Cathy Horyn wrote a five-(internet)page-long encomium of Raf Simons in the NY Times' Men's Style Magazine. It's an interesting read - fawning, but unusually intimate.
Raf
By CATHY HORYN
Published: September 18, 2005
photo by Rineke Dijkstra
The damp, persistent chill had ended, and by noon in Westende, a community of high-rise apartment buildings on the coast of Belgium, the temperature had risen to 65 degrees. At cafe tables along the boardwalk, middle-aged women opened the tops of their blouses, while down on the beach, pinkish bodies, plumped by their Lycra casings, lay between the canvas windbreaks.
Raf Simons leaned against the rail of his balcony. He had made the 90-minute drive from Antwerp, where he lives most of the year, in part to satisfy my curiosity to see his place at the beach. When I first spoke to him, by telephone, more than a year ago, he had described the place as ''crappy.'' I don't know why, but I liked him immediately. Westende was all he said it was. The Germans in World War II built bunkers there, and you can still see their ghastly windows in the dunes, but for the most part, the history of Westende is the history of the past 20 years: concrete pedestrian plazas with shops and restaurants where you can have a beer and eat shrimp croquettes while listening to Europop.
Simons's apartment is on the top floor of a 1970's building. It has a small living room and kitchenette, with two bedrooms and a bath on the second floor. There is a wood stove, a section of a black sectional sofa and one wall papered in a blue-cloud pattern, left over from the previous owner. Simons dragged the sectional piece out to the terrace and then opened a bag of Doritos and the liter of Diet Coke that he had brought with him in a plastic shopping sack. Later we went down to the boardwalk. It was crowded with young families and old people who, from the look of their clothes, were middle-class Belgians. At the end of the boardwalk we came to the dunes. ''Will you be all right in those shoes?'' Simons asked. I took off my sandals, and we crossed the dunes until we were on the flat, hard beach. The shimmer on the North Sea had turned to a pale mauve, and the air was sweet and sticky with the approach of evening. I looked back at the boardwalk. It was physically ugly, but there was something moving in all that collective effort to reach the sea -- to be able to raise your glass of beer. We climbed the last of the breakers that jutted into the water and returned to the apartment, where Simons gathered up his plastic bag. Then we got into his Volvo wagon and headed toward Antwerp, past the German bunkers and the tram lines, until the brown coast turned into the familiar deep green of Belgium in the late spring.
Simons is probably the most influential men's-wear designer of the last decade. ''He did everything before anyone else, and everybody has copied him,'' Marie-Amelie Sauve, the stylist for Balenciaga, said. Although Simons is virtually unknown outside the small world of European men's fashion (he shows in Paris), his effect on the way young men dress cannot be overstated. Only with training, genius, intoxicating amounts of culture and possibly a discreet drug habit have a handful of designers been able to change the shape of clothes. Simons, without any of these advantages, has done it three times. The first time was in the mid-1990's, at the beginning of his career, when he came out with suits that were cut unusually small in the shoulders. The skinny black suit was not a new idea; it had been in existence since the late 50's, pleasing playboys and punks until Helmut Lang picked it up. But by putting his suits on sapling-thin Belgian boys who were not agency models, Simons introduced the idea that a young man's physical size was not at variance with his sense of isolation, a feeling that would have been ordinary to anyone who had grown up in Antwerp -- or Rotterdam or Manchester -- in isolated apartment towers built since the war, and who had spent a lot of time listening to bands like Joy Division and Kraftwerk, whose 22-minute song, ''Autobahn,'' managed to convey the monotony of riding on the German superhighway. If Gucci's caftans and Jean Paul Gaultier's cowboy chaps didn't represent the same emotional trip to this generation, Simons's minimalist suits did. They became the dominant silhouette of the late 90's. I once asked him what made him think of that shape. As usual, he had a straightforward explanation. ''It was just because we were so small,'' he said.
