Raf Simons - Designer, Co-Creative Director of Prada

[Gábor]

I've heard that he's designing costumes for Luca Guadagninos new film 'Body Art'.

 

[5 8 6]

I've heard that he's designing costumes for Luca Guadagninos new film 'Body Art'.

Great news! I love the job he did designing clothes for Tilda Swinton in "Io sono l'amore".

 

[Flashbang]

Interview: Raf Simons
In a rare interview after his show, Raf talks interzones, gender and "taking or leaving it"

The term ‘interzone’ is difficult to define. It is a phrase that has become increasingly associated with the work of Raf Simons and one that suggests his work exists within a realm that goes beyond any one specific thing – certainly beyond the confines of fashion.

Yesterday, this term felt more appropriate than ever. Raf was intent on creating a moment, showcasing his work thirty-minutes outside of Paris at the Gagosian Gallery, surrounded by the work of artists Alexander Calder and Jean Prouvé. “All I can say about tonight, is that it was an environment that connects very much to a dream scenario for me,” he explained after the show – and it was. The collection resonated with these two artists, Raf exploring the industrialisation of society through branded garments – much like the work of Prouvé, but also exploring the freedom of Calder’s kinetic sculptures.

In a rare interview after his show, Raf talks interzones, why he is continuously attracted to things he can’t define and why we can “take it or leave it”.

Dazed Digital: A few weeks ago I was talking to Peter Saville about your work and something that came up again and again was this idea of ‘the interzone’. It’s a term that has always been heavily associated with your work and I’m interested to find out how you define the term ‘interzone’?

Raf Simons: I can’t define it. I’ve been trying to find out for two decades now and I find myself ending up in interzones without knowing how to define it but it’s something that attracts me very much. We used to create that kind of space and moment in relation to the world that we are expressing through clothes very much in the early days and I think lately we feel very much the desire to do that again. We actually brought ourselves out of Paris back into an environment that relates to the environment we used to show in back in the days which was always in the film studios, doing a certain kind of cinematography but also to create a specific moment in time that is quite connected to the idea of the interzone when you think about audience, the boys, the world we create with us, the art process, the moment that is going to be exposed. I cannot give a definition of it. I think my interaction is to not be able to define it. I’m usually very attracted to things that I can’t define. If something’s too clear, it’s very often not inspiring to me anymore.

All I can say about tonight is it was an environment that connects very much to a dream scenario for me. As you know I am an industrial designer graduate and I only came to fashion later. Being able to show in relation to the work of Jean Prouvé, and Alexander Calder is a very emotional thing for me because I admired both the architect and the artist very much already from a very young age. I think that without even knowing, that may be the interzone, because when I approached Larry Gagosian to see if there was the possibility to show in this space there was no show yet defined, so we didn’t know. So we kept on talking until we got the information about who was showing here which was already slowly collating to what we would do as a collection and I also wanted to relate it even more to that collection.

We were also thinking about product and industrialisation of how our lives begin and our society and everything we use, everything we swallow, like food and drinks and products and how it’s getting more and more man-made and more and more artificial and we were at the same time thinking about freedom and thinking about what’s the ultimate contrast to that, what’s the interesting juxtaposition with that. So we started thinking about babies and children and teenagers, you know where everything seems to be so much more natural. The most natural thing is the baby of course, it’s just there and it’s alive and there was nothing, no clothes, there was nothing. I think Jean Prouvé very much represents the industrial, it’s about the product and the manufactured product. Calder was expressing so much freedom and movement and the freedom of form and the movement of shape in space or in non-space. I think Calder's is for me almost the ultimate non-space art or interzone art, because it’s a sculpture, but when you think sculpture you usually think it stands. But it doesn’t so it’s kind of interzone-y and very graphic also at the same time, and so soft and hard and I think we were out for that kind of language.

Also, at the moment we are - because I think fashion moves in waves - enjoying fashion, very much. I’m enjoying men very much, the position at Dior, it’s such a contrast you know and such a beauty also to be able to have the possibility to express in such a major historical context in Dior for women. On the other hand we’re expressing ourselves or I’m expressing myself with my team in an environment which is free and still so young as a brand. We’ve been around for two decades but still I feel like it’s the brand’s teenager and I like to keep it like that, so we are in a very positive mood. I think we wanted to show a lot of energy tonight and freedom and we want to push the men’s a little bit because I - again not from a critical position - but I see there is a lot of behaviour in men’s fashion, which is systematic. It’s a lot about all these kind of clothes that can be easily combined with each other and it's less and less, I think, about making a fashion statement. I find that rather surprising at the moment when so many people, and so many young people, are surrounding fashion and getting more and more interested. I’d prefer to come from out of our world to push them or give them all the possibility.

We are a grown up brand on the one hand - we have a show room where you can of course, get your classic suit and tie - but on the other hand, I think in terms of showing, in terms of having a dialogue about fashion, we want to have the dialogue and I think there are a lot of things happening right now, in fashion in general and that is why it’s a good moment to start a dialogue. There’s a new generation coming in moving away from Paris. I also want to say you can move away from Paris if you want. Maybe it needs us to, so people also dare to do it, but even for me, I started to feel obliged to show clothes on the previous show. When you have shows there are eight shows in a day and there is a show before you, you feel obliged to show right after that show, in a maximum of ten minutes after that show space. Already that limited me in the ticketing process because there was no space that we liked. Only this historical space or only this trashy space. It was ‘let’s do our thing, let’s do what we need to do to express what we want to say this season’. Originally I was even thinking of just going out and createing a new kind of energy. In the beginning it was scary but on the other hand, I feel it was something that can also excite the audience as much as they can be upset about it when they need to spend more time getting to a show. It’s also not that automatically we will do it every season. Maybe next season I will find an environment in Paris that is perfect for the collection but for this situation it needed to be shown in another context.

DD: I also felt there was this kind of gender aspect this season. The collection felt almost genderless and I don’t know whether that was a concern of yours?

Raf Simons: I think it has always been hanging around our brand a bit. It’s a brand that pushes fashion forward and that means that automatically there is more experiment to it. Although we are still defined really as 100 per cent Raf Simons men’s only, we have women clients, women buying and wearing our clothes which is very exciting for me. I don’t feel at this moment in time to want to specifically design something for women because I find it fascinating to see the fact that women want to buy things that they see on men. I think that’s also an evolution. I think it goes in two directions and for the rest I can only say it’s a very natural way for us to behave. It’s not that we over think - it’s very natural. We feel it’s almost a party mood. We’re enjoying it and we show electricity and show energy and, at the same time, show nature.

