Raf Simons (Q5576)
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Raf Simons is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Raf Simons |
Raf Simons is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
intern
menswear designer
right-hand man
1995
founder
2014
Collaborator
A massive rave situation. A long bar that turned into a runway. A thousand young people, students, artists, designers, musicians, DJs, and fashion types, all pressed together in the chaotic spirit of euphoric togetherness that Raf Simons wanted to whip up around the showing of his spring collection in London.“I decided to come to London last year, because I felt the energy was incredible,” he said, while prepping a show at Printworks, a massive post-industrial newsprint factory whose cavernous halls have long been reappropriated as a club night venue that is about to be torn down. Simons has been a visitor to London’s Frieze art fair for years; it falls this week.Post-Covid, post-Brexit, he observed, “you feel London, and the country is a hurt animal, but it’s an animal that’s ready to go out. There’s something positive within the negative. I saw it again, this week, going to galleries. Somehow people mix up here, start conversations. Coming to the city, the streets, the community is always inspiring.”Acting at the edge, in the margins—for and with youth—has always been the grounding of his brand. These gritty, dystopian times feel a lot like Raf Simons’s underground beginnings in the 1990s—it took him back to his memories as a kid of jostling with friends, faking tickets to get into fashion shows.“So I thought, let’s not do that. Let’s just invite everybody instead. I didn’t want a show for 300 people sitting in rows. This is a show that’s pure democracy. No hierarchy. A London explosion of youth, life, dancing, and being together. So,” he added, “I was thinking a lot about the body, in relation to dressing up and going out and performing.”Simons took that prospect as a challenge not to fall back into any comfort-zone of predictable youth-cult signifiers. “I started with the opposite of going out from my own past. It was about dancing, going out together, but I also didn't really want to fall in the trick of Blitz Kids, or the clichés. So I wanted to explore something I never did before, which was the body. To have the body liberated, to see and feel the body to expose it; also to allow the body to be in movement.”
14 October 2022
The vibe shift has arrived at Raf Simons. After pandemic collections that furthered his explorations of youth and distress (and sometimes youth in distress), Simons pivoted on his glossy black heel. For fall 2022, the tense, urgent shapes of his rioters and revolutionaries has dissipated into a silhouette that is abjectly elegant, with draped pleated trousers, slender cloak wraps, black blouson bomber jackets, and backpacks with silken trains. Set in a stately interior, with glass chandeliers and furniture draped in red fabric, the collection’s video looks like a scene from a brooding horror movie that would have not 20 lines of dialogue yet would chill you to the bone.That’s how Simons works: Say nothing and project it all through the clothing and the environment. This season he gave but one hint about his collection: Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1559 paintingNetherlandish Proverbs. The opening look, a blue cloak suspended from a hat designed in partnership with Stephen Jones, is almost a one-to-one remake of the garb worn by the painting’s central figure. From here, the hood-hats continue in luxurious colors, emphasizing the thinness of Simons’s silhouette. Several versions without the head adornment are worn front-to-back, with hand-painted designs on them, one a trompe l’oeil illustration of hands holding a bouquet. A few graphics have snuck their way in, of course, printed across suits similar to last season’s, and there is no shortage of roomy, textural black outerwear, cut from what looks like almost every fabric under the sun: velvet, nylon, vinyl, wool.Here’s where things get eerie: Tented prairie dresses made from what appears to be latex, worn with cloaks and long leather neckties. There is something undeniably kinky about the combination; fabrics and ideas taken from the bondage shop and stripped of their obvious hotness. Simons is best when he is in a clash, taking the obvious and making it strange, turning the serene into something suspicious, or electrifying peaceful shapes with a rebellious edge. These combinations are the oddest and most enticing facet of this collection—why would you make this? Why style it this way?Maybe the purpose of being a silent designer is to leave the questions unanswered. To provoke, not explain. Back to the painting.
Art historical interpretations of the work cast the people in the town’s square as fools, acting out proverbs of the era like “banging one’s head against a brick wall,” or “the world is turned upside down.” What does that central figure in the blue cloak depict, the one whose very cloak opens this collection? A man who has been cheated on by his wife. What can we extrapolate from that? How could Simons relate? Hmm. For a designer who rarely speaks publicly, he manages, always, to say a lot about himself, his life, his obsession in his work. Vibes are shifting indeed.
21 February 2022
Over the last five years, genderless dressing has been so prevalent in fashion that it’s almost lost its meaning. We’re so used to seeing boys in dresses—on runways, on red carpets, on magazine covers—that nothing surprises us. In that sense, Raf Simons’s men and women in corporate skirt-suits didn’t send disbelief down the runway at the Bourse de Commerce. But once you actually tried to picture that image unfolding in the real world—in the offices of Wall Street or London’s City—it was another matter altogether. Simons has always challenged our relationships with conventional dress codes. This collection was his timely reminder that our collective mentality perhaps isn’t quite as far ahead as we’d like to believe.But it was also a compelling study of how those business dress codes could evolve in a real—if still not super near—future. “Right now, I think it’s an important thing because so many men are buying womenswear anyway,” Simons said after the show. “The question is if they’re buying clothes that are made for women, or clothes that are made for both men and women. It’s something I find fascinating to focus on.” Trying to determine the nature of a genderless garment, his research brought him back to where it all begins. “At the birth of a baby, nobody is approaching it like male or female. It’s just a baby. I wanted to work out a shape that works for both in the same way, even if your perception of the girl or the boy dressed in it is different.”Along the way, his silhouette and styling generated a wealth of overtones, illustrating how associative the image of men in skirts and dresses still is to the contemporary eye. Some of the looks had a clinical sensibility about them, which evoked hospital gowns. Some were almost tribal in their uniformity; and others looked ceremonial—religious, even—a fact only intensified by the skeletal hands that clenched the models’ biceps. Simons, who carried the arm rings over from last season, said he considers them a brand symbol, “like Martin has the Tabi boot.” In the context of his dress code rebels, it felt more like the ghosts of tradition trying to cling on to those preordained gender norms tooth and nail.“Maybe it’s autobiographical, I don’t know,” Simons reflected. “I went to a high school that was almost monastic in a way. You were supposed to be this, you were supposed to be that, you couldn’t dress like this, you had to dress like that… It made me think a lot,” he said.
This collection was rebellious, but there was also a distinctly Prada-centric character to the clothes and the styling, which made you wonder if the esotericism that permeates the halls of Simons’s other job in Milan hasn’t amplified his susceptibility to ideas of uniformity. “I think it looks more like a uniform on a boy, and more couture on a girl,” he said of his new silhouette. “It’s a very pure, timeless shape.”
30 September 2021
Every Raf Simons collection is a collection about Raf Simons. Would you prefer a vision of what life might be like if you were a rockstar playing an arena or a Left Bank dilettante or wealthy FinTech NFT collector on holiday in Gstaad? Or are you into Raf’s ongoing bildungsroman? For those on Simons’s journey with himself, he keeps it interesting—and if Simons’s career and work has proven anything it’s that being oneself can be an impressively fruitful pursuit, especially now. To build a heritage brand, you have to have a heritage, and it’s much more compelling—well, to me at least—to watch someone explore their psyche in real time than reanimate the obsessions of ghosts. No wonder Raf and Mrs. Prada gel.For fall 2021, Simons stated his mission plainly: “The collection is about things I love—things I have always loved, that are always there in every collection, in the processes behind it, and the clothes.”Over the past couple of seasons, Simons’s eponymous collection has gotten simpler, more obvious, and more evocative. This season, silhouettes loosen and expand, almost magnetically propelling away from the body rather than clinging to it. The quilted A-line coats, some layered with puffy vests, and gigantic mushroom cap knits with strass brooches and dot patterns must be the largest garments he has ever offered. Wearing them with relaxed, gently flared trousers, the models look like atomic clouds, their clothing the electrons circling their forms but never touching them. Kraftwerk’s custom track, repeating the wordradioactivity,is apt, as is the set, Genk’s Barenzaal and C-mine facilities.Depending on how you look at it, these bubble shapes either evoke a sterile coldness (clothing that lives far away from your body) or a mad humanity (clothing scaffolded around your form in a sensual tension with it). Either way, you can’t help but wish that some of the bodies within these massive clothes were more diverse. The best part of big, baggy, enveloping clothing is that it really does look good on everyone—not just the waifs Simons helped popularize in the aughts.In addition to a mondo silhouette, Simons has also vastly expanded the collection of small, wantable things that hover around his garments. Ivory runner boots with a pastel gum heel are back, while a vast range of teenage-looking jewelry—hearts, logos, and dangly rib cage earrings—accompanies the clothing.
The funniest baubles must be the skeleton hand bangles, fixed high on models’ arms like a reminder of the inevitable, eventual grasp of death. Maybe that’s reading too much into it. Simons chose six words to title this collection:ataraxia,equanimity,dichotomy,synchronicity,allegiance,devotion. Peacefulness is the big story, even amidst the techno-medical disasters of our world. Do you feel comfortable in your own skin? Raf Simons certainly does.
