Fashion Garments

IN MILAN’S HIGH-FASHION shopping district, the “quadrilatero d’oro,” or golden rectangle, just about all the designers are playing the same game — buy my clothes, they seem to say, and you, too, can look like a fashion model. But not Dirk Bikkembergs, the German-Belgian designer, who opened up his first flagship store here last year.
[dirk bikkembergs] Luc Willame

Dirk Bikkembergs

One of the legendary “Antwerp 6,” a group of fashion students who helped put Belgium on the fashion map in the 1980s, Mr. Bikkembergs, now 51 years old, has translated a quirky obsession with football into a fashion empire. His new multilevel store, which is meant to resemble a fantasy version of a football player’s luxury apartment, is a personal manifesto for an alternative approach to men’s fashion. Instead of professional models, Mr. Bikkembergs uses real athletes, including former Italian national player Fabrizio Ravanelli, in his advertising and fashion shows, and he tests out his designs on his own football team, F.C. Bikkembergs Fossombrone, based in the central Italian town of Fossombrone, where his samples are produced. His store is filled with professional football boots, TV screens showing football matches, and emphatically masculine touches, like his fictional football player’s real Porsche.

It’s a fantasy that finally has less to do with football than fashion, as Mr. Bikkembergs seeks to turn his back on the pretenses and poses of the catwalk. In his couture line, he converts the male athlete’s body into a fashion template, creating clothes that are as rigorously masculine as they are tight-fitting. And he has found just the right home in fashion-mad, football-mad Milan, where, during hard times for high fashion, Mr. Bikkembergs’s new store is one of the few venues with a buzz.

Mr. Bikkembergs’s fantasy-filled version of football will compete with the real thing this month when Milan’s Men’s Fashion Week overlaps with football’s biggest event, the World Cup, held this year in South Africa from June 11-July 11. Mr. Bikkembergs says he will have a World Cup theme at his own June 18 Milan show, where he will debut his spring and summer 2011 collection.

He also plans to attend several World Cup matches. Will it be difficult for him to prepare for his show, one of the most important of the fashion calendar, and jet back and forth to South African stadiums? “Don’t worry,” he says, speaking in the second-floor fantasy “gym” of his Milan flagship store. “I’m very organized.”

It has been almost 10 years since Mr. Bikkembergs first turned his fashion sensibilities to football, when he gathered the Milan fashion world in the city’s San Siro stadium to see his 2002 spring and summer collection. And arguably, some in the fashion world have followed his lead. Dean and Dan Caten, the Milan-based Canadian twin fashion designers, also stress their connections to the Italian football world in their label, Dsquared2. And Milan ads for Mr. Bikkembergs’s new store, which feature athletes in underwear and athletic shoes, compete for attention with Giorgio Armani ads featuring Portuguese soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo, who is also stripped down to his underwear.

Mr. Bikkembergs believes that he was there first. “I made the connection,” he says, looking back over the past decade. “Football stars are the new heroes. This is what young guys want to be.”

Interestingly, the designer — who is based in London, and whose company retains offices in Antwerp — doesn’t describe himself as a typical football fan. “I don’t need to go to football matches to do my job,” he says, in spite of his cache of world cup tickets.

Mr. Bikkembergs oversees three labels, including his main line, Dirk Bikkembergs Sport Couture. After leaving fashion school, Mr. Bikkembergs began to show men’s and women’s collections in Paris, but his attention drifted toward Milan — and toward a concentration on a men’s line. “I could feel that real men’s clothes were in Milano,” he says of his Paris years. “I could really feel it.”

In Paris, he recalls, he first made a name for himself, but he also realized the limits of the Paris fashion scene. “I am not the kind of designer who is doing these niche things, like a lot of designers in Paris. [They work] for a small amount of very selective people — I see myself as a global thing.”

His success at blending football and fashion had led him to think about South America as a future market. “I know that the whole of South America is waiting for me,” he says. “I am not looking to China like everyone else. But South Americans will definitely go for it — they like that kind of man.” He describes his ideal customer as “not an arty man, not a man who is working in an office, but a sporty man. I want to give him his clothes.”

This year, Mr. Bikkembergs launched his third-generation professional football boot, the Capitano. According to Mr. Bikkembergs’s press representative, many professional players wear Mr. Bikkembergs’s boots, including Sebastien Squillaci , a player with FC Sevilla and a member of the French national team. Mr. Squillaci will wear Mr. Bikkembergs’s second-generation boot, the Tirosegno, during the World Cup.

Mr. Bikkembergs is planning versions of his Milan flagship store in other cities, including London and Paris, but for now Italy remains his most important market — which is unusual, he says, for a designer who grew up in Germany and studied in Belgium.

“Here in Italy, it’s all about Giorgio [Armani] and Gianni [Versace] and Dolce [& Gabbana]. You know what I mean? To get in on all this is quite an achievement. I’m very happy with that.” He invokes the hit Frank Sinatra song “New York, New York” — “If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere,” he sings. In fashion, he says, “if you can go to Italy as a non-Italian and make it, then you are rock and roll.”

Mr. Bikkembergs made compromises along the way. A few years ago, he discontinued his women’s line. “Listen to me,” he says. “If I do men’s and women’s wear, I don’t exist. It would [mean] working 24 hours a day, every day. At a certain moment, I woke up and said, ‘Who is this guy, working, working, working?’ My [women] customers were hysterical. I said it’s my personal choice. I am the owner of the company — I want to live.”

And he doesn’t worry about breaking into the U.S. market. “I know that the Americans are not into it,” he says of his football-infused fashion template. “But I am sorry — I cannot please everybody. It is a passion thing.”