All the boys were natural tonight. There was nobody who did the hair for them. We showed them as they come so it was very much about the way of dressing, the way of choosing the clothes as a way to express yourself. It was not a camouflage in terms of how you can create yourself with hair or product or styling. You think about the collection and that is what is interesting right now. You can just take it or leave it but hopefully take it.

dazeddigital.com

 

[Bernadette]

I come from a white trash family. My mom went out for work when she was 15. My dad went into the army when he was 17. I am super-proud of my parents. My mother was a cleaning lady all her life. (Raf Simons)


Photo Credit: kellygreenblog.com

 

[Bernadette]

Humberto Leon Interviews Raf Simons - Pt. 1
by Humberto Leon

This year, we are celebrating all things Belgian at OC. We cannot wait to share all the amazing designers, established and new, and rich culture that the country has to offer. A personal highlight, for me, is that this year we are welcoming Raf Simons into the OC family. From the very beginning of his eponymous menswear label, in 1995, through to his tenure at Jil Sander (from 2005-2012) and his latest role as creative director at Dior, Raf has become a fashion icon and proponent of outsider culture. His love for youth culture and his rebellious streak resonated with me all the way across the Atlantic in California in the 90s, and his vision is just as radical almost 20 years later.

Over a long lunch at L'Avenue in Paris last month, Raf and I talked about his teenage years, the ground-breaking designers who emerged from the Royal Academy in Antwerp during the 80s (the Antwerp Six), and our shared love for Pulp and The Breeders. As fellow culture and fashion fanatics, we could have talked forever. Look out for more in the second part of our interview, coming next week.

Humberto Leon: First, I have to tell you that I still have all of my Raf pieces from the beginning. I haven’t thrown anything away since I was sixteen. We have been dying to have you in the store for years and the timing seems so perfect now.
Raf Simons: I am so happy to be in the store. It’s finally a really good moment.

You’ve spoken about growing up in a small town with only one record store. I feel like all of your collections, especially the early ones, use youth codes as a starting point. Growing up, how connected were you to those subcultures?
The weird thing is that I was raised on a street where there were farms and cows and animals, and there was a complete disconnect from culture. Complete. I went to a very Catholic college—we took Latin, Greek, and mathematics—it was the kind of place where, when you reach eighteen, you’re supposed to become a doctor or a lawyer. But I knew very, very early on that this was not what I was interested in.

The area I grew up in, on the outskirts of LA, also had a very suburban feeling. There was no fashion. I made stuff because my mom worked in a factory, and I watched her making clothes while she babysat me. It really informed how I approach clothing. Did your parents influence your interest in design?
My mom was a cleaning lady her whole life, and my dad joined the army when he was really young—every boy in Belgium had to go into the army. Although I have a sublime relationship with my parents, it felt like everything that surrounded me was the opposite of what I was interested in. My dad represented sports and that world, my mom was flowers and garden. And I was completely into television. Television, television, television. MTV and music had a very big impact on me.

The other thing that was happening in Belgium then, which few people know about, was the work of Belgian art curator Jan Hoet. He was behind the careers of people like Joseph Beuys, and he later curated Documenta IX in 1992. But years before that, when I was a teenager, he organized a huge exhibition in Ghent called Chambres d’amis. He asked people who owned private houses in the city to open their homes for the whole summer and display the work of a single artist.

That's so cool. How many houses were there? Like twenty?
Oh no, more. It was a big, big thing. The interesting thing was seeing the works in relation to a domestic environment. It made such a huge impact on me and the whole fashion thing started with that. Then, when I was maybe eighteen, the Belgian scene started. Belgium did not have a strong contemporary movement at that point. There were very few artists. There was nothing happening in fashion until the Antwerp Six came. There was chocolate. Chocolate and diamonds—that was what Antwerp was about. And then, when the Belgians came in, I had already chosen to study industrial design.

What kinds of things were you making at school at that time?
A bicycle for a handicapped child, for example. A crate to carry twenty four bottles ergonomically. An egg holder. But it was during my industrial design education that I became fascinated with the Antwerp Six. I really started looking at fashion, and started to wear and imitate it. I was obsessed with Martin [Margiela] and Helmut [Lang], so I would go to flea markets, and I would basically make my own outfits. I could only afford maybe a pair of socks from the actual stores.

That sounds amazing. I love that you made your own versions of things. Was there a Helmut Lang store in Antwerp at the time?
There was a very famous, enormous, store in Antwerp called Loppa, run by Linda Loppa. Linda used to be the director [at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp]. It was one of the most amazing stores I’ve ever seen.

When did it close?
In the period I was graduating, so that must have been around 1991. Linda had all the major labels: Helmut Lang, Dolce & Gabbana, Romeo Gigli, Jean Paul Gaultier. The store was very inspired by the energy and aesthetics of Gaultier in the 80s. There were these ceiling paintings that were very historical but [the figures] would be wearing Gaultier.

So it was Linda I got in touch with. I had interned with Walter [van Beirendonck] and continued to help him afterwards with his presentations in Paris, doing things with furniture. Linda heard about my work and she said, “I want to meet that guy.” We met, I moved to Antwerp, and she became like a second mother.

Did you ever attend the academy as a fashion student?
The weird thing was that Linda was interested in my furniture. She was trying to get me into galleries and get me represented by furniture studios. But I was so fascinated with fashion at that point that I really wanted her to take me into the Academy as a student. And she refused. She said, “Go away and make clothes and then come back.” And I took it very seriously. Linda had me make a collection, and then she sent me to Milan. It was a very weird experience. Suddenly, I am in Milan with maybe twenty five pieces and about 1,500 euros. I took a job in between, with a gardener. But the first collection was not really made in order to sell. It was just to convince Linda. I was living in Antwerp, meeting kids, and going out a lot. That collection was about the mood of the people around me, and the music.

What was going out in Antwerp like back then? I hear about Antwerp having this really amazing nightlife moment. Does that still scene still exist?
The best moment ever, ever, ever for me was when New Beat hit. I’ve never experienced anything else like that in my life. Imagine three or four thousand kids coming together at a discotheque in the middle of nowhere. Everything you saw was fashion. Whether it was self-made, or second-hand, or high fashion like Gaultier. We had a very specific way of dancing, and a very specific sound. There were a lot of lasers and a lot of drugs. It was sublime.

That sounds pretty cool.
But the problem with New Beat was that it became mainstream. It started to hit the news every weekend on television, and then very quickly it became commercial. So we said that’s enough.

I feel like that’s what happens when all of these underground movements begin: more people find out about them, then this weird commercialization happens and it kills them.
When I started the label it was all over already. New Beat was happening when I was eighteen or nineteen. After that I went to a lot of gigs: early Manics, early Suede, early Smashing Pumpkins, Sonic Youth. And when Kraftwerk was in Belgium I would be there. I’ve seen them twelve times.

