Why Belgian Designer Marie Adam-Leenaerdt Should Be On Every Fashion Lover’s Radar

Marie Adam-Leenaerdt wears the same black uniform to work almost every day. By her own philosophy, having a minimalist wardrobe is a way of avoiding the need to think about clothes beyond the ones she’s designing. ‘I just grab my black trousers and black T-shirt and go,’ she says. The days of dressing up in her grandmother’s avant-garde frocks and high heels in her hometown of Brussels are now behind her, as she tears through a successful fourth year at the helm of her own fashion brand that has dressed everyone from musician Lykke Li to actor Isabelle Huppert.

In July, the designer was awarded the prestigious Andam Grand Prize – previous recipients include Martin Margiela, Christopher Esber and Bianca Saunders – alongside a year of mentorship from Alexandre Mattiussi, founder and creative director of Ami Paris.

At first deceptively simple, Adam-Leenaerdt’s creations, upon closer inspection, will prompt you to reconsider the pre-conceived function of a garment. Her popular trench-coat set can be worn long or short, while the lower section detaches to become a skirt. A do-more-with-less mantra is central to the designer’s success. Across seven collections to date, she has examined the building blocks of a woman’s wardrobe, consistently finding new ways to challenge and transform the essence of a product.

‘I never draw,’ Adam-Leenaerdt says of her design process. She begins, instead, in three dimensions – an approach she developed during five years studying at La Cambre, the Brussels visual-arts school whose alumni include Anthony Vaccarello and Matthieu Blazy. After graduating, the rising star went on to work at legendary fashion houses including Givenchy and Balenciaga. The most crucial lesson she learnt was how to edit. ‘Knowing what to remove is as important as knowing what to add,’ she says. Her pitch-perfect AW26 collection is evidence of her eagerness to put this ethos into practice.

On her 27th birthday in 2023, Adam-Leenaerdt presented her first runway collection at Paris Fashion Week. It was the ‘start of everything’ – and the catalyst for meeting her first customers, among them Sonja Noël from Stijl boutique in Brussels, who had previously championed the Antwerp Six (a group of Belgian designers in the 1980s) alongside other revolutionary talent, including Margiela. Following those initial orders, requests from Ssense, Bergdorf Goodman, Net-a-Porter and Dover Street Market soon followed.

And what does Adam-Leendaert consider her best collection to date? ‘I think it’s the next one! I’m always looking to the future…’ The best, as they say, is yet to come.

Marie Adam-Leendaert showed her SS27 collection at Paris Fashion Week on 29 September. This interview is taken from the November 2026 issue of ELLE UK, on newsstands from 6 October.

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Julia is the Multiplatform Fashion Editor at ELLE UK. Her experience spans fashion journalism, styling and commerce, with roles held at leading editorial titles. At British Vogue, she worked across the fashion team before joining Vogue.co.uk’s shopping vertical, where she was part of the team recognised with a BSME award. In her current position at ELLE UK, fashion trend reporting, shopping edits, designer profiles and fashion month coverage are all within her remit.

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