The second time was in 2001, with two collections that played host to the layered, hooded, sinister image of the urban guerrilla. Although these shows were later seen as eerily anticipating the reality of 9/11, and were meant, according to Peter De Potter, a writer who collaborates with Simons, to express more mundane concerns like a fear of globalization, their chief effect was to start the trend for oversize layers. The third time was last January, when Simons brought out wide, high-waisted trousers with Eisenhower jackets. He felt that the basic element of men's design, proportion, had become secondary to postmodern abstractions. ''I was so fed up with how all these people were tweaking the silhouette,'' he said. ''Very few were working on shape. It was all about two pleats, then three, then six. And in the end you get 250,000 pleats. And embroidery. I thought, No, we have to strip it off.'' Simons also looked at the influence of skateboarding as early as 1996 in a charming video presentation called ''16, 17, How to Talk to Your Teen,'' and at more pessimistic currents, like Gabba, a working-class youth culture confined to the Netherlands that led him, in 2000, to produce ''Isolated Heroes,'' a book of portraits with the photographer David Sims. Whereas most designers build their collections around a theme -- say, Capri in the 60's -- Simons has built his entire career around the ideas and attitudes of a generation of men. His 22 shows and video presentations, and his photographic and curatorial projects, like ''The Fourth Sex,'' a 2003 exhibition in Florence, are a catalog of youth's extremes, seen through the single window of Antwerp and told in a quiet voice that lets us know, This is how it actually is.
Not everybody has been paying attention. In May, when Prada announced it had hired Simons to succeed Jil Sander at her label, many editors and retailers drew a blank. Jay Fielden, the editor of the new Men's Vogue, told me that until he saw Simons in the front row at the Sander men's show in June, he didn't know what the 37-year-old designer looked like. Simons's anonymity in a world he influences can be explained by the fact that the men's business doesn't produce stars the way the women's side does. But even if this were not so, even if he did not live in Antwerp -- where, as the designer Walter Van Beirendonck said, ''you present yourself mainly through your work and a little bit outside the fashion world'' -- even then, he would discourage interest. He possesses none of those small deceptive tricks of personality that the fashion world relies on and are commonly called guile. He is, almost ideally, a blank -- a person without surface in a superficial world. In 10 years, he has agreed only once to pose for a portrait (he thought portraits were just downright embarrassing). In a sense, the person who represents Raf Simons, and whose face appears on the cover of his recent retrospective catalog, is not Simons but a much-tattooed, 28-year-old model named Robbie Snelders, who functions as his alter ego and also runs his office.
Simons is a fashion mystery, and maybe the most mysterious thing about him is that he just shows up. A few years ago, hearing that he was to give a show at a club in Lower Manhattan, Julie Gilhart, the fashion director of Barneys New York, decided that she would go and introduce herself. But after searching the crowded club for an hour, she left. ''All I could see were men in hoods,'' she said. Then last March, Gilhart was in Paris, waiting to take her seat at the Alexander McQueen show. ''Somebody was being interviewed by a TV crew, so I was just standing there, kind of lost in my thoughts,'' she said. ''I felt this tap on my arm, and my first thought was, Oh, please don't let it be a designer with a collection he wants to show me. It was really late. I turned around, and there was this good-looking guy in a trench coat. He said, 'Are you Julie Gilhart?' I said, 'Yes.' And he said, 'I'm Raf.'''
Although a Simons show can look intimidatingly cool, he himself is warm, gentle, forthright. With people he likes, he can quickly establish an intimacy that confuses both sexes. An American writer I know in Paris, a married man, insisted that Simons was gay on the basis of a firm hug that Simons had once given him after a show, while a woman who has known him many years said with an assured smile, when I returned from Antwerp in May, ''He's complicated, isn't he?'' I don't know. A guy who will go to the beach with only a bag of Doritos and a bottle of Coke can't be that complicated. While we were on the terrace, Simons got a call from Marc Foxx, a Los Angeles gallery owner, informing him that he had lost out on a Brian Calvin painting that he wanted. Simons has been collecting contemporary art for years and has works by, among others, Katy Grannan and Evan Holloway. But I also recall that he had a half-dozen boxes of Marlboro Lights stuffed in the door pockets of his car, all of them empty.
Simons is extremely sensitive -- you can make him cry -- and extremely masculine. When I saw him a month later, in Vienna, where he was finishing a five-year stint as visiting fashion professor at the University of Applied Arts, he said that, with people with whom he is close: ''I really like that it becomes very romantic. Not only in a relationship but also in the friendships.''
He went on: ''People who don't know me look at my world as something very hard-core, and I don't feel it that way. It's not what attracts me. We go to the sea, five or six of us, and we're all in pajamas with candles around and watching movies. O.K., maybe we're watching a good movie, but we also watch trash movies. We've never really been that kind of group that goes to the scenes where all the cool people hang out.''
The Belgian designer Veronique Branquinho, who was Simons's girlfriend between 1995 and 2000, agreed: ''In a way, he's very much a family man. He likes to be at home. He's very cozy about his family.''
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droogist
The woman can write!