I love all of those bands. L7, The Breeders, Pulp...
Yes, voila, Pulp. They were all coming up. There was a club I used to go to all the time in Brussels called Fuse. I saw very, very early people like Aphex Twin. You’d just go to Fuse because every week somebody who you’d never heard of would perform in combination with a big name, and it was a scene. After a couple of years of running my label, there was a very strong community of people surrounding it. During the week we would be in the office, working hard on the collections, but on the weekends we would be in the clubs. Music was what was binding everything together. It was really the start and the end.

Source: openingceremony.us

 

[Bernadette]

Humberto Leon Interviews Raf Simons - Pt. 2
by Humberto Leon

Last month I met with iconic designer Raf Simons and picked his brain about the Belgian fashion scene, the Antwerp Six, and the laser-filled New Beat parties of the 80s! In part two, below, Raf tells me about what inspired him in the early years of his brand and which designers and bands still make him fan out today.

Humberto Leon: We were talking about the kinds of music you’re into. What else were you influenced by in the early days of your label?
Raf Simons: There really was no other visual communication besides television and record sleeves at that time. My village did not have trendy magazines like i-D and The Face. But I’d take train trips to Antwerp. You had access to everything there.

I've kept every magazine I've bought since I was a teenager, so I have all of the early i-Ds. And still one of my favorite magazines ever is the issue that you curated. It must have been in around 2001.
I’ve always stayed very connected to i-D. The first people I met in fashion—on the press side—were Terry and Tricia [Jones], and it almost became like a family.

They're legendary.
Yeah. In 1998, near the beginning of my career, they staged a huge exhibition in the stazione in Florence, and I had two boys living in the exhibition space for two months. I put a bunch of clothes in there, a television, and a lot of video games and documentaries. Terry also put every i-D magazine in there. So I got to keep all of these issues from the early period.

You also talk about TV a lot. What kind of TV programs were you into when you were growing up?
When I was a kid, I was obliged to watch the Schlager Festival [laughs], which my mom was obsessed with! Then there was an early evening program called “Top Pop.” It was Dutch but they got everybody on it. It was sublime. Everybody was on it: Debbie Harry would be there in Stephen Sprouse, but when you're young you don't really recognize these moments at the time.

Totally! Over the years though, have you been able to meet a lot of the musicians and bands you love?
I finally met Kim Gordon at the Met Ball this year. The first presentation I ever did—before I started showing—was just a couple of boys that I was filming with Sonic Youth music.

I feel like you're very good at tapping into things. With your Fred Perry and Vans partnerships, for example. They feel like such authentic brands to me, with their own subcultures. After you did the show with white slip-on Vans, I went straight out and bought a pair.
The Fred Perry partnership was quite a natural thing. It’s very easy to make their culture and our culture come together. It’s magic. And now the adidas collaboration is really great too.

I love the footwear from the fall collection.
In fashion we have been seeing so much development in the construction of the sneaker. I was really fascinated by the process. Working with adidas, I feel that the possibilities are enormous.

How big is your studio in Antwerp today?
Very small. We only have six people. And now we are hiring maybe two more because [the label] has been growing so much in the last couple of seasons.

As you've expanded as a brand, has the fact that you don’t come from a super technical fashion background ever affected you?
No, not at all. I think, early on, my attraction to fashion was just the idea of “pop.” As a kid I was completely not into clothes. But when I was teenager I wanted to be a part of the whole New Wave period. The Virgin Prunes, The Cramps, New Order—they were all very big for us as college, so we had black hair [styled with] with sugar water.

I love that look.
We were the New Wave kids at this very Catholic school and we were not even supposed to hang out together in big groups. We were not troublemakers, we just didn’t really relate to the environment we were in. I started going out when I was really young and we would just find each other. We shared the same love for certain bands, we put up posters everywhere, and we had a good time. Lots of us got into the Belgian scene, especially Walter Van Beirendonck, he was big for us at that time.

For me too. Walter was someone I discovered by looking at European magazines. Back when there was no Internet, you could only see things in magazines. I feel really fortunate to have lived in an era in which you had to seek out information, when it was harder to find.
The access that we had to the Belgian fashion designers was really like that. They were around us, so you could feel their presence very strongly when you were in Antwerp. But you would get one glimpse of a Helmut Lang collection on television and then you’d have to wait for six months until you could find it in a store in Brussels or Antwerp.

The last thing I wanted to ask you: is there a reason why you’ve never done womenswear under the Raf Simons label? Because I know a lot of women who wear it!
Originally the intention was not to do menswear only. The intention was just to start making clothes for a young generation that I could relate to. It was more for practical and economic reasons that I had to choose to only do men’s in the beginning—because I was making all the clothes myself. But women have always responded to the clothes after the shows so sometimes we do make a piece in women's sizes. I think lately especially I've been seeing a lot of guys wearing women's clothes and women wearing men's clothes.

Definitely. I think the borders are less defined now. But it's amazing that with Jil Sander and now at Dior, you’ve been able to make that transition.
I like the dynamic between doing Dior and [Raf Simons]. It feels very satisfying and freeing to have this huge historical institution for women on one hand, and then a different kind of freedom with my own line on the other. I go back and forth, back and forth, and it’s very good for the brain. Owning your brand is psychologically very different from being a creative director.

Yeah, that's true.
I will never let my brand go—ever, ever, ever.

Source: openingceremony.us

 

[Bernadette]

August 9, 2013

Raf Simons: Force of Nature

Dior's creative director collaborates with the artist Robert Longo to turn fashion into art.

By Joan Juliet Buck


Simons in front of Longo's Untitled (Gola). Photo by Skye Parrott.


Raf Simons is engaged yet remote, seductive in the manner of a mysterious boy glimpsed in the hall at school. His face is handsome, at odds with itself: martial black eyebrows over the undefended gaze of dark-blue eyes, the mouth curiously tight, the lower jaw thrust forward. He hates to be photographed and often takes his bows with his tongue thrust inside his lower lip. His dark hair is short, brushed forward. At 45 he has the lanky body of a tall teenager. He wears no watch and carries an ancient, un-smart cell phone, on which he claims to be able to text faster than anyone else. He dresses like a student—the collar of a red shirt visible at the crewneck of a dark sweater with elbow patches, dark pants. Lines of seditious nail heads along the sides of his black lace-ups are the only things that signal the impertinence of fashion. "Prada," he says. "Old."

