Filip Arickx

Born in 1971, Filip Arickx is a Belgian fashion designer and co-founder of A.F. Vandevorst. He encountered fashion early through Dirk Bikkembergs, for whom he worked for three years while still young, although the precise chronology of that experience is not part of the public house narrative. He entered the Fashion Department of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in 1987, met An Vandevorst on their first day of study and graduated with her in 1991.

Arickx’s early professional path was less linear than Vandevorst’s. After graduation he completed mandatory military service, then worked as a freelance designer and as a stylist for magazines and television. The direct experience of military clothing, equipment and regulation became one source for the utilitarian construction that later appeared throughout A.F. Vandevorst, while styling strengthened his sense of how clothes could be turned into narrative through casting, image and performance.

In 1997 Arickx and Vandevorst established their own company under the name Blixa and launched A.F. Vandevorst. The label was conceived as a fully shared creative practice. Their first Paris collection, Autumn/Winter 1998–99, combined heavy felt and equestrian hardware with concealed lingerie and sent models down the runway singing to cassette tracks. The following seasons expanded this friction between uniforms, intimacy, medical environments, ritual objects and theatrical presentation, with Arickx remaining joint author through the house’s entire lifespan.

The duo’s external design work remained separate from their own brand. They designed Ruffo Research collections in 1999–2000, later worked on Allegri outerwear in 2004–05, and contributed costume design to theatre and opera. Within A.F. Vandevorst, Arickx also helped shape dedicated lines such as Fetish footwear, Nightfall lingerie, Relics jewellery and A.FRIEND, while the AKTION temporary stores extended the house’s clinical and military imagery into retail space.

Arickx continued designing with Vandevorst after the 2017 withdrawal from the conventional ready-to-wear system. Their final period included invited couture-week presentations, archive re-composition, smaller clothing capsules, footwear, Spring/Summer 2019 and the 360-degree Autumn/Winter 2019–20 project. The pair announced the closure of A.F. Vandevorst in February 2020 and completed the operational wind-down by the end of August. The 2025 X010 boot reissue was a bounded return to an archive object, not a new season of the house.

Arickx brought an especially direct relationship to military and utilitarian dress into A.F. Vandevorst. His mandatory service placed him inside the systems of uniform, standard issue, heavy equipment and regimented presentation that later resurfaced in felt coats, straps, boots, pockets and protective silhouettes. Those references were repeatedly complicated by lingerie, softness, exposure and instability inside the collaborative process with Vandevorst.

His background in styling also contributed to the house’s insistence that a collection existed through image and action as much as through isolated garments. A.F. Vandevorst shows repeatedly gave models a task, constraint or altered route: singing, rising from hospital beds, moving behind gauze, arriving by car or motorcycle. These devices changed the rhythm of the clothes and made performance part of the silhouette.

The designers’ equestrian vocabulary joined both sides of this thinking. Saddles, straps, riding boots and leather harness structures offered hard points of control around softer tailoring and intimate layers. The result could be sensual, disciplinary and protective at once. Arickx’s work with Vandevorst repeatedly relied on these unresolved combinations instead of a fixed catalogue of signature items.

In the final years, the pair reduced scale without simplifying the ideas. Archive garments were restyled for ALWAYS+FOREVER, wedding materials were repurposed for unique looks, and digital capture replaced the runway for Autumn/Winter 2019–20. Arickx’s contribution remained tied to joint editing, proportion, utility and staging through the end of the house.