The Antwerp-based designer we’ve been eyeballing since forever, and frankly, it was only a matter of time. Kegels was born into a fashion-heavy family — her father is the founder of Kipling — and came out of the womb with a love for fashion. As a child, she was giving school presentations on Paul Poiret and fashion history; now she’s giving us lace boob stickers and winning the most prestigious fashion prizes the world currently has to offer.
After studying at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and interning with Meryll Rogge and Alaïa, Kegels struck out on her own, developing a very particular universe populated by women who contain multitudes before lunchtime. The career obsessive who parties harder than she works, the librarian who plays competitive tennis, the girl arriving at work with wet socks.
Her characters dress accordingly: jewellery is turned into a textile sticker of a gemstone, a raincoat becomes a handbag, and the body itself gets accessorised with her now peer-loved stick-on bras or lace boob stickers, and tattoo jewellery. Everything is a little ridiculous, but executed with the seriousness of something that absolutely should not be ridiculous.
Which is perhaps the great Kegels trick: her work drifts between domesticity, memory, and the absurdities of being a modern woman, rendered with a perfect level of precision — wood-printed leather, furniture-like padded bags, trompe-l’œil everything.
Words by Pykel van Latum
Image by Tom Delaisse
