Marina Yee, the most mysterious of the Antwerp Six

Marina Yee was born to two antique dealer parents in Antwerp on 17 April 1958, and she was exotic from the start: her mother was from Temse in East Flanders, and her father had Chinese roots. The Yees lived in Congo until 1960, after which they came back to Belgium and would move over ten times in Marina’s first fifteen years of life. 

She met fellow designer Martin Margiela at the Sint-Lucas school in Antwerp and they fell in love. Margiela and Yee would eventually become known as part of a legendary group of fashion designers coined the Antwerp Six, all students at the Royal Academy for Fine Arts in Antwerp.  

Marina was the most obscure among them. You could say she was a bit of a question mark. In fact that’s how she described herself at one point: “a two-legged Haunted by the dilemma of what kind of artist I was.” 

Another reason she’s so illustrious is likely due to her unconventional career. In fact, she veered away from fashion design for quite a while, teaching instead at various creative schools in both Belgium (Tournai and Ghent) and the Netherlands, but she never really stopped designing or practicing other art forms. 

She had a thing for technical clothing and has said she’s old school “with a corner cut off” (an expression in Dutch) and while she was the least know, she was probably the most reconisable designer of the Antwerp Six. 

She succumbed to cancer on 1 November 2025. She will be missed. 

Photo: Alex Conu