The creative collaborations of Ann Demeulemeester & Patti Smith

Some of our favourite fashion stories concern women supporting and uplifting each other — especially, if they work in different industries. This was the case when Belgian fashion designer Ann Demeulemeester collaborated with American songwriter and musician Patti Smith on not just one project, but two full-scale runway shows.
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They met in the mid-90s and forged a friendship, based on shared artistic and cultural interests. Although they had collaborated on several creative projects prior, the first most overt collaboration between Smith and Demeulemeester’s brand was for the latter’s SS 2000 ready-to-wear collection, titled “Woolgathering”.
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The collection took the name from Smith’s first autobiographical novel, published in 1992. Models wore the designer’s signature poetic tailoring — white shirts, narrow black trousers, and layered, windswept silhouettes — but many pieces were embroidered or printed with lines from Smith’s writing and song lyrics.
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Rather than functioning as decorative text, the words were treated as intimate messages stitched into the clothing, reinforcing Demeulemeester’s idea that garments could carry emotion and literature close to the body. As a result, the boundary between fashion, music, and poetry was blurred, transforming the runway into a performance and establishing the shared sensibility between the two artists.
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Their second collaboration was for the FW2006 menswear show in Paris. The collection’s dark tailoring, loose shirts, and layered black silhouettes echoed the androgynous wardrobe Smith had worn for decades. This time, Smith was given the spotlight, closing the show with a musical performance.
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Their collaboration that evening felt like the logical continuation of a long artistic friendship. Demeulemeester treated Smith not as a campaign star but as a co-conspirator whose words and attitude were part of the collection’s meaning; Smith, in turn, brought the poems and songs that had inspired the designer for decades.
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As a result, these collaborations are widely remembered as one of the clearest demonstrations of how the two artists’ shared sensibility could animate clothing as much as music.