Jean-Paul Knott: KNOTT so MAD

When asked to develop an exhibition for MAD (Museum of Art and Design) Brussels, to mark a quarter-century of his career, there was no question for Jean-Paul Knott, the Brussels-based independent fashion designer, that it would be a collaborative event rather than a traditional survey presentation. “My work has always been built in dialogue—with artists, photographers, musicians, craftsmen, and close friends. Fashion, for me, is a collective practice. MAD Brussels understood this immediately, and we shared the desire to show that a career is not just a sequence of collections, but a web of human relationships. Those friendships shaped my aesthetic, my rhythm, even my doubts. Including them was a way of being honest about how creation really happens.”

The exhibition, spread across multiple gallery spaces, merges art, design, fashion, music and photography in an intuitive way that tracks the contemporary culture of the last twenty-five years as much as Knott’s career. Select looks from each collection from over 25-years demonstrate Knott’s ability to mix structure and tailoring with fluidity and his ongoing interest in playing with textures and materials. In the centre of the exhibition, a selection of three black and white silhouettes, described as “Brussels Touch,” and now part of the permanent collection of the Fashion & Lace Museum in Brussels, highlight Knott’s approach to form, balance and craftsmanship. Nearby, a suite of 29 photographs taken in 1999 by the French photographer Karel Balas, show portraits of the designer’s friends each wearing a look from that first collection. In the central pool space, twenty-five silhouettes trace a path through twenty-five years of creation. Each look embodies a moment in the evolution of Jean-Paul Knott — from the purity of early forms to the fluid architectural volumes of recent years. Across the walls of the main space are a vision-board like installation of photographs that trace the brand’s visual history. Knott explains that “Putting the exhibition together felt less like curating a retrospective and more like composing a narrative. I didn’t want it to be chronological in a rigid way, but rather emotional and intuitive—closer to how memory actually works.” They worked from fragments: garments, sketches, photographs, sounds and personal objects, with the idea of “letting each piece act as a trigger, opening a door onto a moment, a place or a relationship,” he continues.

In the upper passarelle, a suite of five photographs by German photographer Petrov Ahner show model/muse Debra Show in looks from the Spring-Summer 2005 collection; there is a video by experimental filmmaker Andries Winter titled, “Who is Jean-Paul Knott,” that offers an intimate journey into the archives and creative moments in the designer’s career. In the street-facing windows, a collaboration with Denis Meyers, the Belgian visual artist known for his expressive typographic language and urban vitality includes hand-tagged T-shirts, dresses and sneakers as well as graffiti-tagged windows.

Some of the works featured in the exhibition come from Knott’s own personal collection, while others “are traces of encounters—images, sounds, or objects that marked me deeply at a given moment. They are not there as decoration, but as sources.”

KNOTT so MAD is an ode to the city of Brussels in many ways as well – how the city shaped Knott as an artist and how this creative community supported and strengthened each other’s careers. Knott, who studied and lived in New York and then moved to Paris to work Yves Saint Laurent, decided to return to Brussels to set up his own house. This is an important moment that certainly defined what kind of fashion designer he would go on to be. As he says, “Brussels offered me freedom. New York taught me intensity, Paris taught me rigor, but Brussels offered space—space to fail, to experiment, to be ambiguous. It’s a city that doesn’t impose a single identity; it lives in between cultures, languages, histories. That “in-between” quality resonates deeply with me. It allowed me to build a label that was not about spectacle, but about meaning and emotion. Brussels keeps me grounded, slightly off-centre, and that distance from the main fashion circuits has always been a strength rather than a limitation.”

KNOTT so MAD is on view through January 31st, 2026.

MAD Brussels

@mad.brussels

Jean-Paul Knott

@jeanpaulknott