Last updated: September 8, 2026
On September 4, the LVMH jury, gathered at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, gave the 13th edition of the LVMH Prize for Young Designers to Julie Kegels. The Belgian designer, who founded her Antwerp label in 2024, receives 400,000 euros and a year of mentoring from LVMH's in-house teams. The jury included Jonathan Anderson, Maria Grazia Chiuri, Marc Jacobs, Stella McCartney, Nigo, and Delphine Arnault, choosing among nine finalists shortlisted in April. Two smaller prizes went out the same afternoon: the Karl Lagerfeld Prize to Zane Li of LII, and the Savoir-Faire Prize to Anil Padia of Yoshita 1967. Full jury and prize details here.
The prize money is not what makes this worth writing about here. What Kegels actually built her Spring 2026 collection from is.
For the show that opened Paris Fashion Week last September, titled "Quick Change," Kegels approached Marie Jo, a Belgian lingerie brand under the Van de Velde group that has made bras since 1981. She asked for access to the brand's deadstock inventory and worked alongside Marie Jo's own seamstresses and designers in their atelier in Schellebelle, turning leftover lingerie fabric into runway pieces. Marie Jo's own account of the collaboration is here.
The results read like lingerie construction taken apart and put back together in the open. Patchwork bras were assembled from offcuts, and corset-like bodices were built from sheer mesh laid over real boning. Undergarment-inspired belts sat on top of the hip instead of hiding underneath a waistband, and straps were left visibly exposed instead of tucked away. One fabric turned up again and again across the collection: a checked mesh with a daisy-ribbon trim that Marie Jo has used in its Avero line for three decades. Kegels cut it into new bustiers and briefs, worn under skirts that looked deliberately slipped. She has said the print reminds her of something her mother would have worn.
Kegels put the idea behind the collaboration in one sentence: "Lingerie is sensual and intimate. It's a gift to yourself and a source of strength. I wanted to capture that double feeling, vulnerable and powerful at once, in this collaboration."
That framing is one we build around every day. Boning, sheer mesh, and a garter clasp function here as a construction method with its own visual logic, not a layer meant to stay hidden. Our own bodysuit pieces and the structural strap work across Odri run on the same idea: construction as the actual design.
[PRODUCT PHOTO: Editorial shot of a model wearing a black structured bodysuit in a small lingerie atelier interior, garment racks in the background holding black, red, and white lingerie sets, natural window light, three-quarter angle, face turned in profile]
Kegels trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, the school that produced Margiela and Demeulemeester, studying alongside Pieter Mulier and Meryll Rogge. It shows in how she treats a finished garment: less as a closed object, more as something still visibly under construction, patched, stitched, held together with hardware you can see. That is closer to how a garter belt is actually built than to how eveningwear usually pretends to be.
Corsetry has already had a long run on couture runways this year, and museums have started asking what actually held those silhouettes together underneath the fabric. What is different about this particular win is the source material: an actual lingerie manufacturer's own deadstock, cut and rebuilt by lingerie's own seamstresses, then handed the industry's most closely watched prize for new talent. It is about as direct as a major jury has come this year to saying that the craft behind a bra and the craft behind a couture bodice are the same discipline.
Atelier Notes is where the Lioness team writes about the wider fashion and lingerie industry: runway moments, craftsmanship stories, and the ideas moving through fashion that connect back to how we build our own pieces. Separate voice from the Lioness Studio guides, same team behind it.
