Walter van Beirendonck wants you to stay YOUNG, ODD, and UNINHIBITED

Walter van Beirendonck’s FW26 show started with a model blasting onto the runway on a scooter, covered in yellow, adorned with 3D flowers, and holding guns. The bearded, self-proclaimed fashion industry outsider (and cult favourite) is 68 years old but wants to stay young forever. He isn’t chasing youth through Botox or surgical smoothness, but through a mindset of childhood uninhibitedness: raw energy and fueled by pure hope.

For this collection, he delved back into his long-standing obsession with art brut and outsider art, work made beyond the edges of institutions and industry approvals. He speaks with particular reverence about André Robillard, who has spent most of his life in psychiatric hospitals making rifles from wood, tape, and found objects. What moves Walter are the parallels with childhood: the urgency, the complete disregard for what is expected or accepted, and the unfiltered way of thinking. It’s this closeness to childhood, to instinct, that he clings to.

Anti-war motifs run throughout the collection. He’s mixed his own plush artillery with flowers and birds, and took inspiration from Afghan war rugs (traditional carpets woven with imagery of tanks, helicopters, and grenades), turning them into knit vests. War paraphernalia is mixed with hearts and flowers: beauty overtaking violence, even taking over the whole face as a balaclava.

The Antwerp-based design house, specialising in meticulous maximalism, stated that the colours are “more restrained” than before. Bright yellows, hot pinks, and electric blues still dominate, refusing neutrality. Restraint, here, is relative.

The collection speaks of youth. Youth as futurity, youth as hope, youth as something fragile and unnamed. The title references the disappearance of subcultures as we once knew them. “What you see here are the Scarecrows of 2026. A way of describing the youth of today, before we lose them unnamed.”