Jan-Jan Van Essche

As for many others, the human collective culture remains an endless inspiration for Jan-Jan Van Essche to create new garments, each new design a genuine attempt to open up new perspectives and to push conflicting dialogues forward.

With every series of garments, traditional patterns from different ethno-cultural origins are cautiously studied and subsequently interpreted in the designer’s individual pattern language; one speaking the poetry of simplicity.

Jan-Jan Van Essche mostly opts to remove all possible seams and minimalize details and cultural connotation, while maximizing comfort for the wearer and therefore proposing an experience that works from the within.

Unlike the classic Western approach to confine and shape the body, Jan-Jan provides the body the luxury and freedom to shape the garment.

His sincere and discrete designs are executed in carefully sourced, refined quality fabrics of natural fibers, all contributing elements inducing one’s awareness and state of mind.

Contributing to this story of minimizing anecdotic connotations some fabrics remain un-dyed or even loom state, the colors are rather to the muted palette and the black color with its endless shades is always present to rigorously accentuate the silhouettes.

Jan-Jan Van Essche continuously aims to develop new insights on contemporary yet effortless and genderless elegance.

His pieces are layered with subtlety, integrated into modern-day city life and into personal wardrobes, slowly and carefully playing their humble role in finding connection and acceptance.

They see no boundaries, no limitations, no restrictions no exclusions.

The conventional silhouette is amplified and each individual garment literally leaves room for interpretation, engendering openness.

The wearer of Jan-Jan Van Essche is a gentle soul in constant dialogue with one’s personal context as well as with the world as a whole.

Like the garments, the wearer is humble and is unrestrained.

Jan-Jan Van Essche is born in Antwerp, Belgium, where he has his design studio. He’s a 2003 graduate of the Antwerp Royal Academy of Fine Arts.

In June 2010 Jan-Jan Van Essche launched his first eponymous label as an annual wardrobe. COLLECTION#1 – ‘YUKKURI’, Japanese for ‘take it easy’ or ‘slowly’.

This title also became his intrinsic and conceptual approach to contemporary wardrobes as a designer.