Hired in April 2012 to replace John Galliano at Dior, Simons has been ordained into the papal line of designers who've applied their talents at the house since Christian Dior's death, which goes Saint Laurent, Bohan, Ferré, Galliano. The cultured and thoughtful Simons brings the Antwerp spirit that revolutionized clothes in the 1990s to the high-profile big business of fashion. After expanding from menswear shows that exalted skinny teenage boys and radical culture (and had names like "Woe Unto Those Who Spit on the Fear Generation...the Wind Will Blow It Back" and the more succinct "Black Palms") to making beautiful clothes for women under the Jil Sander label in 2005, Simons is hardly a newcomer to the world of top-tier women's fashion. But Dior is Dior. And the circumstances of Simons's arrival at the house could not have been more dramatic. In February 2012, he was let go from Jil Sander just two days before a runway show that became his sudden farewell. The show ended with models, buyers, press, and Simons himself in tears. That July his first couture show for Dior—in rooms lined to the ceilings with more than a million flowers—was greeted with rapturous delight. He'd done it in seven weeks. Sidney Toledano, Dior's group managing director, declared, "He gave, he gave, he gave. He's aligning his vibration with the brand."

Of the day Dior hired him, Simons told France 24: "I walked out of the room and just started walking around Paris. I think I walked four kilometers." It was a kind of illuminated Werner Herzog moment. Back then his accent was thicker; the name Dior came out "Diorgh."

Simons's main language is Flemish. He was born in Belgium, in a place called Neerpelt, some 60 miles east of Antwerp. His father was a military night watchman; his mother cleaned houses. After attending a strict Catholic school, he went to college in the nearby city of Genk to study industrial and furniture design, with the goal of creating practical, socially responsible objects: "Furniture, cars. A bike for a handicapped child. A grab for a door," he explains. "Something to lift 24 beer bottles."

We met at a grand restaurant in New York to get acquainted over food that takes longer to describe than to eat. Simons was staying at the Maritime Hotel, isolated on the roof in a suite with two fireplaces. "It's like being in an apartment. Last night I slept with the fires on and the windows open." I imagined him sleeping on the floor on a tarp.

Three words recur as Simons speaks: Challenge, not in the PC sense, as a handicap, but as an opportunity. Incubation is another, not in our sense of getting a cold but as the slow period when things develop—hidden and unconscious. (It's also the title of a song by Joy Division, one of the bands he loves.) And dialogue, the thing he craves. Asked why he switched from industrial design to fashion, Simons says, "As an industrial designer, you design the thing by yourself and then it goes away from you, whereas fashion is in constant relation to the body and to psychology. It makes it more complicated, and it makes it more challenging."

Today, while creating six collections a year for Dior, Simons continues his menswear in Antwerp. At Dior there are some 75 people in the couture atelier, 50 in the ready-to-wear. In Antwerp he works with just eight people. His life is divided into neatly alternating weeks. "Every weekend I'm on the highway to Antwerp. I need to be there, to have the calm. It's a whole different life: I jump on my bike, and it's so small, I can be anywhere in a minute. I like to be at home when there's free time because when you're at a big company, you're constantly surrounded by 30 people."

Simons's work is in constant dialogue with contemporary art, an essential part of his life. He's a serious collector. "By nature, creative people like to evolve and explore," he says. "That is a need, a necessity." At the Frieze London art fair last fall, his intense focus wore out Dior's creative director of accessories, Camille Miceli. "We went in at 10 in the morning and stayed until 7 at night," she told me. "He stops at every booth, looks at everything; he goes so deeply into every detail. He's obsessed. And he has very good taste."

"Even when I was doing only the men's collections, I did things on the side," Simons explains. "I made videos, I taught at a university for five years in Vienna, I curated some big projects—an art show with Francesco Bonami for the Pitti Discovery Foundation in Florence called 'The Fourth Sex,' about the adolescent period when your sexuality is not yet defined."

An only child, Simons says he longed for siblings but had to settle for a pet, not a dog but a marmot—"bigger than a mouse and with longer hair." The rodent didn't last very long. "I spoiled it like hell," he says. "I gave it great salad. It loved salad. Every time the fridge would open, it would start to scream when it saw the salad. My dad said, 'Stop, get out with this thing.'"

His family lived in the country, next door to a farm where pigs were slaughtered once a year. "When I turned 18, it was time to run, run, run away from that and forget the whole thing," he says. "At that age you want the city, you want fashion, you want culture, you want art."

In Antwerp he wore Doc Martens and danced all night. It was the late '80s, and Belgium was becoming the center of new fashion, championed and nurtured by Linda Loppa, head of the fashion department at Antwerp's Royal Academy of Fine Arts. In 1991, designer Walter Van Beirendonck (for whom Simons worked as an intern) took him to a show in Paris by another Belgian, Martin Margiela, and Simons fell in love with fashion.

But instead of leaping directly into fashion after graduation, Simons spent a few years in what he refers to as "incubation time," doing stints as a flea-market dealer and a designer of garden furniture. Then, in 1995, he got in touch with Loppa. "She is one of the most radical people I've ever met in my life," he says. "She lived in a 2,000-square-meter loft [21,500 square feet], with two Le Corbusier chairs. I wanted to impress her with the things I could do, to make her believe I could get in to her school. She said I should do it on my own and sent me to Daniele Ghiselli, a fashion sales agent for European distribution." The 35 pieces Simons made as a test were hung in a Milan showroom with clothes by Helmut Lang—and they all sold. "It was a very weird moment for me," he recalls. "I'm sitting there without money, without structure, all by myself."

He found a partner, and the businesspeople at Dries Van Noten helped with details. He lived with Veronique Branquinho, another talented Antwerp designer. (They split in 2000.) "Those early days, we weren't thinking about the fashion world," says Simons. "It was about going out, making clothes, telling stories, sharing aesthetics. There was no thinking process to it. It wasn't about business." He cast his shows with boys he found on the street. "Having a dialogue with models is very different from having a dialogue with men you cast from the street, who aren't going to tell you it's beautiful because they want the job again," he says. "You get very interesting feedback."

Simons's first Paris show, held in 1996, when he was 27, was an immediate and influential success. Where he led, others followed. When he briefly dyed his hair jet black, everyone in fashion under 30 in Paris did the same. Boys starved to get into his clothes. At the same time, like Margiela, Simons refused to be photographed. He says, "It was such a niche thing—it wasn't supposed to set off the whole world."

When Jil Sander hired Simons as creative director in 2005, he had never designed a collection for women but had always longed to. "In fashion design you can divide people into two groups," he says by way of explanation. "You have people who come with an aesthetic that is there forever, even if it evolves. Then you have people I call jumpers. One season it can be this; the next season it's completely something else. I always knew I am more of a jumper."