24 March 2021
Every Raf Simons collection is a collection about Raf Simons. Would you prefer a vision of what life might be like if you were a rockstar playing an arena or a Left Bank dilettante or wealthy FinTech NFT collector on holiday in Gstaad? Or are you into Raf’s ongoing bildungsroman? For those on Simons’s journey with himself, he keeps it interesting—and if Simons’s career and work has proven anything it’s that being oneself can be an impressively fruitful pursuit, especially now. To build a heritage brand, you have to have a heritage, and it’s much more compelling—well, to me at least—to watch someone explore their psyche in real time than reanimate the obsessions of ghosts. No wonder Raf and Mrs. Prada gel.For fall 2021, Simons stated his mission plainly: “The collection is about things I love—things I have always loved, that are always there in every collection, in the processes behind it, and the clothes.”Over the past couple of seasons, Simons’s eponymous collection has gotten simpler, more obvious, and more evocative. This season, silhouettes loosen and expand, almost magnetically propelling away from the body rather than clinging to it. The quilted A-line coats, some layered with puffy vests, and gigantic mushroom cap knits with strass brooches and dot patterns must be the largest garments he has ever offered. Wearing them with relaxed, gently flared trousers, the models look like atomic clouds, their clothing the electrons circling their forms but never touching them. Kraftwerk’s custom track, repeating the wordradioactivity, is apt, as is the set, Genk’s Barenzaal and C-mine facilities.Depending on how you look at it, these bubble shapes either evoke a sterile coldness (clothing that lives far away from your body) or a mad humanity (clothing scaffolded around your form in a sensual tension with it). Either way, you can’t help but wish that some of the bodies within these massive clothes were more diverse. The best part of big, baggy, enveloping clothing is that it really does look good on everyone—not just the waifs Simons helped popularize in the aughts.In addition to a mondo silhouette, Simons has also vastly expanded the collection of small, wantable things that hover around his garments. Ivory runner boots with a pastel gum heel are back, while a vast range of teenage-looking jewelry—hearts, logos, and dangly rib cage earrings—accompanies the clothing.
The funniest baubles must be the skeleton hand bangles, fixed high on models’ arms like a reminder of the inevitable, eventual grasp of death. Maybe that’s reading too much into it. Simons chose six words to title this collection:ataraxia,equanimity,dichotomy,synchronicity,allegiance,devotion. Peacefulness is the big story, even amidst the techno-medical disasters of our world. Do you feel comfortable in your own skin? Raf Simons certainly does.
24 March 2021
There are few working designers so vocally obsessed with youth culture as Raf Simons. But the youth Simons seeks to explore isn’t the youth of today—the young people advocating for climate justice, leading protests against police brutality and racism, and volunteering as poll workers. It’s his own youth that interests him. The metadata of his website, where he streamed his spring 2021 film “Teenage Dreams,” reads: “I don’t want to show clothes, I want to show my attitude, my past, present, and future. I use memories and future visions and try to place them in today’s world.”Designers are plumbing their own histories more than ever in this digital and isolated spring 2021 season, but this has always been Simons’s way. The press release for his teen dream collection lists the films that inspired him, many of which he has cited before, fromAlienandAlice in WonderlandtoPicnic at Hanging RockandA Nightmare on Elm Street. The release also notes three very apt Joy Division songs: “Isolation,” “Incubation,” and “Disorder.”That’s the totality of Simons’s statements on this collection, which features his first official foray into womenswear at this brand and his first fashion film since his start in the late ’90s, when similarly rakish models loafed about in Belgian photo studios and homes. Back then they smoked ciggys and drank champers and smushed into a single couch. In today’s film they populate in a nuclear floral set by Mark Colle: possessed, crawling on the floor, snatched into a web.As Simons’s youth in revolt slunk around in the film, punctuated by pulsing beats by Senjan Jansen, his signatures came into focus. The silhouette was as slim as ever and there was ample sloganeering and graphics, things his customers old and young adore, as well as photo prints of family members of Raf’s studio team. Raf stans will appreciate the continuity of his long lean silk skirts, colorful turtlenecks withRmonograms at the throat, sleeveless tunics, and body-wrapping perspex tops. A big mustard knit, the sort of ginormous sweater Simons himself often wears, will be another fan favorite. It’s worn by both a male and female model, proving the point that while this is technically a womenswear debut, female shoppers have long found comfort in Simons’s work.
23 October 2020
There are few working designers so vocally obsessed with youth culture as Raf Simons. But the youth Simons seeks to explore isn’t the youth of today—the young people advocating for climate justice, leading protests against police brutality and racism, and volunteering as poll workers. It’s his own youth that interests him. The metadata of his website, where he streamed his spring 2021 film “Teenage Dreams,” reads: “I don’t want to show clothes, I want to show my attitude, my past, present, and future. I use memories and future visions and try to place them in today’s world.”Designers are plumbing their own histories more than ever in this digital and isolated spring 2021 season, but this has always been Simons’s way. The press release for his teen dream collection lists the films that inspired him, many of which he has cited before, fromAlienandAlice in WonderlandtoPicnic at Hanging RockandA Nightmare on Elm Street. The release also notes three very apt Joy Division songs: “Isolation,” “Incubation,” and “Disorder.”That’s the totality of Simons’s statements on this collection, which features his first official foray into womenswear at this brand and his first fashion film since his start in the late ’90s, when similarly rakish models loafed about in Belgian photo studios and homes. Back then they smoked ciggys and drank champers and smushed into a single couch. In today’s film they populate in a nuclear floral set by Mark Colle: possessed, crawling on the floor, snatched into a web.As Simons’s youth in revolt slunk around in the film, punctuated by pulsing beats by Senjan Jansen, his signatures came into focus. The silhouette was as slim as ever and there was ample sloganeering and graphics, things his customers old and young adore, as well as photo prints of family members of Raf’s studio team. Raf stans will appreciate the continuity of his long lean silk skirts, colorful turtlenecks withRmonograms at the throat, sleeveless tunics, and body-wrapping perspex tops. A big mustard knit, the sort of ginormous sweater Simons himself often wears, will be another fan favorite. It’s worn by both a male and female model, proving the point that while this is technically a womenswear debut, female shoppers have long found comfort in Simons’s work.
23 October 2020
Often the most compelling fashion shows make everything going on in the world dissolve for a brief moment in time while simultaneously delivering a singular and pertinent perspective on the world. This latest Raf Simons collection had a transporting, emotional quality because the people he depicted appeared to no longer inhabit our world yet they dressed as though they were still clinging to some part of it. Departing atBlade Runner—which, it’s worth reminding, was filmed in 1982 and set in 2019—and making other narrative stops along the way (Kazuo Ishiguro’sNever Let Me Gocomes to mind), this was Simons venturing beyond his obsession with misspent youth. It was the abduction of youth altogether.Emerging from a glowing yellow tunnel into a minimalist yellow terrain were several individuals who concealed their hands within muffs, a rather anachronistic accessory. People in 2020 wouldn’t fathom wearing anything that impedes the use of a smartphone. But positioned front and center, they communicated a crucial piece of information about these people, the Solar Youth. If you think this sounds positive, read the fine print: They don’t want you to know who you are. One theory is that they left the earth as children from our past and awoke as an elite community of our future.This might explain why their attire was at turns elegant, nostalgic, and vaguely sci-fi. Silvery high-neck base layers were visible under the impeccable, imposing military-style coats. Homespun sweaters and scarves were juxtaposed with tubular knits that encased the arms. White boots were pristine to the extreme, and sumptuous outerwear replaced the cliché space suit. Several blazers and collegiate jackets were shielded under clear filmy plastic. If there is no Planet B, you might as well pack whatever you love most.A tender cover of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?”—in addition to ominous synthetic pulses and Trent Reznor’s spare scoring—assisted with the designer’s cryptic stance on the season. Was this, as the song goes, his freakiest show? On a hypothetical Simons index of wearability, pretty much the entire lineup was tailor-made for earth. But beaming forth from these looks were signs of dread and defiance.With open eyes but still nervous each timewas scrawled atop a muff that read‘No’ Land.They can’t stop all of usappeared across another. By the final walk, what initially felt like warranted grumbling over the show’s remote location became immaterial. Tell us, Raf, where do we go from here?
15 January 2020
Rage and alienation: is this Raf Simons’s comfort zone, the place which connects him back, as a 51-year-old man, to the teenage experience his work continually fetishizes? Well, Simons doesn’t have to play nice to any bosses anymore. After his exit from Calvin Klein, he reports only to himself. And what the free Raf Simons wants to say is exactly how much he accuses and despises corporate America. Quite apart from the slogans, it was there rather clearly, breaking through on the soundtrack, a voice which intoned, “Big lie...media America, corporate America...fascist America.”Sometimes, watching a Simons show can feel like sitting an exam or trying to crack a cryptic crossword. His work is exclusionary to the extent that you need to be a qualified Raf-ologist to understand what it means. This time, he refused to speak after the show to give any gloss on his meaning and layered references. Maybe he didn’t trust himself to answer questions about why the set was populated with standard office chairs, bound in black plastic tape. Or to add anything to what could be read, partially or wholly, in his textual graphics.It was pretty bluntly unmissable though. “STONE(E)D AMERICA” was one recurring motif. And on the back necks of many garments: “My Own Private Antwerp.” To be fair, it wasn’t a question of Simons lobbing criticism of Trump’s America from afar, now that he’s living back in Belgium. He’d been critical enough about the political atmosphere of Trump’s America while he was working at Calvin Klein, what with hisAmerican Psychoand other horror movie thematics. Now, though, after a couple of seasons when he’d diverted his energies into exploring a certain European elegance in his own collection, his raw anger against the power of corporate USA was back with a vengeance.His boys seemed to belong to some underground crew—maybe the last surviving boys on Earth, possibly the victims or maybe the perpetrators of some toxic social endgame. There were more text labels reading “RS-LAB,” which explained the lab coats, but why the hospital gowns? Why boxer shorts and padded gloves that looked as if they might be made for handling radioactive chemicals?Styling and heavy meaning apart—and this might sound frivolous, considering—it was also a plumb-center commercial collection for all of Raf Simons’s fans, of whatever age. The arty, painted T-shirts, the leather coats, the colorful baggy sweatshirts and overshirts.
Whatever post-American psychological fallout is going on in Simons’s life, it hasn’t affected his ability to serve his faithful audience. Maybe it’s improved it.
