Let’s go back to the beginning of this month. While 2026 marked the first ever edition of the Antwerp Fashion Festival, one already familiar component was part of the programme: The fashion department of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts presented its highly anticipated student collections on the runway. Imagine historical clothing, contemporary dance, handcrafted hats, knits, tulle, graduation works. And at the finale of the show, while the models and students jumped and cheered on stage, wearing colourful sunglasses, a long blue-and-white cloak, feathers, wigs, black transparent long sleeves or pullovers with expressionist breasts attached, there was something else. Something not necessarily distracting, but something that lifted everything seen before onto a different societal level. We’re talking about paper signs with big, vibrant letters: “Who can pay can stay.”
For anyone who didn’t get it, these signs were a protest. And a rather important one, even though hardly anyone outside of Antwerp seems to be talking about it. What’s actually going on: tuition fees at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the Royal Conservatory are set to rise. For current non-EU students, that means an increase to 13,500 euros. For new students, or those returning from an exchange year, it could mean a rise to as much as 25,000 euros. The original fees, somewhere between 7,000 and 8,000 euros.
To put that into perspective, the Royal Academy belongs to the A-list of fashion schools. BoF ranks it fourth in the world for both its bachelor’s and master’s programmes, while Vogue Business listed it among the top ten fashion schools of 2026. A school established and respected for a design approach that is radical, conceptual, demanding and artistic, one that helped shape some of the industry’s most recognisable names: Dries Van Noten, Walter Van Beirendonck, Ann Demeulemeester, to name a few of the Antwerp Six, who all studied and graduated there around the same time.
Compared to other fashion schools of the same reputation, the Royal Academy has always remained affordable, giving young students from all kinds of backgrounds and corners of the world the opportunity to invest their talent, their passion and their drive into building an outstanding career, a network, a craft.
A bit of context to underline that: to study fashion design at Central Saint Martins in London, international students, including EU citizens post-Brexit, pay around 35,000 to 35,500 euros a year for the undergraduate programme. At Parsons in New York, the same education costs around 55,500 euros, scholarships aside. None of this is to blame those who choose such schools. But it shows just how exceptional, unique and important the Royal Academy has been as an (in comparison relatively) affordable, high-quality institution.
The Academy itself has confirmed that the fee increase is not a decision of its own making, but rather a consequence of Flemish government policy reducing public funding for non-EEA students. At the same time, the school stresses that it has to pass on these costs to maintain the quality and international character of its programmes.
A closer look shows just how many students this measure actually affects: around 20 percent of the student body comes from outside the EEA, and within the fashion programme, that figure rises to roughly 30 percent.
Now, back to the signs on the runway. A protest like this rarely is just about money, even when the numbers make it look that way. It’s about who gets a seat at the table later. Or the front rows in this case. Who ends up designing for the houses, shooting the campaigns, running the studios. The students holding up “who can pay can stay” already know what’s coming: a school built to find talent slowly turning into a school built to find money. If only the wealthiest can afford to study design here, the school’s visual language changes with it. Not in theory, in practice. Half the reason the Antwerp fashion scene looks the way it does is because someone from one part of the world sat next to someone from another part of the world, connected through passion and drive, all sewing through the night, all bringing something the others didn’t have.
Take that mix away, and you don’t just lose students. You lose the references, the arguments in the studio at 2am, the version of a collection that only exists because three different stories collided over one sewing machine. Nobody knows exactly what the Royal Academy looks like in five years if this goes through. But a school doesn’t stay radical by accident. It stays radical because the people inside it keep pushing against each other, and that only works if those people can actually afford to be there.
Which is the real question underneath all of this: how does a school known for being liberal, experimental and open-minded stay that way once the price of entry changes who gets to walk through the door? The fee hike came from the government, not from the Academy. But a top-tier school doesn’t get to keep its reputation while quietly losing the students who built it.
So yes, the runway during the Antwerp Fashion Festival was loud, joyful, full of people who clearly earned their moment. But the signs they carried while taking their bow weren’t part of the show. Perhaps, they were the most honest thing in the room.