It was at Jil Sander that Simons began to study the history of women's fashion and discovered a passion for Christian Dior, who "focused on the idea of beauty, femininity, nature. I grew up in that kind of environment," he explains. "Very much about nature and purity." His Dior clothes are reverential in their beauty yet thoroughly contemporary: He reincarnated Dior's definitive New Look Bar jacket as half of a shorts suit; he invoked evening-gown silhouettes but infused the potentially staid shapes with the thrill of the modern by abbreviating them at mid-thigh. He's fearless and willing to experiment within the context of respect for a legendary house.

But for Simons, the biggest change from his past engagements is the couture. "If at Jil Sander I had a desire to keep the shape up, I would grab two fabrics that would [do that] or use a chemically treated wool from Japan," he says. "But in Dior Haute Couture you can take the lightest-weight transparent silk and the atelier will bring the shape up. They don't do it technically; they do it with their hands." Enamored with the sense of freedom and possibility, Simons used his Fall 2013 couture collection to showcase a rule-breaking approach extending from curve-sleeved jackets to spiky shibori gowns and techno-houndstooth suits.

When it came to the Fall 2013 ready-to-wear collection, his vision was to "use a visual language that clearly comes from human hands and link it to the memory of Dior." That meant deploying Andy Warhol's early fashion illustrations as decorative motifs on handbags, strapless dresses, and shifts. "He's seen as an artist that had a hard hand, silk screens and industrial boxes," says Simons, "but there's so much work that he did before that's very personal, very fragile, very feminine."

Sitting outside the restaurant after lunch, Simons marvels at the speed of things. "I'm very scared sometimes that fashion might attack its own magic by the amount of exposure," he says. "Is this normal, the speed of fashion? They say there are too many shows, but the nature of fashion is to have it exposed in that moment of ecstasy.

"In the '90s, when a designer showed something, you had the patience to wait until it was in the stores," he continues. "That had a lot of romance and mystique to it. If you want something and you have to wait for it, you enjoy it, probably, longer. If it's just thrown at you the moment you like it, how much are you going to still desire it?"

It's the same with love, Simons muses. "These days, people's perceptions of relationships are very different from 50 years ago. I come from a love nest. My parents—it's just such a love nest. I see a lot of the younger generation switching—whether it's love or a job—not having the patience. Lots of people want to change their reality when they don't see the reality as perfection."

Source: harpersbazaar.com

 

[Bernadette]

Raf Simons : An Interview

On Growing up…

“I go back to a lot of things I was seeing but not experiencing myself when I was younger. I saw the punk scene happening- I was too young to be involved- and later other strong youth culture groups, but they were thingsI felt I could not be a part of myself. I was from a small village, a very isolated place far from the city, about an hour away from Antwerp. When you are younger this is a long way. I went to a small Catholic college, where artistic things were not promoted at all. So when I picked up ideas from the street, it wasn’t in me to be like that myself.”

“I had nobody, absolutely nobody who I could relate to, nobody who gave me energy and inspiration.”

“I’ve never had a ‘**** you’ attitude. I’ve always had a sense of responsibility. It was later when I had a good job doing industrial design, living in Antwerp, surrounded by people who gave me inspiration, that I decided to quit my job and change everything.”

“What I know about industrial design is that I found it very isolating and that I wanted to move away from it, but now I feel attracted to it again. In the last ten years I’m once again interested in the idea of furniture and making something that lasts and has a different presence.”

On Maison Martin Margiela…

“After that [he third Martin Margiela show] I knew I wanted to be a fashion designer. A very impactful show, I think four out of five people were crying. After that I had a very different idea of fashion.”

“When Belgian designers like Martin Margiela started to come out. It was a very strong, impactful time for any Belgian who was interested in fashion.”

On Fashion…

“I think that every designer should strive to make a difference, to question things, to find a way of having a dialogue with their audience. That is the most satisfying part for a designer, if your brain and heart is very much about creation.”

“I’m not someone who is happy with gut reactions. I’m a creative person so I love the dialogue and energy of the shows. But overall I want to make sure people fall in love with the clothes and that they are satisfied.”

“Very often I communicate ideas knowing that there is no specific outcome. Fashion is not there to educate you, but to challenge you. Sometimes I speak with young kids and I have the feeling…not that they have no interest, but that they look at it a different way. This is the reason I chose to do fashion, to create a dialogue and bring people together.”

Source: natalieandrachel.wordpress.com. Posted on July 23, 2013.

 

[Bernadette]

Photo Credit: elle.de

 

[Bernadette]

Photo Credit: dalje.com

 

[Bernadette]

lemonde.fr

 

[Bernadette]

lemonde.fr

 

[Bernadette]

Raf Simons: 'I don't have to be the avant-garde kid now'

In 1995, Raf Simons launched his menswear label inspired by youth culture. Now he's creative director at Christian Dior, one of the world's most famous houses. Here he explains his passion for art, his love of conversation and why he's known as the nicest man in fashion

Alice Fisher

The Guardian, Thursday 19 September 2013


Photograph: David Sims/guardian.co.uk

It is quite wrong to say I'm a minimalist," declares Raf Simons, a designer who has been routinely, reverently, described as a minimalist since he delivered his first collection 18 years ago. "I have shown work in my own brand [menswear label Raf Simons] that has been completely not minimal. When I worked at Jil Sander, the heritage of that brand was actually purist. Jil was such a purist she even threw away her own archive." He pauses to look part impressed, part alarmed by this rigour. "My point is, you get stamped all the time: conceptual designer, minimal designer… but I don't have to be the avant-garde kid now: I'm not 25, I'm 45."

For a man who has always striven to make his work modern rather than conforming to any particular -ism or -ist, it must be frustrating to be defined by his past. Even if it is a past full of clothes that have been adored by critics and that have had a wide enough impact to affect the way people have dressed, filtering down to the high street in the form of tight suits in the past decade and neon flashes in the present. Though his work at the Raf Simons label, started in his native Belgium in 1995, and as creative director of Jil Sander menswear and womenswear from 2005-2012, played with prescriptive ideas, it wasn't driven by them.

If you really want to pin down his modus operandi, it is to explore new ideas. Something he's shown in every collection since he became creative director for the house of Christian Dior in April 2012. His new role is one of the most influential in fashion: Dior, the jewel in the crown of LVMH, the world's largest luxury conglomerate owned by French businessman Bernard Arnault, is one of the few truly global fashion brands. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a job for a minimalist.

"For me, it's more interesting to think of what I will not be," he says. "I will never be theatrical, that I know. Kick me out when I'm theatrical – I think it's disgusting. The only thing I haven't been called is a less heavyweight word. Like nature, or flower, or playful, which is very much in me."