19 June 2019
Of course, it was as fraught an occasion as there could possibly be in fashion: Raf Simons’s first reappearance in public, less than one month since his fans had been hit by the body blow of his exit from Calvin Klein. The specter that sudden severance of a lauded major designer raised was more general. Does it herald the death, or at least the belittling, of creativity and meaning in fashion? Simons had a tangential answer to that. “I don’t want to be negative,” he said. “I want to do something abstract and beautiful and elegant and proud and sophisticated, but without losing the edge of what the brand stands for: the young generation, the dark movies.”Well, he delivered on that, in a show dominated by dramatically long silhouettes—they’d be called maxi coats on a woman—which came freighted with all the kinds of messages Simons’s cult followers find gratifying to decode.Burning down the housewas a printed slogan that flashed by on one of the knee patches on the white cotton trousers that accompanied everything.That, one could suspect, might have been slipped in during the last couple of weeks, but Simons claimed to have finished the collection “before Christmas, before the hassle started.” It certainly felt as if it had continued where his last collection—which had terrific renderings of couture-like satin coats—left off, but this time in a more extended and concentrated way, exploring elongated volumes or pushed-out David Byrne shoulders in classic menswear fabrics. Simons’s headgear typically threw it well off-normal: an almost indescribable construct of jockey hat, umbrella, and backward baseball cap. Or maybe a conceptual crash helmet for fashion’s runners and riders?This time, Simons’s chosen surrounding wasn’t a dark old club dive in a Paris suburb, but the gilded rooms of the Shangri-La Hotel—and the club came to the hotel. Simons had invited theWhispering Sons, a young Belgian post-punk band whose web page describes how their music “unveils feelings of alienation, propelled by an urging and ominous sound.” The designer had been thrilled to discover that they’re “from northeast Belgium, next to where my parents still live.” So they performed, and then there was part two of the show, a more-or-less repeat of the first, only this time in pastels and bright colors.
16 January 2019
Basic fashion dynamics: There’s only so far a pendulum can swing before it starts going in the opposite direction. Raf Simons’s late-night show in a warehouse in a Paris suburb might go down in recent history as the moment the backlash against streetwear became an inevitability. Tailoring for men, even for a new generation, is back at the top of the agenda again, and Simons is one of those pushing for a new way of doing it. Why? “We need it! We need a new outline. I know I was part of it myself, but too many hoodies with prints! You know, something needs to shift,” he stressed.His was a concentrated, direct idea: Make men’s coats and jackets in Paris couture–grade women’s satin, cut them wide, and spike the look with New Wave club references. “I was thinking of Yves Saint Laurent, when he was doing his incredible color combinations,” Simons said. “Everything except the jersey and a couple of menswear suits was made from duchesse satin.” Duchesse needs to be masterfully cut so as not to pucker, bubble, or droop, and as every haute couturier knows, the simpler the cut, the more demanding the skills. Punctuated with lines of wide-spaced silver-chrome bubble studs, Simons’s—in single shots of white, ice blue, emerald, and marigold—looked immaculately made. Perhaps he learned a thing or two about that in his days in the couture ateliers at Christian Dior.New Wave–y late-’70s/early-’80s taste did go through a neon phase; the fuchsia coat triggered a flash of early Stephen Sprouse and exactly how he brought elevated glamour to the downtown New York club scene at that time. In Simons’s playbook, there always has to be something of a romantic throwback to misspent youth. With him, though, the emotional pull is more toward rough European basement nights—in this case, illustrated with four photographic tokens of punk life in London, printed on flat backpacks and satin T-shirts.“There are all these references to punk, like the safety pins and studs and black leather, but I was thinking of how to do them in a way that was not that—so you don’t recognize them,” the designer said. That’s where it got interesting. There were glimpses of tiny knots of diamanté jewelry and silver D-rings embedded here and there, suggestive of piercings and fetish. And, wittily, a twisted translation of plastic six-pack holders, made into a version of a punk string vest. “Like when kids hang out, carrying their beers,” as Simons put it. “But also, like Paco Rabanne.
”Dual readings is the mark of interesting fashion. Ultimately, though, with this one, it’s the single message that resonated as new: the surprise of haute couture tailoring taking center stage—and for men.
20 June 2018
The runway was set for a feast, with piles of fruit and vegetables, breads and cheeses, cakes, and stacks of waffles that the staff encouraged guests to eat. Around dozens of lush floral bouquets, hundreds of half-poured glasses and empty bottles of Champagne and wine were artfully arranged. Grape juice, however, wasn’t the elixir Raf Simons had been contemplating while making his latest collection. The extensive show notes cited the 1981 German filmChristiane F.as a starting point. “Simons, like many Europeans of his generation, was exposed to the harrowing world ofChristiane F.in high school, where the film and the book were discussed as a part of the curriculum,” the press release explained. It went on: “Christiane F.remains a cautionary tale, one that unashamedly and unapologetically depicts the realities of drug use and addiction.”Christiane F. was a heroin junkie in late-1970s Berlin, a striking one with dyed red hair and a willowy, youthful frame, and she has turned up in a Simons collection before, circa Fall 2001. (Simons was leagues ahead of fashion in the late-2010s fixation on graphics and text.) Here, he seemed to be making a connection between his youth—or his youthful obsession, at least—and the opioid epidemic ravaging his adoptive country. This is Simons’s third collection since arriving stateside, and it’s tempting to see pessimism in the progression from Milton Glaser’s iconic “I ❤️ NY” design of a year ago to the strung-out photos of Christiane F. and the periodic tableLSDandXTCpatches decorating the knees of jeans tonight. Who among us isn’t pessimistic these days? But the vivid colors of the excellent outerwear and the ultra-sheen of skinny cargo pants and glossy vinyl gloves belie that idea about negativity. We were reminded somehow of Simons’s final collection for Jil Sander, with its clutch coats and, of course, its stunning floral arrangements. That collection had its fetish-y elements, too.One of this show’s recurring motifs was the unfortunately named dickey. The false sweater fronts were suspended from turtlenecks and layered over the tailoring that dominated the lineup. It was a strangely compelling gesture, and a more sophisticated one than the half-hoodies withDrugsprinted across the chest, in an allusion to an obscure mid-1980s play by Cookie Mueller and Glenn O’Brien. We’re dubious that those sweatshirts will open up a dialogue about addiction, though they will surely have Simons’s addicts eager for a fix.
There was more than a winking nod here to the glamour and allure of illicit substances. That’s what made this collection powerful: its assured sartorialism combined with its very now sense of spectacle. Plus, who doesn’t love a free glass of vino?
7 February 2018
There were two FDNY wagons outside pre-show and an ominous cluster of unamused firefighters. Was this show going to get shut down before it began? As the Q and N trains rattled urgently over the Manhattan bridge above, the responders receded: Raf Simons’s second New York menswear show was legal.For this one, we were clustered among the foundations of that bridge in the New York Supermarket on East Broadway. The smell of recently sold fish, the humidity, and the neon were all authentic. Team Raf sluiced extra water on the floor, plus added Chinese lanterns printed with the graphics produced by Peter Saville for New Order and more neon signs that spelled out the wordReplicant.What did it all mean? For now, we didn’t much care. The clustering crowd that included A$AP Rocky, Hanne Gaby Odiele, and Marc Jacobs were sipping their Tsingtaos, vaping hard, and simply enjoying the fish-fragrant freshness of a bona fide fashion moment happening at the slightly maligned but ripe-for-a-refresh New York men’s “threek” (three day week). As Jacobs observed “I love Raf and he’s a good friend, so I’m very glad he’s here. Although, I saw more of him before he got here than since he’s here . . . but, you know, Raf makes fashion. He’s a creator. So he brings a creativity to American fashion which I think is lacking, so I’m very happy to have him.”So what did the creator activate tonight? Distressed tailoring both checked and plain under a canopy of umbrellas, sometimes with lit ferrules or shafts or semi-dismantled canopies. There were hints of Raf collections past in the hypersize collegiatewear and image-stamped garments transformed into bibs. There were women wearing clothes that, like the rest here, were neither menswear nor the other but more a disjunctive genderless anti-uniform. Wide-brimmed hats in floral print with added scarves-cum-dustmasks were countered by rope-fastened gumboots like those worn by municipal Japanese workers and fishermen. Trousers were sometimes wide and shroud-like. Saville’s graphic contours for Joy Division and lettering for New Order popped, and the setting plus heavy clues from those Simons-installed neon signs hinted at a soon-to-have-a-sequel inspiration.In the circumstances, however, it was far less reliable to parse than to ask. According to Simons: “There are a lot of things that go back to my early days and why we started doing the things we did. So there was strong music references from the past, as you can see.
But there are juxtapositions in a different way taken out of context, basically; it’s about movies (aboutBlade Runner, clearly), it’s about cultures sliding together—that’s the most important message for me, Asian culture and the culture of the west coming together. And you know there was a bit of new wave, punk attitude, but not aesthetically, more in the attitude like taking different kinds of things . . . good vibes . . . I wanted it to be energetic.”Tonight Simons’s pot melted in purposefully directional disarray under the train-rattled Manhattan bridge. Whether a new generation will adopt his cues—something Simons implied he would be delighted to happen—to help their external self-determination remains to be seen. As a moment in time, however, this was a properly buzzing chapter in New York’s unwisely down-on-itself menswear scene that came served with a side order of fish as whiffily potent as those local naysayers’ counterproductive doubts. Wish it, and it will come—just like Raf did.
