Julie Kegels Takes Fashion’s Biggest Emerging Talent Prize

The Antwerp designer has won the 2026 LVMH Prize just two years after launching her label

Belgian designer Julie Kegels has won the 2026 LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers, placing one of Antwerp’s most compelling new voices firmly on fashion’s international radar.

Kegels received the award at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris on 4 September, emerging from a final group of nine designers. Presented by Jennifer Lawrence, the prize comes with €400,000 and a year of mentorship from LVMH experts, offering both financial support and access to the commercial expertise required to turn a young label into a sustainable fashion business.

It is a significant acceleration for a designer whose namesake brand is only two years old. Kegels launched her Antwerp-based womenswear label in 2024 after graduating from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, developing a visual language that plays with familiar ideas of femininity without allowing them to remain entirely comfortable. Everyday garments are shifted through proportion, construction and styling, while sculptural silhouettes and artisanal techniques give seemingly recognisable pieces a more complicated character.

That tension has become central to Kegels’ work. Rather than proposing a single archetype of the woman she dresses, her collections explore the different identities a woman can occupy, sometimes within the course of a single day. Domestic references, personal memories and the rhythms of ordinary life enter the clothes, where elegance can coexist with humour and convention is subtly distorted rather than simply rejected.

The strength of that proposition was recognised by a formidable LVMH jury. The 2026 panel included Jonathan Anderson, Sarah Burton, Maria Grazia Chiuri, Nicolas Ghesquière, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, Stella McCartney, Camille Miceli, Nigo, Phoebe Philo, Michael Rider and Pharrell Williams, alongside senior LVMH figures including Delphine Arnault.

Kegels was not the only designer recognised in Paris. Chinese designer Zane Li, founder of Lii, received the Karl Lagerfeld Prize, while Kenyan designer Anil Padia of Yoshita 1967 was awarded the Savoir-Faire Prize. Li and Padia will each receive €200,000 and a year of LVMH mentorship, with Yoshita 1967 receiving additional support through LVMH Métiers d’Excellence and embroidery specialist Maison Vermont.

Kegels now joins an alumni list that has become remarkably predictive of fashion’s next generation. Previous LVMH Prize winners include Marine Serre, Thebe Magugu, Nensi Dojaka, S.S. Daley, Setchu, Hodakova and 2025 winner Soshiotsuki.

For Kegels, however, the significance of the prize lies as much in what comes next as in the recognition itself. Independent fashion increasingly demands that young designers master far more than creative identity. Production, distribution, communication and financial discipline can determine whether early industry attention becomes a viable house or a brief moment of visibility. The LVMH Prize gives Kegels considerably more ammunition for that next stage.

Two years after launching her label, she has already secured one of emerging fashion’s most consequential endorsements. The question now is how far she chooses to take it.