He doesn't look very playful as he says this. Rather formidable, in fact, sitting cross-legged and straight-backed in his dogtooth check jacket and slim black trousers, stark against the white panelled backdrop of a salon at Dior's avenue Montaigne HQ in Paris. He says what he loves is dialogue. It is a debate about clothes and the lives of those who wear them that he has championed throughout his career.

He launched his menswear label after working with Walter van Beirendonck, one of the original "Antwerp Six" – a group of avant-garde Belgian designers whose radical vision influenced fashion in the 1980s. Simons had originally trained in industrial design, but used to sneak away from his work placement at a factory, where he was meant to be designing crates to hold 24 beers, to work for Van Beirendonck. When he launched Raf Simons he used models cast from Antwerp's streets. He'd run a minibus of these kids along with any family members who wanted to go along for the ride to his Paris show on a fashion awayday. He talked to the boys about their lives and their opinions on his clothes. "These kids, they didn't care. If one in 40 said [your design] is ****, you thought: he has no taste. If 20 said it, you think: maybe this isn't what this generation is interested in."

Now he applies the same courteous interest to women buying luxury ready-to-wear from Dior, one of the top houses in the international fashion market. They may be unlikely to tell him his clothes are ****, but these women are just as opinionated as his Belgian kids and he wants to hear what they think. "For me, I work in tune," he explains. "I love the active/reactive thing. Fashion is a melting pot. I need to have a direct dialogue with women, with colleagues, with people," he explains. "You sniff it up, you hear it, one thing brings you to another. You learn and read from reactions. Because of the size and history of the house of Dior, there's dialogue all the time, which is fascinating. It's interesting to have dialogue with the world."

It seems to be working. He's produced seven collections of modern tailoring, shimmering ballerina skirts and colourful, sexy bustiers; clothes that investigate and innovate the tropes of couture and the feminine ideal that form the legacy of Christian Dior. Clothes that are playful and clever and very wearable. They have also been financially successful – the brand's global sales rose 17% in 2012.

Though Dior's original house vision was simple, updating it for today's increasingly complicated fashion market is no small feat. Simons' approach has been inspired. His last two shows – resort 2014 and couture autumn/winter 2013 – were bigger and more varied than these collections typically are. The pieces he presented moved significantly away from the traditions of Dior. At resort, the lace and the flowers were mixed with zips and a sporty feel; at couture – a fundamentally European artform – African, Asian and American motifs were given equal space on the catwalk. It's a smart proposition for how a fashion house equally stabilised and held down by the weight of its history can move forward. The focus on couture is particularly interesting. Sales have risen 24% during Simons' time at Dior, and though it seems like an archaic artform to most of us – fashion's "dusty sister", as Simons puts it – he's fascinated by it. "I think choice is a big luxury these days. I want to offer possibility and direction. In couture, when look number one to number 45 is very much about one thing, it's controlling. It's not how young people see the world."

Though he's open to new ideas and ways of looking at the world, there is one thing Simons has as a constant. The influence of art. This love is at the fore in all his work at Dior – in the Andy Warhol illustrations that pepper his autumn/winter 2013 collection and the surrealist designs that shape his knitwear – but it is also apparent throughout his career. His last Raf Simons show was set in the Paris outpost of the Gagosian. The art references during the Jil Sander years ranged from the pop of Yves Klein blue in his 2008 spring/summer collection to the more obscure influence of ceramicist Pol Chambost in 2009. "I need art," says Simons. "I cannot live without it. Ce n'est pas possible. It's like air."

Art shaped his worldview long before he knew fashion existed. Simons was raised in the tiny village of Neerpelt in the Belgian province of Limburg, "between farms and disconnected from culture", by his parents Jacques Simons, an army night watchman, and Alda Beckers, a cleaner. He went to a "very dusty" school run by priests and focused on mathematics and Latin. "I was well bored, but I took it seriously because my parents said once, when I was 15, 'You'd better take it seriously or you might end up doing the things we do.' I always remembered it. So I would sit on a bench doing Latin, thinking, '****!'

"All I had for culture was a record store and a television. My dad was a sports person, and when you're brought up on football then, bah, you look for something else. One summer [1986] an important Belgian art curator, Jan Hoet, did an ongoing project called Chambres d'Amis [in which works of art were hung in private homes]. I was intrigued by it. Every day I followed it on television and I travelled to Ghent, the city where it happened."

As soon as he could he started a personal art collection – which includes an eclectic mix of contemporary artists such as Sterling Ruby (who designed the interior of Simons' Tokyo store in 2008), sculptor Olafur Eliasson and George Condo – and he has worked as a consultant for the Cigrang Freres art collection in Belgium. He thinks that one day he'll move into the art world professionally. "It's a very beautiful environment. Most of my close friends are artists, so I wouldn't ever want to be in a position where I needed to make money from an artist. Curating, though, I find super."

His face lights up when he talks about art and it's nice to see such a warm smile. In a business renowned for neuroticism and bitchiness, Simons has a reputation for being one of the nicest men in fashion – a man who personally makes sure that journalists at his shows are given the access they need and answers every question with grave respect. Even the one – which still makes me cringe – that I asked him about the weather after the resort 2014 show held in May. His driver, who shuttles him between France and Belgium, is given food to take home by Simons' mother when he drops the designer in his homeland. "Well I'm not always sunshine," he says. "I can be a meanie. But I don't want to hurt people because I know how it feels to be treated badly."

He thinks his attitude is down to how and where he grew up. "I don't know about hierarchy. I think it's a psychological thing. But then why should I behave differently to the cleaning lady in the house to Mr Arnault [who owns it]? We are all humans."

His approach to his career in fashion is as pragmatic as to the people working within the industry. He already says he knows when it will be time to quit. "My thought process never stops. My ideas have always been such a natural process, they overlap in a constant flow. It's not a calming thing. I have to text my ideas to myself or run quickly to the office to sketch them down. I have a sketchbook next to my bed because I wake up from it sometimes – but not every day, don't think I'm a freak.

"So I said to myself 18 years ago that when I have to think too hard, sitting at my desk, that's seriously the day that I have to get out." Hopefully it won't happen too soon. But Simons looks quite fascinated by the idea. He looks happy and open. Interested in what the future holds.