12 July 2017
Whether it’s the Statue of Liberty beckoning over the curve in the horizon as your steamer approaches from the east, or a frantic cluster of handwritten “Have you been detained?” posters waiting outside immigration as the automatic doors of JFK whoosh blessedly closed behind you, every outsider’s first arrival in New York is as different as it is meaningful. For Raf Simons, a designer who is no less vaunted in fashion than he is sometimes ambivalent about it as an art form—i.e., deeply—that rule applies.Simons is a recent immigrant arrived to take the mantle at Calvin Klein: The king is dead, God save the king. But before he Makes American Fashion Great Again in nine days’ time, tonight was about the transposition of his own 22-year-old brand from Europe to the new continent.What we got was this: Oversize satin-sheen topcoats and almost aggressively mundane boxy check jackets worn atop oversize pants with luxurious breaks at the ankle, bottomed by rope-trimmed chisel-toe shoes. The slightness of the models and the bigness of these pieces contributed to what Simons said he’d aimed to muster, a sense of children adopting their parents’ uniform. Sometimes the boys wore nothing but maître d’s waistcoats with their baggies, or attenuatedly utilitarian long-yoked work shirts. They almost always wore heaped beading at the neck.Shiningly recognizable was the typographical design of Milton Glaser, transposed into rough-knit I heart N.Y. sashes and sweaters. Less so were the Raf Simons Youth Project tees, the service-industryThank You(writ thrice) aboveHave a Nice Daygraphics, and the seemingly random insertion of words includingblowandforestin double-edged collegiate fonts onto split-neck sweats. Absolutely the standout detail—and gratifyingly cheap and easy to replicate at home—was the duct tape cinching at the waist of outerwear.Simons’s rationale for all this was tangled but ultimately coherent. As he said: “I wanted to approach it from the combination of a mind-set of someone who comes to New York in the beginning, a kid let’s say. When you are a young kid you end up in the places that are very touristy, that confront you with all these things, the Statue of Liberty, the I Love . . . I wanted to go back to how I experienced New York in the beginning and combine it with how I experience it now. So this fresh young direction to the city and everything it stands for—and what is happening now.
” The rise of Donald Trump after his personal move was arranged had changed everything, he added, and moved his process back to the DIY subversion of British punk under Margaret Thatcher.Had his perception of New York changed since its Trumpification? Simons shook his head: “I can only see this city as a city that has incredible history, incredible inspiration, and incredible people . . . ask me do I think that you should stand up against what is happening in this country, then I say yes. Even in writing, I do not think people should be fearful—we should be more fearless—and not behave like everybody is expecting you to behave.” No fear in new New York.
2 February 2017
Earlier this year, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation contactedRaf Simons. They asked if he’d like to work with them on something. He said yes. That’s the shorthand version of the story behind the collection he presented at Pitti Immagine Uomo, perfectly chimed with a duo of Mapplethorpe exhibitions at LACMA and the Getty Museum, and the HBO documentary subtitledLook at the Pictures. It was the right time. And Simons is a Mapplethorpe fan, so it was the right artist. “I was honored,” Simons said after his show, his voice vibrating with emotion. Hence he shelved the idea he was working on for a collection (he wouldn’t reveal what it was; it may, he said, come out in a later show) and began his latest artist collaboration.Normally, when Simons works with an artist, he approaches them. This time, the dynamic had somewhat shifted. The generosity of the Mapplethorpe Foundation’s offer is reflected in the generosity of Simons’s interpretation: There’s no outfit in Simons’s Spring 2017 show that doesn’t feature a photographic print of a Mapplethorpe. His curly-haired male models, with seductively slanted leather biker caps, often bore a striking resemblance to the photographer himself—though Simons stated that, rather than the artist’s doppelgängers, “every boy is a representation of a piece of work.” Each could be a Mapplethorpe sitter. The billowing shirts had shades of Mapplethorpe’s famous muse Patti Smith on herHorsesalbum cover. Robert Sherman, a model whose alopecia made his skin approximate marble in his many portraits shot by Mapplethorpe, also attended the show. Simons had to clear third-party rights with all the sitters before reproducing their images. It began a dialogue that resulted in an immersion on Simons’s part in Mapplethorpe’s work.That being said, the artist sat for himself a lot. Mapplethorpe was a fascinating character, and the art is inextricable from the man. “If you think about the work, it is so much about him,” said Simons, and, indeed, it was so much about the clothes he wore, too. On a voyage of sexual self-discovery, many of Mapplethorpe’s first pictures were Polaroid self-portraits, trussed up in leather gear, testing the limits of pleasure and pain. Later, he documented his own sexual fetishes; the leather scene and BDSM predominantly. Clothing was a vital component: At one point, Mapplethorpe began stretching his own (worn) underwear across wooden frames to form unconventional sculptures; later, he clad himself in black leather.
16 June 2016
WhatRaf Simonshas been doing with his fashion shows for the last two years now is fascinating. He’s been consistently chafing at the confines of the industry, challenging perceptions of his work. Frequently his role as artistic director ofChristian Dior—whichSimons resigned in October, after three and a half years—threw the staging of his own-name label into strong relief. His standing audiences seemed a riposte to the rigid hierarchy of traditional fashion seating; a collection sharing a credit with the contemporary artist Sterling Ruby challenged the very notion of the designer label.For Fall 2016 Simons constructed a complex labyrinth of wood, like a series of twisting alleys culled from a horror film, around which his audience loitered, waiting for the models to appear. When they did, they dashed erratically through the crowds in oversize sweaters, coats, and down jackets, those in the latter crushing against the audience as they strode past. The soundtrack wasn’t music, but rather composer Angelo Badalamenti discussing his collaboration with the director David Lynch, whose birthday coincided with Simons’s show.The latter was coincidence, Simons said, but it transformed the presentation into some sort of ode to Lynch. Pressed against those walls, watching those clothes, it seemed very Lynchian—that odd combination of the mundane and the macabre. Simons issued guests with pamphlets, but rather than decipher the collection into lazy sound bites, they deliberately added to its obtuseness. Said paper was printed with a litany of key words and phrases, seemingly disconnected. “All the things on this list were what was on my mind,” Simons said. “Not trying to think about the stories I could make. Very fragmented.” It included a bunch of artists (among them Lynch and also Cindy Sherman), some place names, movie titles, and cryptic statements like “The Boy Scout” or “Red Americana / Flemish blue.”Simons halted the habitual quizzical stampede backstage with a sigh. “Everything is there,” he said, of that ambiguous palimpsest. Then he asked, laughing, “Do we have to do this now? Do you have time tomorrow? I have so much time!”How about that for challenging fashion right now?Simons’s central notion this season was time—turning it back, charting its passage, and taking his.
He was thinking back through 20 years of his own archive, and although the collection was formulated while still ricocheting along on the Dior schedule (one he’d been frantically attempting to keep up with for a decade, including his tenure atJil Sander), the empty hours gave him the rare and precious opportunity to not only consider, but reconsider. He thought a lot, he said, about Martin Margiela—the man, not the label—how he orchestrated his exit from his eponymous house, and about his influential body of work.
20 January 2016
There is a complicity between the very young and the very old. It's obvious to anyone who's watched grandparents with their grandchildren. The fashion industry, obsessed with youth and novelty, is the last place you'd expect to find trenchant commentary on this relationship. And yet, in the past week, two of the signal collections of this particular moment have made it their cornerstone. First, Gucci in Milan, and then, tonight, Raf Simons in Paris.Raf never knew his grandfathers but he has become familiar with their idiosyncrasies through photographs. The way, for instance, they—and their friends—would go on wearing the same suits they'd worn for years. No need for novelty, their clothing was their crutch. The way clothing shapes and expresses identity has been an obsession of Simons' from the very beginning of his career. That's what his gangs were always about. So when he said tonight's collection was "verygang," you instantly knew what he meant.The hoods were the biggest clue. Half of the models walked with heads wrapped in check shrouds, vision obscured to the point where at least a couple of them pitched off the raised catwalk. Hoodies have become a contemporary emblem of truculent youth, but Simons made his hoods medieval in shape. Monastic, in other words. And that automatically created a connection between the hermetic brotherhood of a medieval monastery and the hermetic brotherhood of a 21st-century gang. More, his hoods were cut from the cloth old men might choose for custom shirts. And what do old guys sitting around in a coffee shop look like? "Generation communication" has been Simons' motivator from day one. So he said. Here was visible backup.It's not like the senior citizens of the world are suddenly going to demand to be kitted out in Simons' trousers that flare to puddles of fabric on the floor, or his lean coats that also fall floorward in a cascade of cloth. But, in his mind at least, he was building a kinship between past, present, and future. It was abstract, to be sure. There was a lot of granddad-ly knitwear, some of it pieced together to literally extend its life, other bits of it shrunken into soul-boy crop tops. There were tailored ensembles that did indeed hint at suits lovingly preserved over decades. There were coats that took a hesitant, hand-painted shot at creating a classic plaid (the evolutionary principle at work in these pieces was a thing of peculiar wonder).
And, more than anything, there was a soundtrack spun from Mark Leckey's titanic piece of celluloid mythmaking,Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore. The utter gorgeousness of peak moments in anyone's past is defined by that film. Raf's past for sure, but his young models could find equivalents in their own lives. So could the grandfathers he never knew. And that is the enduring melancholy that touches everything Raf Simons does. All things must pass.
24 June 2015
What Raf Simons is doing with fashion is something unprecedented. Yes, the act of creating anything is always going to be autobiographical at its root, but the way Simons has been exploring his past is on a higher plane. It is so arcane and so specific, and yet at the same time it touches on a consciousness that comes to everyone with time. Age gives you the perspective to understand what it was you were actually doing when you were young."Youth on a pedestal." That was Simons' off-the-cuff explanation of the staging of his show tonight, with its catwalk raised high above the crowd. The models wore almost-floor-length looks—coats, gilets—which elongated them still further for the audience that was gathered at their feet. We stood anywhere we cared to for the duration of the presentation. So did the photographers.Simons instantly regretted the glibness of his words, but he was only cutting to the quick of his aesthetic. He has always been driven by the beauty and passion of youth, alongside an acceptance of its passing, which has loaned his work its air of melancholy. Simons has always loved the community of youth. "I'm an only child," he reminded us tonight. It's why music was so important to him. Your allegiance to musicians was how you defined yourself, first in your bedroom and then in your school, your bar, your club, long before you knew anything about fashion."I wish there could be 10,000 people here tonight," Simons said of the warehouse on the outskirts of Paris where he staged his show. "A gathering of people, the way it was in the beginning." That would have been an amazing sight: thousands moving to Deep Purple's "Child in Time," a 45-year-old track that is as majestic now as it was to baby acidheads in 1970. Which was surely the point that Simons and sound designer Michel Gaubert wanted to make. "Child in Time" made the notion of "relevance" irrelevant. The collection set out to do the same.Its key item was a long white cotton coat, thoroughly graffitied with slogans and cartoons. Utterly mystifying, until you heard Simons' explanation. In Belgium, there is a "celebration" of your first 100 days at college, when boys from the second and third years test your physical and mental limits—hazing, in other words. (For Simons' "celebration," he and four others had their feet buried in buckets of plaster that set rock-hard, forcing the five to stand upright for an entire day till their persecutors handed them hammers to crack their way out.
