The morning before the photo shoot for this story, which is taking place in Paris, Marie Adam-Leenaerdt is working at home in Schaerbeek, an attractive neighborhood in northeast Brussels, while a summer storm pummels the greenhouse roof in her garden downstairs. The window from her office overlooks it, and you can’t see anything but sideways rain. In a few hours, she’ll catch the train and stay the night with her boyfriend’s French parents, who are storing the clothes for the models, so that she’ll be ready for the call time tomorrow. The back-and-forth to Paris is something Adam-Leenaerdt, 28, is used to; sometimes she even takes the longer route to get there, by car, so she can bring her Labrador. She doesn’t mind. Not enough to up sticks and move, as many of her peers have done.
“It’s the comfort of life here,” she says of Brussels, where she was born and raised. “It’s a city, but it feels like a village. It isn’t far from Paris or London. Here, you can have a house with a garden. I like gardening to clear my head. I like to cook and have friends over for dinner.” The 1920s home where she launched her brand, and keeps 15 varieties of heritage tomatoes, belongs to her parents, who live on the lower floors. Adam-Leenaerdt has a self-contained flat at the top, which doubles as a workspace and showroom. Her family is close. “My mother helps me every day,” she says. “With the budgets, the strategy, the mental support.”
Adam-Leenaerdt graduated from La Cambre, a visual arts school in Brussels, in 2020 and launched her self-titled label at Paris Fashion Week in 2023. One of her professors, Tony Delcampe, remembers that even as a student, she was committed to working in fashion while maintaining a healthy personal life. “She’s very involved with arts, but also cooking and gardening,” he says. “That allows her to have distance from the fashion world.” Between graduation and her debut show, she had entry-level jobs at Balenciaga and Givenchy. The narrow focus of the role, as a small cog at a big design house, was unfulfilling. “After six months at Balenciaga,” she says, “I had worked on clothes but not accessories. I wanted to work on all the pieces of the wardrobe, and not be limited to garments.” When she launched her own brand, she offered clothes, shoes, and bags right off the bat. She dabbled in swimwear. Recently, she has moved into knitwear, too.
For inspiration, Adam-Leenaerdt studies everyday things. The starting point of her debut collection was mange-debouts—high, slim tables meant for cocktail nuts and drinks. They are sometimes dressed in column-like coverings, which drew Adam-Leenaerdt’s eye, so she bought stacks of the linens, secondhand, to drape over a mannequin in her studio. (Adam-Leenaerdt never sketches when designing; she prefers to craft with her hands or manipulate images in Photoshop.) With the tablecloths, she fashioned triangular dresses that had wide, structured tops and narrow, swishy hems that dropped to the ankles. The pieces were shown in a deliberately unglamorous space—a meeting room in a humdrum Parisian hotel—to underscore the potential of the ordinary. “We stacked the conference room chairs to create the catwalk,” says Dimitri Jeurissen, executive creative director at Base Design and a mentor to Adam-Leenaerdt. “We took a banal situation and turned it into something interesting.”
The first shop to stock Marie Adam-Leenaerdt was Stijl, in Brussels. “I went to see her first collection in the small studio in her parents’ house,” says Sonja Noël, the owner of the store. “I was impressed by the impeccable design execution of the garments, and I made an instant decision to order.” Stockists like Addition Adelaide, in Tokyo; Blake, in Chicago; Bergdorf Goodman, in New York; and Net-a-Porter followed.
Adam-Leenaerdt’s most recent collection, which features skirts that can be transformed into coats, dresses, and bags, was inspired by a poorly lit picture she found while scrolling through the secondhand marketplace website Vinted. “I saw images of a skirt that had been wrongly placed on a jacket hanger,” she says. “I like bad pictures, when clothes are oddly photographed on chairs, and I can see different forms, a different vocabulary.”
Multifunctionality is central to many of Adam-Leenaerdt’s designs, both because she likes to resist categorization and because she wants to add value. She feels the need to justify the price of her clothes. “It’s important to make things that last and that have more than one use. You can wear the dresses in different ways and for different occasions; you can adjust the boots to different heights,” she says.
This fall, Adam-Leenaerdt will be busy with her next collection, which is slated to be shown at Paris Fashion Week in March. “It’s a privilege to be on the schedule, as a young brand,” she says. “But it is also a challenge, because every season there is more pressure on me.” To keep her feet on the ground, she’ll invite people over for pizza nights, making the dough and tomato sauce from scratch. She’ll pull carrots from the garden. If it’s been a long day, she’ll take an hour to meet somebody at Badi, a cider bar owned by friends, and then come back to her desk.
Among those who know her, there’s a consensus that Adam-Leenaerdt’s conceptual mind and dedication to craftsmanship, as well as her practicality, make her a fundamentally Belgian designer—an heir to the likes of Martin Margiela and Ann Demeulemeester. “In fashion,” Adam-Leenaerdt says, “you have to find a balance between belonging to the fashion world and having fun with it. I like things and people who don’t take themselves too seriously. I think that’s the Belgian way.”
Hair by Olivier Schawalder for Dyson at Art + Commerce; Makeup by Hiromi Ueda for Armani Beauty at Art + Commerce; Manicure by Cam Tran for Manucurist at Artlist Paris. Models: Dana Thompson at Next Management, Ying Ouyang at Viva Model, Amira Al Zuhair at Next Management; Casting by DM Casting; Casting Assistants: Brandon Contreras, Evagria Sergeeva; Produced by White Dot Production; Photo Assistants: Aurèle Ferrero, Paul-Antoine Goutal, Marta Paba; Digital Technician: Florian Massal at Shotlist; Retouching: Maeva Smircic; Fashion Assistants: Marie Poulmarch, Bianca Aponte; Hair Assistants: Bastien Zorzetto, Hawa Drame; Makeup Assistants: Joana Lafourcade, Qin Huo.