Source: theguardian.com

 

[Bernadette]

Photo Credit: Billy Farrell Agency

 

[Bernadette]

An Ideal for Living : Peter Saville & Raf Simons

Video: http://www.dazeddigital.com/video/peter-saville-raf-simons/1243

Source: dazeddigital.com

 

[Bernadette]

Interview: Raf Simons

In a rare interview after his show, Raf talks interzones, gender and "taking or leaving it"

Text: Isabella Burley
Photography: Lea Colombo



The term ‘interzone’ is difficult to define. It is a phrase that has become increasingly associated with the work of Raf Simons and one that suggests his work exists within a realm that goes beyond any one specific thing – certainly beyond the confines of fashion.

Yesterday, this term felt more appropriate than ever. Raf was intent on creating a moment, showcasing his work thirty-minutes outside of Paris at the Gagosian Gallery, surrounded by the work of artists Alexander Calder and Jean Prouvé. “All I can say about tonight, is that it was an environment that connects very much to a dream scenario for me,” he explained after the show – and it was. The collection resonated with these two artists, Raf exploring the industrialisation of society through branded garments – much like the work of Prouvé, but also exploring the freedom of Calder’s kinetic sculptures.

In a rare interview after his show, Raf talks interzones, why he is continuously attracted to things he can’t define and why we can “take it or leave it”.

Dazed Digital: A few weeks ago I was talking to Peter Saville about your work and something that came up again and again was this idea of ‘the interzone’. It’s a term that has always been heavily associated with your work and I’m interested to find out how you define the term ‘interzone’?

Raf Simons: I can’t define it. I’ve been trying to find out for two decades now and I find myself ending up in interzones without knowing how to define it but it’s something that attracts me very much. We used to create that kind of space and moment in relation to the world that we are expressing through clothes very much in the early days and I think lately we feel very much the desire to do that again. We actually brought ourselves out of Paris back into an environment that relates to the environment we used to show in back in the days which was always in the film studios, doing a certain kind of cinematography but also to create a specific moment in time that is quite connected to the idea of the interzone when you think about audience, the boys, the world we create with us, the art process, the moment that is going to be exposed. I cannot give a definition of it. I think my interaction is to not be able to define it. I’m usually very attracted to things that I can’t define. If something’s too clear, it’s very often not inspiring to me anymore.

All I can say about tonight is it was an environment that connects very much to a dream scenario for me. As you know I am an industrial designer graduate and I only came to fashion later. Being able to show in relation to the work of Jean Prouvé, and Alexander Calder is a very emotional thing for me because I admired both the architect and the artist very much already from a very young age. I think that without even knowing, that may be the interzone, because when I approached Larry Gagosian to see if there was the possibility to show in this space there was no show yet defined, so we didn’t know. So we kept on talking until we got the information about who was showing here which was already slowly collating to what we would do as a collection and I also wanted to relate it even more to that collection.

We were also thinking about product and industrialisation of how our lives begin and our society and everything we use, everything we swallow, like food and drinks and products and how it’s getting more and more man-made and more and more artificial and we were at the same time thinking about freedom and thinking about what’s the ultimate contrast to that, what’s the interesting juxtaposition with that. So we started thinking about babies and children and teenagers, you know where everything seems to be so much more natural. The most natural thing is the baby of course, it’s just there and it’s alive and there was nothing, no clothes, there was nothing. I think Jean Prouvé very much represents the industrial, it’s about the product and the manufactured product. Calder was expressing so much freedom and movement and the freedom of form and the movement of shape in space or in non-space. I think Calder's is for me almost the ultimate non-space art or interzone art, because it’s a sculpture, but when you think sculpture you usually think it stands. But it doesn’t so it’s kind of interzone-y and very graphic also at the same time, and so soft and hard and I think we were out for that kind of language.

Also, at the moment we are - because I think fashion moves in waves - enjoying fashion, very much. I’m enjoying men very much, the position at Dior, it’s such a contrast you know and such a beauty also to be able to have the possibility to express in such a major historical context in Dior for women. On the other hand we’re expressing ourselves or I’m expressing myself with my team in an environment which is free and still so young as a brand. We’ve been around for two decades but still I feel like it’s the brand’s teenager and I like to keep it like that, so we are in a very positive mood. I think we wanted to show a lot of energy tonight and freedom and we want to push the men’s a little bit because I - again not from a critical position - but I see there is a lot of behaviour in men’s fashion, which is systematic. It’s a lot about all these kind of clothes that can be easily combined with each other and it's less and less, I think, about making a fashion statement. I find that rather surprising at the moment when so many people, and so many young people, are surrounding fashion and getting more and more interested. I’d prefer to come from out of our world to push them or give them all the possibility.

We are a grown up brand on the one hand - we have a show room where you can of course, get your classic suit and tie - but on the other hand, I think in terms of showing, in terms of having a dialogue about fashion, we want to have the dialogue and I think there are a lot of things happening right now, in fashion in general and that is why it’s a good moment to start a dialogue. There’s a new generation coming in moving away from Paris. I also want to say you can move away from Paris if you want. Maybe it needs us to, so people also dare to do it, but even for me, I started to feel obliged to show clothes on the previous show. When you have shows there are eight shows in a day and there is a show before you, you feel obliged to show right after that show, in a maximum of ten minutes after that show space. Already that limited me in the ticketing process because there was no space that we liked. Only this historical space or only this trashy space. It was ‘let’s do our thing, let’s do what we need to do to express what we want to say this season’. Originally I was even thinking of just going out and createing a new kind of energy. In the beginning it was scary but on the other hand, I feel it was something that can also excite the audience as much as they can be upset about it when they need to spend more time getting to a show. It’s also not that automatically we will do it every season. Maybe next season I will find an environment in Paris that is perfect for the collection but for this situation it needed to be shown in another context.

DD: I also felt there was this kind of gender aspect this season. The collection felt almost genderless and I don’t know whether that was a concern of yours?

Raf Simons: I think it has always been hanging around our brand a bit. It’s a brand that pushes fashion forward and that means that automatically there is more experiment to it. Although we are still defined really as 100 per cent Raf Simons men’s only, we have women clients, women buying and wearing our clothes which is very exciting for me. I don’t feel at this moment in time to want to specifically design something for women because I find it fascinating to see the fact that women want to buy things that they see on men. I think that’s also an evolution. I think it goes in two directions and for the rest I can only say it’s a very natural way for us to behave. It’s not that we over think - it’s very natural. We feel it’s almost a party mood. We’re enjoying it and we show electricity and show energy and, at the same time, show nature.

All the boys were natural tonight. There was nobody who did the hair for them. We showed them as they come so it was very much about the way of dressing, the way of choosing the clothes as a way to express yourself. It was not a camouflage in terms of how you can create yourself with hair or product or styling. You think about the collection and that is what is interesting right now. You can just take it or leave it but hopefully take it.