Other newbies are less fortunate. Lives have been lost.) The persecutors wear long white coats scrawled with slogans.
21 January 2015
Every creative act starts with a memory. Artists thrive on the recalled image, feeling, taste, scent. If they're not embracing memory, they're consciously reacting against it. But why bother? There is no escape from the past. It's a beautiful thing, and Raf Simons proved that tonight. On the back of most of the coats and jackets in his collection were sailor collars collaged with fragments of his personal history—the actual and the imagined. "Like mood boards you'd pin your favorite images to," he said. Friends, family, a fluffy kitty, a roller coaster, Mt. Fuji painted by Hokusai, a koi pond, a shark, a swimmer in peril, an astronaut…it seemed furiously random until Simons parsed the images.Those old photos were of his parents courting fifty-five years ago. The roller coaster, the one he rode with his friends Olivier Rizzo and Willy Vanderperre decades ago. The Japanese influence was his thank-you to the first retailers who ever supported him. The shark wasJawsand Simons' love of horror movies; the swimmer in peril was danger; the astronaut was isolation…surely you've composed a psychological profile by now. In the middle of it all, an old passport photo, Simons in a Superman T-shirt. That shirt was part of Rizzo's graduate collection from Antwerp's Royal Academy of Fine Arts, the Central Saint Martins in this story. As Rizzo was telling the tale backstage, Simons appeared with the very same T-shirt and gave it back to him, twenty-five years later. Cue tears.It was that kind of night. The febrile atmosphere was established by the soundtrack—Mica Levi's ravishingly ominous music for Jonathan Glazer's filmUnder the Skin—and the lighting, red for danger, green for nature. Combined, they created the white light that, according to show producer Thierry Dreyfus, illuminated horror movies in the seventies. It had a dislocating effect, throwing much of the presentation into shadow, so the boys in their dark suits looked like Men in Black, moving eerily through the throng. Oh, yes, forgot to mention, the audience was standing, because, said Simons, "you perceive things differently when you're upright."As far as he was concerned, what he did was the only possible reaction to the experience of working with artist Sterling Ruby on the Fall collection. That was such a sweet surrender that Simons said, "I could only go deep into myself to find another challenge." He's a supremely organized individual, but maybe Ruby left him with an appetite for chaos.
"It's interesting to let go," he agreed.Mr. and Mrs. Simons, whose courtship had been incorporated into their son's collection, were backstage for the whole show, the first time they'd actually experienced the mechanics of Raf's profession. His mom was visibly moved. His dad wanted to get back to watching soccer. France playing in the World Cup. Memories are made of this.
24 June 2014
The soundtrack was Pink Floyd'sThe Dark Side of the Moon."Nothing connected to anything that isnow," said Raf Simons. "This has been nine years in the making," he added of the show he presented tonight with artist Sterling Ruby. That's how long the two have been friends, and they clearly communicate on such a deep and generous level that they were able to accomplish something quite unique in the ego-addled annals of art and fashion. Not a collaboration in the usual sense of designer hires artist for T-shirt design, but a full-on, both-names-on-the-label mind-meld. "This isourchild," said Simons.And even if you could pick out the faces of the parents in the finished product—silhouettes and proportions that were iconic Simons, flashes of the organic chaos of Ruby's art—the overwhelming impression was of an astonishing compatibility. For instance, anyone who wondered how the monumentalism of Ruby's work could possibly be conveyed—or contained—in a collection of clothing would have recognized symptoms of overscaling. But this is also a Simons signature.A Ruby painting or sculpture often has an unfinished feel, an urgent sense of something protean arrested in motion. Simons made his name with clothes that traded on that same mood: deconstruction/reconstruction. They came together tonight in coats collaged with pieces of fabric that seemed in an upward rush, about to fly off their foundation. Items that looked like paint-spattered, bleach-splashed artist's workwear evoked images of The Clash, a reminder of how much punk's DIY ethos has motivated both Simons and Ruby. It infused the lineup with a spontaneous, handcrafted quality that felt like a riposte to the shiny Warholian propaganda of Simons' Spring collection.Which was perhaps the point of the images in this collection. These included a shark's ravening maw and a grasping hand with luridly painted nails, and they were intended, said Ruby, as "icons of consumption." Both men have used photos and words to similar effect in their work. Among the words that reoccurred here as visual motifs wereabus langandfather. The first stands for "abusive language"; Ruby acknowledged the second as his particular contribution. A possible connection between the two would have added a layer of psychological complexity, but Ruby would say only thatfatheris a particularly loaded word, used here to imply "the indoctrination of the man.
"The show clearly entailed an enormous amount of time and effort—Ruby has never made soft sculptures as large as the handful that arched over the catwalk—but that was also the point. "What does labor mean now?" Ruby wondered afterward. It was a question that motivated both men while they were working together. Cliché dictates that hard work is its own reward, but in this case it was clearly an expression of something deeper: the joy of friendship, family, the dignity of craft, maybe even the mechanics of desire. Because—and here's the kicker—there was scarcely a soul in the place tonight who wasn't hungering for the clothes as they came down the runway.
14 January 2014
Raf Simons is about to become a godfather. He was picturing the Alexander Calder mobile suspended over his show space today as the perfect godfatherly gift—if the nursery had 40-foot ceilings and he had $15 million to spend. The Calder, a couple of others like it, and two structures designed by the legendary architect Jean Prouvé (basically blueprints for a gas station and a prefab house) filled the gallery that Larry Gagosian has created near Le Bourget airstrip outside Paris. It was absolute coincidence that it should be work by Calder and Prouvé that was on display when Simons staged his presentation, but the synchronicity of art and fashion simply offered more proof that there is no such thing as an accident. The mechanical nature of the Calders and the mass-producible design of the Prouvés tied into a Pop art something in Simons' show. You could see it in the kiddie giddiness of elongated tees made up like walking ads, or pieces that looked like play clothes—onesies, gym slips—for adults.The nu-beat soundtrack was an obvious cue to the Simons of a long time ago, when he was clubbing in Antwerp with his friends Olivier Rizzo and Willy Vanderperre. There was a thread of rave-y glow-stick idealism in this collection, harking back to when they were all just skinny boys with the world at their chemically enhanced fingertips. That's what the silhouettes said, too. "This is the new shape," one tee announced. "Artificially flavored," it added.Nature versus artifice: that might have been the core of it all. A lot of the fabrics were purely synthetic, but the sentiment behind them was as real and as ardent as the one that drove Simons nearly 20 years ago when he made clothes inspired by the songs of angry young men. But something had to change. Less anger, more light. A sense of fun. The key word for Simons was "freedom." He is known for his tailoring, but there was precious little of that here, because suits are ultimately just another restrictive uniform.A Simons show is always a proposal. Ideas need to be digested, recast in their essence. That will happen here, too. You'll see these things filter into the world in one free form or another. But what we saw tonight was Raf Simons staking a claim to his own legacy: I was here; I did this.
25 June 2013
"I think it's interesting that it's very mixed-up," Raf Simons was saying after a show where every second outfit had somethingotherto say. "You can perceive it in different ways. And that's been especially my aim in the last couple of years. I don't want it to be perceived only in one way anymore." In other words, read what you would into the collection Simons showed tonight. He'd give it all to you. Yes, there was a strong dandy element in spare, slightly A-line coats with an angular tie at the throat. Yes, thatwasPuss 'n' Boots in the cartoon graphic of a jacquard, because Simons said he'd become fascinated by the psychology of cartoon characters like Puss, indomitable in the face of endless uncontrollable setbacks. (Wile E. Coyote also won Raf's heart.) Yes, there were echoes of early-seventies Bowie-ness in fitted knit vests over baggy trousers. And, for those with a fashion memory, that was Simons' own past, the Kinetic Youth show of Spring/Summer 1999 to be exact, circling back in the colors—aubergine, beige, yellow, pink, blue—and the proportions.But the key that truly unlocked the collection might have been the recurring graphic motif of an abstract head framed by a question mark. (It looked a bit like the PBS logo.) "I've been questioning the whole idea of what is men's fashion now, where I would want it to go," Simons said. First on his hit list was a redefinition of silhouette. "The defined silhouette over the last six or seven years has been very Balenciaga-inspired for everyone, myself included. It's become a garderobe [a wardrobe] and it doesn't feel like high fashion that says something to me personally." Raf's solution? A shift in volume, away from slim pants and fitted blazers, and a move away from the notion of matching, toward something looser and less controlled, trouser hems touching the floor, sleeves stripped away. Then there were the shirt-cuffs unbuttoned, the collars pointing skyward, the sleeves hastily shoved up. OK, those last flourishes were stylist flimflam, but it wasn't hard to get the picture. And that picture's title?Kinetic Youth Returns.The only other designer asking the questions that Simons asks in the way he asks them is Miuccia Prada, and there were discernible parallels with her work in the collection that he showed tonight. "No bonding, no neoprene, no futurist, just wool and cotton," he said of his fabrics. Into that, read this: youcango back to go forward. Look at Raf himself. We should all be so happy.
