Alix Browne is the Deputy Style Editor of the NYTimes.com. For Dirk Van Saene’s NºA she offered her outsider’s opinion on Antwerp – a medieval city that lives and breathes fashion for today.

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“Throw a rock in Antwerp and hit a fashion designer.

There is Walter walking down the street in his prison-orange sweatshirt and his arsenal of jewellery. There is Veronique driving to work in her Manta.

There are An and Filip and their dog as big as a horse.

Visiting Antwerp for the first time, it is hard not to feel like the Japanese journalist who was sadly disappointed not to find a towering skyscraper emblazoned with the words Walter Van Beirendonck Industries.

Yes, Antwerp’s reputation in the fashion world is that BIG. But Antwerp itself is modest. A city where everything is Just Around The Corner.
A city most guidebooks will tell you that you can ‘do’ in two days max. This is not too far off.
Young people living there are known to complain that is is a city where nothing ever happens.

Except the SHOW.

No further description is required.
There is only one SHOW.

And everyone knows what SHOW that is. Each year, in June, the SHOW is sold out to roaring capacity over a three-night engagement in a space that resembles, appropriately, a cathedral.

And it is here, in the presence of the city and this year’s international jury and the entire fashion department of the Antwerp Royal Academy, and yes, if He exists then perhaps in the presence of even Him, too, that you begin to understand that in Antwerp fashion is a kind of religion. A pilgrimage to Antwerp has a strange way of restoring one’s faith.

At times the entire city can seem to give itself over to the cause. Every gallery and exhibition space.
Every billboard and shop window.
There is fashion in the streets, there is fashion in the air, and one suspects there is fashion in the water.
And yet there is no apparent fashion scene.
Not in the sense that New York has a fashion scene or Paris has a fashion scene or Milan has a fashion scene.

Fashion in Antwerp is serious and a bit introverted and it can be a bit dark but it is not silly, superficial, or self-seving. Fashion in Antwerp is four white ticks on the back of a jacket.

Fashion in Antwerp is what Ann Demeulemeester likes to call an anonymous gift to an unknown person.
It’s the thought that counts.

Sometimes people in Antwerp can seem to take fashion so darn seriously you want to take take them by the neck and throttle them and say LIGHTEN UP!

Sometimes, like when you see a designer from Antwerp backstage after a show, tears streaming down her face, friends and family gathered round, tears streaming down their faces, you can’t help but want to be part of that experience. And in a small way you have been.

Antwerp designers don’t really make clothes.

Well, of course they make the things we recognize as clothes: jackets and pants and dresses and shirts and shoes and all of those things we put on our bodies.
But wearing these jackets and pants and dresses and shirts and shoes is like wearing a little tiny piece of the person who made them.

This is what people mean when they talk about fashion having a soul. And if this is the measure of fashion then perhaps Antwerp really is the biggest fashion capital in the world.

Throw a rock and you’ll see what I mean.”