PARIS — Christian Wijnants is ready to put down roots.
Twelve years after launching his namesake label, the Belgian fashion designer is opening his first flagship in Antwerp Wednesday and will launch an online store next month, which he hopes will be followed by further stand-alone units in Hong Kong and China next year.
The move into retail follows the acquisition in late 2013 of a 50 percent stake in the label by CLCC, the Luxembourg-based fashion fund headed by Belgian shipping magnate Christian Cigrang, which also has stakes in A.F. Vandevorst, Yang Li and Brussels-based jewelry brand Kim Mee Hye.
Wijnants said the backer allowed his brand to capitalize on the momentum it has enjoyed since he won the 2013 International Woolmark Prize and added pre-collections last year. The company’s sales were up 175 percent in 2014 versus the previous year.
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He has also been selected as one of 15 designers who will participate in the Swarovski Collective 2016, a one-year program during which they will receive financial support and crystal product from the company.
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“We decided to open a store because the collection is expanding and we’re developing very well at the moment,” Wijnants told WWD.
“It was never really my dream to open a store. It was always my dream to have my own brand, to have my own collection, but more and more I had the feeling that it would be really nice and it would be an enrichment for the collection to have a place somewhere in the world where I could really express myself as well with the architecture and interior design,” the designer added.
“Antwerp seemed the best place because I live here and it’s quite a cool city,” he said — with typical Belgian understatement — of the town whose Royal Academy of Fine Arts boasts fashion alumni including Kris Van Assche, Ann Demeulemeester and Dries Van Noten.
Wijnants enlisted Swedish architect Andreas Bozarth Fornell, best known for his stores for Acne Studios and Roland Mouret, to design the 1,075-square-foot boutique located among antiques stores on Steenhouwersvest in the Sint-Andries district of Antwerp.
“I didn’t have any plan B. I just asked him because I really love his work,” he explained. “I love the way he plays with materials, and especially — surprisingly — working with sometimes very cheap materials next to very rich materials.”
Bozarth came up with the idea of mixing natural and artificial elements as an echo to the way Wijnants will juxtapose a material such as rubber with natural fabrics like linen in his ready-to-wear collections. The back of the narrow store is set off by a small but lush garden designed by Belgian garden architects Bart Haverkamp and Pieter Croes.
“Some of the furniture is made of fiberglass and polyester, but it looks like natural stone, other natural stones look like concrete, and the concrete looks stony. Everything is a little bit like trompe-l’oeil — you don’t know what’s real and what’s not real,” Wijnants said.
Next month, the designer plans to launch an online store that will ship worldwide.
The brand is carried in around 100 points of sale worldwide, including Barneys in New York, Harvey Nichols in London, Mameg in Beverly Hills and Tomorrowland in Japan. Wijnants hopes to open stand-alone stores in Hong Kong and China in 2016 in partnership with its existing retail distributor GRI.
“It’s always nice to have new challenges and new projects like this one. I would almost call it the cherry on the top when you have a show, you have a collection and you also have the space to show your work in the best way possible, where people can really see the total assortment in a nice environment,” he remarked.