15 January 2013
It's Raf Simons Week in Paris. In a few days, his first haute couture collection for Dior will follow the spring collection for his own label that he showed tonight. They may seem poles apart, but the impact of the Dior appointment was clear in Raf's menswear. Or at least, it was obvious that he'd gone back to reflect on his past by boarding that what-brought-me-to-here? train of thought that often follows on the heels of great good fortune. And what his reflection illuminated was how much of what looks current in men's fashion was proposed by Raf at one point or another since he started designing menswear in 1995. Shorts, for instance, have been a Simons staple. He's always combined classic tailoring and sportswear, and integrated art into his fashion. He's a grand colorist, and an aficionado of the masculine/feminine hybrid. But more than anything, he's been fashion's great apologist for the power and poignancy of youth.Both were on parade here, the Green Velvet club classic on the soundtrack a reminder of the Antwerp nights kids like him never wanted to end, the bare legs and tangled hair tokens of the vulnerable self-consciousness that comes with a certain age. But if that was Raf's past, he was keen to explore how it could fuse with his future. And if it was physically impossible to fuse time, he would do it with gender.In one of Kurt Cobain's most memorable portraits, he's wearing a floral dress. That grunge memory resurfaced in Raf's collection when he sealed the back of a pleated floral sundress to the front of a sober tailored coat. It was the most startling expression of the current of androgyny that pulsed through the show. Others: the shorts with their perverse little slit; the perforated tops that could have been Aertex mesh or broderie anglaise; the huge painted faces by L.A. artist Brian Calvin that decorated oversize tees, with their staring eyes. "I love eyes," the designer said. He loves a challenge too, because he feels challenges initiate communication. Hell, the conversation between the Dior woman and the Raf man has already started.
26 June 2012
Raf Simons says he used to be very critical of menswear, but now he finds himself really appreciating the work of his peers, even buying some of it. Except, he adds, it just doesn't give him any energy. For that, he'd have to look to the collection he showed tonight, which celebrated, in his own words, "change, energy, freedom, protection." That last one came from the feeling Raf gets every few years that it's time to return to the youth-cult well that has refreshed him from the very beginning of his career. The boys whose idealism has shaped his fashion sensibility make him feel protective. And, with this particular collection, they've revived his own idealism after a trying period in his business. Like the show's title—Run Fall Run—implied, you run, you fall, you get up, you keep going. And keeping going had, Raf claimed, freed him.What he showed certainly had reminders of the time before he was "Raf Simons." Like the schoolboy-ness of the shorts, or the gawkiness of the models in clothes whose outsize proportions suggested something that could be grown into. It was also there in the veils of hair trailing across faces, which reminded hairdresser Guido Palau of work he did with Raf more than a decade ago. Still, the collection was an entirely contemporary manifesto, matching the approachable style of the street (the oversize outerwear, for instance, or the ombré sweatshirts) with the couture influence that Raf has been exploring for a while, especially in his work for Jil Sander.The match was clearest in the headgear—could be a couture cloche, could be a hip-hop cap—but it was most radical in its approach to the suit, the item that defines the Fall 2012 season. It wasn't just that Raf showed all his jackets with a new cut of shorts, slim in the leg, more generous around the waist. It was also the drop-shouldered, swing-backed generosity of the jacket cut. To appreciate just how much of a departure this was from current gentlemenswear orthodoxy, simply look at any other collection shown in Milan or Paris over the past week. Raf pointed out that his selling collection includes many more conventional options (long pants, for one), but for the show, he felt it was essential that he push his brand to a more extreme and personal point.Taking just one of the most graphic pieces as an example—a double-breasted teddy-bear coat which turned to reveal a bright yellow animal-hide pattern dyed into its back—Raf said he'd always been fascinated by dyed hair.
Why do people do that? he wondered. It had become an unlikely symbol of change for him. So here it was in a collection that promised nothing but. Speaking of which, a technical malfunction before the show started meant the audience learned how many men it takes to change a lightbulb at a Raf Simons show.
20 January 2012
Escalators may be a good luck charm for Raf Simons. The show he staged on them in 2004 lingers in the memory as one of his best. Tonight, history repeated, with models falling and rising on the escalators of a building that was once the headquarters of the bank Credit Lyonnais. There was a mechanical grace to the show that underscored the kind of serial uniformity that is important to Simons's work (hence the march of the models with their identical patent-slick hair and their black suits). He has a successful sideline as a consultant/curator in the art world, and there is some of the artist's process in the way he approaches fashion. That serial element, for one thing, evident here in the way Simons offered identical looks in a range of colors, like a Warhol silkscreen. Then there is the way he has built his own visual vocabulary - the sleek monochrome tailoring, the confident use of color, even the sleeveless tops - which it is his on-going work to refine. In today's presentation, the most striking element was the visual dynamism of plaids scissored into kaleidoscopic patterns. Simons has an ambiguous relationship with the mainstream fashion industry, so it was possible to see his plaids as a last-word comment on the menswear industry's current hunger for pattern and print. Think of his bright orange checks as a floral. Or the flowers intarsia-ed across his knitwear as his version of a Hawaiian shirt. Everything Simons does is, in one way or another, a meditation on youth: celebrating its beauty, energy, and idealism, acknowledging it must pass. Hence the nostalgic undertow in his work. And, as much as he downplays the tendency to romanticism, it's there. What this collection's kineticism reaffirmed was that Simons is able to inject emotion into something that seems consummately cool and controlled.
24 June 2011
In the past,Raf Simonshas used his show invitations as manifestos. His latest, with its cryptic comment about the Rise of the Craftsman and Fall of the Prince, took on added weight with today's announcement that Simons had terminated his relationship with his business partners in Italy. The words on the invitation allowed one to idly conjure up a face-off between the Artist and the Autocrat, but as it turned out, there were better things to talk about backstage after than the news flash. Why worry about the future when the immediate present demanded so much attention in the glorious shape of Raf's Fall collection?And shape was the operative word. There were suggestions of the designer's ongoing fascination with haute couture in silhouettes that lightly caped a coat back, unseamed and rounded a shoulder, or boxed a jacket. (If couture is craftsmanship, was that mohair apron a gentle reminder of the craftsman at his workbench?) The maximal spirit Simons has been talking about since mid-2010 was obvious from the outset, with a camel coat wrapping a high-collared latex top. Likewise, the vivid shades that colored elongated knits, the coats, and oversize tunics. One example in orange closed with toggles down the back, a duffel in reverse.The duffel coat was a cornerstone of the collection. Another was the parka. As these student classics implied, Simons had college on his mind. His young idealists could wear a bonded flannel sweatshirt advertising their allegiance to Dead Prince College or declaring that they were a Memory Ware Collector (making them fans of the artist Mike Kelley's work, like Raf). If this was Simons' way of saying he still had plenty to learn, his "college" clothes managed a techno precision that made you realize just how far he's come from the hand-collaged rawness and urgency of, say, his Manic Street Preachers collection. In that respect, this show assuredly started the next phase of his career.At the beginning and end, the soundtrack producer Michel Gaubert played Marcus Schmickler'sPalace of Marvels (Queered Pitch), a piece of music that began with a steadily ascendant electronic roar. It was the sound of someone taking off to somewhere new.
21 January 2011
Style.com did not review the Fall 2010 menswear collections. Please enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for our complete coverage of the Spring 2011 collections, including reviews of each show by Tim Blanks.
22 January 2010
"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in." Using the style of New York artist Christopher Wool, Raf Simons stenciled those words by Leonard Cohen in the courtyard of the educational institution where he staged his latest show. He also embroidered them on tops, with colored threads trailing like a delicate fringe. As well as Cohen and Wool, Simons had in mind Robert Ryman, all of them "artists who dedicate life to the slight evolution of things." It's a sensibility that breeds an obsessive attention to detail, and Simons fits right in. He wanted to make a statement about extreme tailoring, just like his very first collection which, as he said, no one ever saw. So he took the tuxedo, the purest masculine tailoring there is, and sliced away the sleeves and legs, leaving an all-in-one. Then he built this basic back up, adding a waistcoat, a jacket, and finally returning to the suit itself. It was a hypnotic, compulsive exercise in rigorous design. As Simons himself said, it was "the anti-pajama"—the antithesis of all the soft, voluminous, ultracasual clothing that has dominated the men's runways this season.But it was scarcely even the main event. What was equally enthralling was the effort that went into the texture of the clothes. Fabrics that had the densely pressed effect of handmade paper were actually embroidered. So were what looked like tweeds (and at least 50 percent of the rest of the collection). And the embroidered dégradé effect Simons used so impactfully last season was revisited in a suit where a dense mass of filaments slowly dissolved from dark to light down the body. BTW, Leonard Cohen's words were from an album calledThe Future. Raf knows whereof he quotes.
27 June 2008
The DJs at fashion shows are usually early adopters of the Next Big Thing, so keen ears have spent the season waiting for a burst of Burial. Raf Simons and his sound man Michel Gaubert saved it for (almost) last—when it actually meant the most—as the soundtrack for the designer's signature exaltation of the urgency of youth. Post-show, Simons talked about focusing on the moment in a young man's life when he's beginning to define himself. Hence, the show's emphasis on the body, in tops as wrapped and seamed as Alaïa's (orThe Mummy's). But as he closes in on 40, Simons' absorption in the turbulent emotions of men almost two generations younger inevitably acquires an elegiac tinge—the music of Burial is scarcely a glass-half-full proposition, to put it mildly.That melancholic note was where the show came alive, because it offered Simons an opportunity to get roots-y. "Earthy" was actually the word he used. It applied to jackets made from jute to the slubbed texture of wool suits to a woven pattern that looked like soil strata, and to a carroty orange that accented somber tones of gray. The same intense shade was incorporated into another jacket that toned upward from ashen gray hem to fiery shoulder (the buttons changing color, too), like a phoenix from the flames. An ingenious sartorial metaphor for reinvention ("or eternal damnation," joked Simons' right-hand man Robbie Snelders).Other states of mind were suggested by one jacket with fabric bunched and creased around its waist, another with a funnel-neck wired shut, or a sweater that looked like a Mark Rothko painting (well, there's a state of mind right there). The shoes, on the other hand, anchored the models to the ground in the earthiest way. As thick-soled as a creeper, they came croc-stamped or webbed and ready to kick out the jams. "You're only young once," they said. Sad, but true.
