Julie Kegels

Julie Kegels is an Antwerp-based fashion designer who launched her eponymous womenswear label in 2024 after studying at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and gaining experience at Alaïa and alongside Meryll Rogge. The label made its Paris runway debut with a collection titled “Quick Change”, framed around rapid transformation and movement through a day’s shifting contexts, with garments designed to switch silhouettes on the body and read as modular looks.

Collections centre on wardrobe staples—shirts, tailoring, dresses and knitwear—built with controlled construction and unexpected detail rather than overt decoration. Kegels’ work has been described as resisting a single feminine archetype, using contrast in cut and material to move between practicality and play.

Developed as a small studio, production is largely handled across European ateliers, and the business is built through a mix of wholesale stockists and a growing direct-to-consumer channel to reach an international audience season after season.

Kegels frames fashion as a way to question fixed ideas of femininity, favouring plurality over a single muse and refusing a rigid system to obey. The “Quick Change” premise points to clothing that supports pace and adaptability, treating transformation as a practical need rather than a theatrical flourish. Within this, structure is used to create clarity—clean lines and considered proportions that can shift with styling, layering or movement, while staying legible in real-life settings.

The label’s guiding principle is contrast: the ordinary made slightly strange, and the playful kept functional. Rather than leaning on nostalgia as a costume, Kegels draws on familiar wardrobe codes and reworks them through construction, proportion and material choice. Humour appears as an undercurrent in the mechanics of the garments, but the end goal remains wearability at its core and agency, allowing different identities to surface across a day without abandoning precision, comfort or restraint, consistently.