A history that did not happen
It began with a coat that was already forty years old.
Antwerp was liberated on the fourth of September, 1944. The rockets started falling five weeks later, and went on falling until the end of March. Lievaert opened in the middle of that.
It did not, though. The liberation and the rockets are real history; everything below is invented — the family, the workroom, the patterns, all of it. It is a made-up house given a past it never had.
Jozef Lievaert was a cutter, not a proprietor. He spent the occupation in a first-floor room on the Kloosterstraat turning collars, letting out seams and rebuilding whatever was carried up the stairs, because there was no cloth in the city to make anything new from. He kept a book of what came through the door. By the autumn of 1944 it ran to nine hundred entries, and almost every one of them was a repair.
The house dates itself from the twenty-first of November that year — the day he finished a woman's overcoat that had come in as her father's, cut in 1903, and decided that a garment which survives two owners and a war is the only kind worth making. He hung a card in the window that said nothing but his name. He never replaced it with anything cleverer.
Cloth was still rationed, so the first pieces were cut from what the city could spare: blanket wool, salvaged lining, a bolt of Scottish tweed that had spent the war behind a false wall in a shipping office on the Ernest Van Dijckkaai. Fourteen coats left the workroom in 1945. The house has never made a great many more than that in a season since, and has never wanted to.
The founding
- Founded21 November 1944, Kloosterstraat 118
- FounderJozef Lievaert, cutter (1911–1989)
- First yearFourteen coats, all from salvaged cloth
- SecondMarthe Lievaert, 1968–2009
- ThirdAnneke Lievaert, since 2009
- PremisesThe same rooms, eighty-two years
Eighty-two years
What the house did, and when.
A card in the window
Jozef Lievaert finishes an overcoat cut in 1903 and dates the house from that day. The city is under V-2 fire; the workroom keeps its shutters closed and its lamps low until March.
The first ledger
Cloth is still short and money shorter. Marthe Lievaert, nineteen, opens an account book in which clients place a sum against work not yet begun. The house has kept accounts that way ever since — it is the same arrangement offered to members today.
The archive begins
Every pattern is numbered, dated and filed rather than cut down for the next client. The decision costs the house a room it cannot spare and turns out to be the most valuable thing it owns.
Pattern 0311
The straight-shouldered overcoat block is drawn. It is still cut to the same lines today, unchanged in sixty-five years, and remains the piece the house is known for among the few who know it.
Marthe takes the shears
Jozef stops cutting and starts teaching. He keeps a table by the window until 1986 and comes in on Saturdays after that.
Leather, downstairs
A saddler's bench is installed in the ground-floor room. The first case takes ninety-six hours and is delivered eleven months late; the client's daughter still has it.
The offer is refused
A group approaches the family about licensing the name for accessories in Japan and Italy. Marthe declines in a letter of four lines. The house has never licensed, franchised or lent its name since.
The third generation
Anneke Lievaert takes over the workroom, keeps the eleven benches, and formalises what her grandfather did by habit: any piece the house has made is repaired without charge, for as long as it exists.
Thirty-one pieces
The collection is kept small enough for one workroom to make and one person to remember — twenty pieces of clothing and objects, and, since the leather bench took on a second maker, eleven bags. Roughly four hundred pieces leave the Kloosterstraat each year.
The archive
Every pattern the house has ever cut.
Filed by the year it was drawn, in the room above the workroom. A client may call up any of them — the coat their mother had, the jacket from a fitting in 1974 — and have it made again to their own measurements. Roughly one order in nine now comes from the archive rather than the collection.
The workroom
Eleven benches, one staircase, no machines newer than 1974.
Six cut and sew. Two work leather on the ground floor. One does nothing but edges — seven passes of paint on a portfolio, dried between each. Two keep the archive and answer letters.
Nobody in the building is called a designer. The house draws from what it has already made, and changes a line only when a client's body asks it to.