18 January 2008
Raf Simons' message for Spring 2008? Forget MySpace, and find your space in the material world. Reconnect with reality! Sure, fashion's archidealist has always been engaged by the tribalism of the young, and rave culture is a constant for him (here, the Chemical Brothers were on the soundtrack), but this collection's main inspiration was also the season's least likely: the backpacker. Yep, that sandal-wearing, backpack-bearing tribe of international travelers, whose curiosity, energy, and open-mindedness were held up by Simons as antidotes to the inertia of what he calls the "www-generation." Avoid the obvious, he counseled.The way he responded to his inspiration certainly did so. Conventional volumes and proportions were done away with—T-shirts fell to mid-thigh, sweaters dropped to the knees, drawstrings tugged in sleeves, torsos, and trouser legs to create new silhouettes. Shorts—the backpacker's signature item—were reconfigured in doubled layers of contrasting fabrics. Likewise, the backpacker's hiking sandal, rejigged as a color-blocked boot that might have been designed by Mondrian. High-performance tech fabrics in intense primary shades reflected the theme. And the dominant accessory was—what else?—an enormous backpack, color-coordinated with the outfit it accompanied. (Its presence aroused memories of the Spring 2007 women's show from Miuccia Prada, where the models also toted giant rucksacks.) After Simons' stunning fall show, where his signature tailoring was taken to new heights, the somewhat abstract nature of this one felt like a new direction, as though one chapter of his career might have closed and another was about to open. Whatever, there is no one else in fashion thinking these thoughts, let alone acting on them.
29 June 2007
A piece by young English sculptor Conrad Shawcross revolved hypnotically in the center of Raf Simons' show space, suggesting one of Leonardo's visionary contraptions. As it turned out, that was a pretty good place to start thinking about Raf's new collection. Leonardo was fascinated by the articulation of human appendages, hands and feet especially. And after today's show, Simons noted that "hands are important to create the shape of the future." The way he chose to draw attention to this point was by kitting his models out in fierce elbow-length gauntlets that suggested protection as much as creation.They were a jarringly futuristic counterpoint to tweeds, leathers, and knits that were just about the most traditional clothes Simons has yet created, but that was no accident. One of the designer's aims this time was to make traditional things more contemporary. A tweed coat zippered open down its seams to reveal a nylon underlay (it suggested wings folded away, though perhaps that's simply because Simons has often evoked angels in his outerwear). A ribbed blue-gray cardigan coat wrapped an inky Lycra rollneck. And superb woven-wool jackets in an intense midnight blue were glazed as if by starlight in deep space. They embodied the essential paradox of Raf Simons's work: sleek futurism here, romantic melancholy there (perfectly reflected in the surging sound track by Icelandic electronic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson).Like anyone who is absorbed by thoughts of things to come, Simons can only dream, but that seems to suit him fine: Sometimes it's best that dreams don't come true.
26 January 2007
The audience filed in to the accompaniment of Mark Leckey's cult 1999 film,Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, and its mesmerizing footage of rave kids set the scene for an exultant trip down memory lane for Raf Simons. "I felt like having fun," he said backstage, after a show that featured many of the elements—the narrow silhouettes, the sleeveless tops—that we've come to think of as classic Raf.Naturally, though, he was also quick to point out that his collection was as much about the future as it was about happy memories. That was evident in the windcoats, with their floating volumes, garments akin to those worn by the astral pioneers in David Lynch'sDune. But it was Simons' obsession with shorts that most clearly showed this prescient and incisive designing mind at work. Shorts will always be associated with the schoolboy, and that's where Simons started, with suits that looked like uniforms. Then the shorts transmogrified into style statements involving wraps, waistbands, and pleating.To take one sartorial element, then de- and reconstruct it is the sort of cerebral activity Simons loves to engage in—and somehow manages to make consistently fascinating. Part of the charm was the staging of this show: After the usual single-model walk-out, a file of young men would offer variations on a theme (color-blocked sleeveless tees, for instance, or shorts suits). In their uniformity, they paradoxically emphasized individuality. Don't ask how Simons achieves such effects—put it down to sublime empathy.
2 July 2006
The setting for Raf Simons' latest presentation—the rooftop of La Défense, President Mitterand's monument to Parisian modernity—was just the sort of location the designer has sought out in the past. And the pulsing electrodance soundtrack also had echoes of earlier shows. But the subtle news here was the peace that Simons has made with his former bête noire—fashion itself. Backstage, after a show that was superbly focused on technique and distilled to a palette of black, white, and gray, he said so himself. "I really wanted to show fashion!" he yelped.From an opening salvo of ribbed knitwear (patterned, perhaps, like a bedspread he might remember from the village he grew up in) to a duffel coat with gleaming metallic toggles to a huge doubled, how-did-he-do-that padded jacket, Simons paraded a series of pieces that are sure to edge their way to the top of shopping lists next fall. Just how did he achieve that doubled effect? Two jackets were attached at the collar, then one was fitted inside the other, the result a great swoosh of featherlight volume that invoked a sort of space-age sleeping bag (to underscore the point, the song playing at this point was an anthem by Depeche Mode sound-alikes DK7 calledSleeping Bag).Volume, in fact, was key to this collection. For several seasons, Simons has been experimenting with trousers cut samurai-large, but for fall, all the pants were cigarette-slim and the emphasis was up top, with the neck a particular focus for funnel collars or hoods that massed around the throat. This had the effect of framing his young models' faces, romantically exalting their youth. And in that, at least, Simons was entirely consistent with his past.
26 January 2006
Raf Simons marked his first ten years in the business with a book, a video retrospective, and a show of his latest collection in Florence's Boboli Gardens, widely regarded as Italy's most important park. The classical grandeur of the setting suited the theme of Simons' collection—Icarus, in all his heroic isolation—and many of the clothes had a feel of airiness, movement, and flight. Shirts and T-shirts, for example, were literally opened up via latticework. Tops were radically—and fluidly—oversized to match the full trousers he's been showing, and full-length coats with huge floating tailpieces looked more like wings than ever. Linen loaned a different kind of construction to his tailoring, with jackets and tops in a linen mesh, expanding on the idea of air passing through clothes.Reflecting Simons' family background, colors stayed within a military palette—gunmetal, slate, black, and Air Force blue, as well as his beloved dove-gray. And though those huge trousers came without last season's obi-like belt, it was still easy to picture them on a samurai (worn with shoes that looked like gladiator sandals). Simons, however, wasn't partial to the warrior analogy. Heroes, just for one day? Absolutely. But lovers, not fighters.
10 July 2005
He called his show History of My World, but Raf Simons refused to revisit the past with his latest collection. To be more precise, he looked back only as far as last season's epochal offering, which was clearly the jumping-off point for Raf's new century (remember, it's always Year 4 before a decade really kicks into gear).For fall, then, Simons expanded on his poignant, futuristic vocabulary, which embraces a radical new shape. The presentation itself was overlong and repetitive, but it made its point with a baggy-trousered, cropped-jacket silhouette that focused attention on a loose, gathered waistline. Under some of those paper-bag waists, a wide leather corset belt made the point still further, as did a cropped puffer-trench-coat hybrid and a gun-metal double-breasted jacket that looked like a sawed-off trench. A lot of the clothes had military or uniform connotations, with one outfit combining black trousers, black shirt, and black tie. Yes, these rang a little sinister. But, like the shoulder and elbow pads on his Jacquard knits, they were surely just reflecting the essentially combative nature of Simons' designs. If you're not thinking about these clothes, they're not working.Of course, such is the purity of Simons' tailoring that some pieces, like a gray topcoat, required no thought at all. And there was always the straightforward masculinity of a huge double-collared shearling coat.
28 January 2005
Raf Simons's invitation was a cryptic list of people, places, and things that have made a difference to the world. The inescapable implication was that his name could be on that list, too. Which might not be such a stretch; Simons has undoubtedly made a difference to the world of menswear, and this collection only served to underscore the power and originality of his vision.Once absorbed by radical punk icons and slogans, Simons has now shifted his frame of reference to an earlier period: specifically, the moment when Kraftwerk put its pop culture spin on the nexus between man and machine. Using a palette pared to black, white, and shades of pale gray, he expressed his tailoring skill in linear, luxurious suits and coats that had aGattacaflair. Suspendered stirrup pants made the silhouette even leaner (and topical; with the Olympics looming, it read as a gymnastics reference). Then the leanness exploded, in triple-pleated leather trousers, funnel-necked tops, and huge white coats that floated like angel wings. On that optimistic note, Simons concluded a stunning show that felt like a fresh start for him.
2 July 2004
Raf Simons and Peter Saville’s collaboration is now the stuff of legend, but back in 2003 it was brand new. With New Order on the soundtrack, Simons presented fishtail anoraks with four album covers designed by Saville on their backs: New Order’sTechniqueandPower,Corruption & Lies, OMD’sDazzle Ships, and Joy Division’sUnknown Pleasures. A set of three fetched$20,000on the secondary market in 2016. By 2017 Simons had resurrected the graphics for the spring 2017 collection he presented in New York, but Joy Division has always loomed large in his work, visually and spiritually.Beyond the coveted graphics, Closer offered a tongue-in-cheek take on British dressing, all newsboy caps, white wool coats, aran sweaters, and a Union Jack stitched into the back of a shearling jacket. It could be the Peter Saville treatment, but the models look particularly beautiful in this show, ethereal even. For Simons it marked a pivot from the aggressive shows of the early aughts to a more refined, if still rebellious, elegance.
