issue. It was the early ’70s then, and David Bowie had created (with the help of the Japanese designer Kansai Yamamoto) his Ziggy Stardust persona, with his plume of red hair, graphic makeup and narrow, androgynous jumpsuits. For teenagers like Van Beirendonck, who “couldn’t play football” and were living in polite, bourgeois villages, Bowie and his compatriots — Iggy Pop, with his snakelike torso and skintight pants; Lou Reed, with his wild hair and kohl-lined eyes — were a revelation: Here was another way of being, another way of living. At 18, he picked up a Dutch magazine called Avenue, which described the fashion department at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp; he enrolled the next year, in 1976. Founded in 1663, the academy was known for its classical pedagogy, emphasizing art over commercialism — its fashion department, created in 1963, was a relatively new addition.

At the Royal Academy, Van Beirendonck discovered the rigors and ambition of design, as well as a coterie of like-minded friends. In his class was the prodigious Martin Margiela, who a decade later would be working in Paris for the designer Jean Paul Gaultier while launching his namesake line. A year later, Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester, Dirk Van Saene, Dirk Bikkembergs and Marina Yee would join the class below him. Antwerp only had a population of around half a million in the 1970s, but a particularly outré avant-garde movement had blossomed around the art gallery Wide White Space, which represented conceptual artists such as Joseph Beuys and Marcel Broodthaers. There was also a burgeoning experimental theater scene led by the young director Ivo van Hove. Like its European neighbors to the east and north, stolid Belgium — with its Magritte-gray skies and cobblestone streets — was rapidly transforming. Different in their aesthetic leanings but similar in their drive, Van Beirendonck and his schoolmates formed a clique. Van Beirendonck says, “When Ann did something, then Dries wanted to do it better, and then I wanted to do it better.” The emergence of new designers such as Giorgio Armani, Gianni Versace, Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana — who piled big shoulders on ultrasexy feminine silhouettes and alluded to contemporary culture — was inspiring, too. They were proof that one didn’t need to build a couture house to make fashion that people wanted to wear.