22 January 2021
On a platform of compacted soda cans, Raf Simons presented a treatise on consumer culture for Spring 2003. The predominantly black collection, titled Consumed, was not a rebuttal to fashion’s “buy, buy, buy!” mantra, but a theory of how to do it Simons’s way.Words like membership and resistedwere printed on tees alongside takes on the corporate logos for PlayStation 2, Canon, and a “Sun Bank.” In the show notes, the brand wrote: “Today’s living environment is about consuming as well as being consumed; some suggest this could lead to an apocalyptic end, while others, particularly younger generations, take this reality as their cue to create new, more viable and flexible personas.”Those shifting personalities took to the runway in clothes that went beyond clever graphics. Harness-like vests had camping-inspired pouches and special compartments to hold cigarettes, while jackets and trousers were cut big with a utilitarian feel. A bomber jacket had so many ropes, rings, and strings dangling off it, it could’ve doubled as a portable storage unit, adding to the survivalist, almost post-apocalyptic bent of the collection. Still, the highlights were laden with a sense of fun. There was a white bomber jacket stamped with photos, including a self-portrait of the artist Ashley Bickerton, to whom the collection was dedicated, made in collaboration with artist Peter De Potter. The others were the black painted soda cans that dangled around models’ necks. The brand described them thus: “Take an empty soda can, paint it shiny black, repeat, repeat, and then, above all, behold its beauty.” Resist, reuse, recycle.
10 July 2017
The Virginia creeper plant, native to North America, is an unstoppable, deciduous vine, turning from verdant green to a kaleidoscope of reds and auburns in the fall. Botany books note that the creeper is the kinder, less toxic cousin of Poison Ivy. Raf Simons’s fall 2002 collection, named after the vine, is a kinder take on nature and environmentalism than his spring 2003 collection, which would be a paean about overconsumption and pollution.Set against a woodland backdrop, the collection was a big one for Simons’s now-signature knitwear, with boxy argyles and multi-colored weaves starting to appear en masse. The most famous of Simons’s Creeper sweaters is the Nebraska version. Made to pill, fray, and develop holes, the collegiate-looking crewneck has become one of the designer’s most coveted grails, worn in music videos by A$AP Rocky and Rihanna. (It also spurred an homage collection from Virgil Abloh in 2015.)Don’t let the superstar sweater distract from this show’s other innovations. Virginia Creeper marks the rare appearance of a puffer coat in Simons’s collections. Maybe those items are the secret grails here.
22 January 2021
Looking back at it, Raf Simons’s spring 2002 collection was eerily prescient. Presented on January 7, 2001, the show featured wrapped and masked models holding torches. A gesture of terror, fear, and even cult mentality, it pre-dated the September 11 terrorist attacks by nine months and the G8 protests that led to a civilian death by six, but offers a startling parallel in hindsight. It’s that ability to take the temperature of the world—even of things that have not yet happened, and filter it through fashion that is Simons’s strength.The clothing mimics the swaddling of the models’ faces: large, bulbous white jackets and trousers, with aggressive interjections of red, yellow, and black. Models walked barefoot through a 6th arrondissement lycée in Paris, while Fuse and The Fall played on the sound system. Peter de Potters’s graphics, always a bit uncanny, featured aggressive slogans like “Be pure, be vigilant, behave” and the wordrevolution, its letterIdripping into a cross with tree roots. The most famous piece 20 years later is Simons and Potters’s Kollaps hoodie. “We are ready and willing to ignite, just born too late,” it reads. By July 2001, Simons had directed a video with Willy Vanderperre called “Safe” depicting models wearing the white pieces—but a whiff of un-safeness was in the air. Simons titled this collection, “Woe Unto Those Who Spit on the Fear Generation…The Wind Will Blow It Back.” The bitter pill to swallow is that every generation has something to fear.
22 January 2021
Fall 2001 marked Simons’s return to fashion after a one-year sabbatical. In March of 2000, he walked away from his budding empire and took on a host of other jobs, teaching at a design school in Vienna and consulting for a Belgian shipping magnate on his art collection. A new manufacturing partnership allowed him to decrease the size of his team and work more intimately with his collaborators. The result was Fall 2001’s hyper-stylized collection of urban radicals. This was a rejection of the slim, gangly shapes of Simons’s early work. Oversize everything—bomber jackets, hoods, striped turtlenecks, trousers—made up the bulk of the lineup, with models covered completely in garments, many with scarves wrapped threefold around their faces. “At the flea market in Vienna, I saw youngsters from the Ukraine or Romania, who simply lay layer by layer and thus create their own volumes because of the cold,” he told the Swiss paperNeue Zürcher Zeitungat the time. What else to call this collection of iconoclasts but “Riot Riot Riot”?Fashion folks, accustomed to the posh environs of the First Arrondissement, might not have liked the trek to a cold, damp warehouse filled with smoke and flashing lights in Neuilly-sur-Seine, necessary to see this show—but they loved the clothes. The haphazardly layered look redefined men’s fashion in the moment, a clean break from the hyper-slim suits of Simons’s peers.But this show was not just about shape—it was also about obsession, intensity, and authenticity. Flyers for Sonic Youth and Joy Division concerts, Christiane F. movie posters, photographs, and scraps of sayings were tacked onto garments in a haphazard manner, the way a fan might DIY a tee before heading to a concert. Among them were several photos of the band Manic Street Preachers and a police blotter report from the disappearance of its guitarist Richey Edwards in 1995, which stoked a minor controversy in Wales, the band’s home country. In a surreal twist, a Covent Garden shopkeeper reported that the band’s bassist, Nicky Wire, bought a jumper with his likeness on it from the store for £170. Talk about a full-circle moment.
10 July 2017
Spring 2000 is textbook Raf Simons. Across 66 looks, the defining characteristics of his aesthetic come into view: Slim, graphic vest tops; bubble-curved MA-1 bombers; and a jewel-box sense of color. Two decades later, each piece could fit right in among his current work—including at Prada. (Simons was named co-creative director at the Italian brand last year.)Graphics within the collection are sparse, with Camp Crystal Lake from theFriday the 13thfilm on tees and a pyramidal shape on the backs of bomber jackets. Summa Cum Laude, the collection’s title, is also printed sparingly on tanks and tees, alluding to a strain of academia and Americana that would return for Simons’s fall 2011collection.
22 January 2021
Can you show the same collection twice? Raf Simons’s new Archive Redux rerelease of 100 pieces from past shows allows a second life for specific items, but his spring 2021 collection took the idea much further. Back in 1999, Simons presented a nearly all-black collection titled “Disorder—Incubation—Isolation” that opened with three models carrying flags, one with each word on it. After seven months of pandemic-induced quarantine in 2020, Simons debuted a nearly no-black collection called “Teenage Dreams,” citing the same three Joy Division songs in a press release.The palette may have changed, but the haunting cape hoodies and swing-back coats remained the same. Simons’s logo turtlenecks also persevered, their monogramRmigrating from the hip to the neck. With their bowl cuts and haunting demeanor, the models in this show exude a certain timelessness—or maybe it’s that no matter how far we come, disorder, incubation, and isolation remain at the heart of our lived experience.
22 January 2021
The punk, anarchic toughness that informed much of Simons’s earliest work was put on hold for Spring 1999. Inside a mirrored geodesic sphere on the outskirts of Paris’s Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, he made a decided shift toward suiting. “I am obsessed by tailoring—very strong, linear clothes,” Simons told theInternational Herald Tribune’s Suzy Menkes in a preview of the show, titled “Kinetic Youth.” “I ask myself how I can bring that to young people—to a 14-year-old who you never see in a suit?”Simons’s idea was to transform the lean-on-top, large-on-the-bottom silhouettes of ravers into structured, sleek garments. The first chapter of the show broke down this concept via 17 black-and-white looks that explored the elements of suiting and shirting, with the occasional geometric or Bauhaus-inspired graphic. Then came a parade of boys, all wearing identical white turtlenecks with the letter R scrawled on the collar and hip-slung trousers in a myriad of earthen shades: ash, tomato, ocean blue, black. They arrived as a uniformed unit, with little breathing air between their bodies, and darted in and out of the venue to the sound of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” From there, the real show began. There were light gray, inverse-pleated trousers with a bold, louche appeal; mint gauzy tanks; and peaked shoulder vests in bourgeois camel or grungy black leather. The colors were that of a ’50s diner, with Lynchian pops of lemon against steely gray, and mossy green that made your hair stand on end.But for all the structure, form, and unity, Simons’s gents were still guerrilla guys at heart. For the finale they returned to the dome, walking in the opposite direction to Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall.” We don’t need no education, indeed.
10 July 2017
Spring 1998 was Raf Simons’s sixth collection—and second-ever runway show. In three years he had established himself as the buzzing Belgian talent of the Paris menswear schedule. Titled “Black Palms,” the collection was presented in a parking garage in Paris’s Bastille neighborhood to the loud sounds of Lords of Acid, Permanent Fatal Error, Reese & Santonio, and A Split-Second. The models were carted in from around Europe; Simons would put out radio ads looking for lean youths—most not professional catwalkers, and most bearing some resemblance to Simons’s own image or that of his friends: rangy and ready for action. The silhouette of the show, too, was inspired by the designer’s own. Simons once described his wardrobe of the era as “black outfits; long, skinny; white Stan Smiths.” That was echoed in the elongated inky pieces on the runway.The message was clear from the show’s opening looks: Lithe to the point of concave teenage models in low-rise, loose black trousers paced the runway, talismanic crystals slung around their necks on silver chains, and symbols painted on their shirtless bodies. Fellow Belgian artist Franky Claeys designed a series of graphics for the collection, the most famous of which is a pair of black palm trees that artist Jos Brands painted onto the first model’s back. Another duo later on in the procession wore trompe l’oeil shirts painted on by Brands, one an anarchy symbol against white, the other the Sex Pistols’sNever Mind the Bollocksalbum cover in black. When the boys were wearing tangible clothes, they were engulfed by loose knits that hung down to their fingertips and wide-sleeved black blazers layered over graphic tees or slashed jersey tank tops. Pants always buckled at the ankle and shoes were always black, dirty sneakers.With over 60 looks, “Black Palms” remains one of Simon's' lengthiest shows—and one of his most diverse. While the punk graphics and palm trees are still remembered to this day, the middle of the show saw a preppy pastel pink V-neck, a rainbow snakeskin print tank, and some knee-length jean cutoffs. To date, they’re one of only two times denim ever appeared in a Raf Simons runway show.
10 July 2017