Source: dazeddigital.com

 

[Marc10]

A NEW TRADITION
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE WORLD'S MOST FORWARD-THINKING DESIGNER TAKES OVER THE MOST VENERABLE FASHION HOUSE IN PARIS? RAF SIMONS ON HIS JOURNEY FROM ANTWERP TO DIOR

Profile by Tim Blanks. Photographs by Willy Vanderperre. Styling by Olivier Rizzo.

"Confusion is one of my favorite words," declares Raf Simons. "When there is confusion, there is dialogue." He is musing on the critical response to someone like himself, part man of the moment, part discombobulating harbinger of things to come. "Dialogue is about creating an interesting debate, about creating momentum." And there is plenty of that in a conversation with Simons. It's like catching up with an old friend from school, someone you haven't seen for a dog's age whom professional success has elevated to a higher plane, but who still worries about the same intense making-the-world-a-better-place issues. And thank Christ for that.

In the world of high fashion—and there is scarcely fashion higher than the world of Christian Dior, which Simons now straddles as the house's creative director—he is a humanist anomaly, a commonsensical riposte to some of the curious orthodoxies that prevail in the industry. Why, for instance, are catwalks alive with flights of fancy, while stores often seem to be selling the same old, same old? "It doesn't feel right to me," he says. "I'd rather find a beautiful balance between what we show and what we sell. At my age [45], I'm happy to try to find a way to succeed on both levels. It's one thing to make yourself into a designer where everyone says, 'Oh, you're so genius!' then nothing sells. It needs to be on people's backs. That's ready-to-wear."

Simons launched his career in 1995 as a designer of menswear that rapidly moved the goalposts of male fashion, chilling it with a razor-thin, hard-edged urgency drawn from the punk and electronic music he loved. One of the most mesmerizing aspects of his Dior tenure so far has been the way that Raf then connects with Raf now. "In the early days, I wasn't even thinking about runway shows as a possibility," he says. "It was more about making clothes, and the attraction of people wearing those clothes. I think that attraction—the emotion of a man or woman dressed in things you're doing—is coming back very strongly. It's very often the reason to start communication. I got disconnected from that as things got bigger over the years. Dior has reconnected me. It was fantastic what clients had to say at the Dior Joaillerie dinner after the last couture shows. They wanted to sit and talk."

That notion of reconnection—so subtly but forcefully insinuating as to link the superficially unlinkable—is the thread that ties together Simons' own Spring collection for men, his Dior couture collection for Fall, and Dior's latest ready-to-wear collection, for Spring 2014. "I have a problem seeing couture as this thing that has to be very different aesthetically and mentally from ready-to-wear, from fashion for people," he muses. "It's weird for me to think about couture and focus on its old aspects. I find it more challenging to link it to what kind of life we live these days."

Contemporary life doesn't faze Simons. "I am embracing what our world is becoming. It's very propaganda, very man-made, a world of speed, a world of fast, direct communication. Our world is very produced. It's a lot about consumption. I want to make collections that show that. But under that are the basic ingredients I am always interested in: a certain kind of romance, darkness, youth." In a world of speed, a shadow must inevitably pass over youth and beauty and—eventually—everything else. That melancholy scenario has, in a subliminal way, often provided the poignant core of Simons' own collections.

But now that he's at Dior, there's something else in play—his own fascination with how Christian Dior himself would have responded to the changes wrought in the decades following his death, in 1957. "Everyone defines the Dior aesthetic around the Bar silhouette and the full skirt and the Femme Fleur, but that was only ten years. What if Dior had gone through the sixties, the seventies, the eighties…? He was interested in very different things. I found him revolutionary in taking risks. He was very liberated in the way he reached out to the women of the world, to different cultures and religions."

Not so long ago, the notion of Raf Simons helming the house of Dior would have seemed like a surreal idea, but he has risen to the challenges he's set himself to a remarkable and surprising degree. Take his last couture show, set against digital backdrops created backstage in the moment by four stellar fashion shooters. Dior himself, friend to Dalí and Giacometti, might have appreciated the collaborative nature of the whole shebang. "I love collaborations and reinterpretations," Simons says animatedly. "It's inspiring to see my clothes in different situations. I know there are designers who have problems with that, who only want their clothes shot as complete looks by magazines, but I'm the opposite of that. The more you open up, the more things come in."

He's encountered that kind of open attitude within the walls of Dior. "It's as if everybody wants so much for it to be nice, not just the collection but the atmosphere, the mood. I think that's because the presence of couture is still so strong. It's just all these women sitting together. It's a pretty calming feeling for a designer, very different from when you're sitting in a room presenting to seven different manufacturers, none of whom may be able to do what you want."

Equally reassuring has been his role as creative director. "How I see myself at Dior is very different from how I see myself in my own brand. Creative directors are not in charge. They are a link in a chain. That is calming for me. It works very well because we are all together. It's actually the same with Dior and with my own business. I need to have an environment where people decide things and believe in things together."

Which brings us almost too neatly to Antwerp, spiritual and actual home of a surprising number of the people who are responsible for the current health of the fashion body politic. The images on the previous pages were created by stylist Olivier Rizzo and photographer Willy Vanderperre, both Belgian. Simons met Rizzo more than twenty years ago in Antwerp, when Simons was interning with Walter Van Beirendonck after graduating in industrial and furniture design from the college in Genk, and Rizzo had a holiday job in WVB's studio. A level of professional success that takes them away from home far and often has come to them all, but they still see things the same way, hang out the same way, share a state of mind and a language. "We've all been feeling, 'Let's get back to Antwerp,'" says Simons. "Then we did things together because that was our world. Now we have a lot of nostalgia for doing these things again in Antwerp. It's very much a need, I think, for this small environment and strong friendships."

Simons, Rizzo, and Vanderperre are arch global fashion arbiters, and yet, says Simons, "At the end of the day, we all carry Antwerp so much in our hearts. On New Year's Eve, we're all together. None of us could imagine it any other way." And now, neither can I.

style

 

[Flashbang]

It is nearing 11 p.m. on Tuesday when Raf Simons, the artistic director of Dior and something like the current rock star of fashion, walks into a darkened room to the loud patter of minimal techno. The music segues into a driving, squelchy, 4/4 thump. In the center of the space is a towering, eighteen-foot-tall LED monolith flashing geometric shapes. Oh, but this isn’t an early start to a rave—it’s an *evening at the Guggenheim.

Simons, who is Belgian and splits his time between Paris and Antwerp, is in town for the museum’s international gala, of which he is an honorary co-chair and Dior a sponsor, and he is here tonight for the walk-through rehearsal. Simons has a reputation for being enigmatic, shying away from interviews and letting the clothes speak for themselves. But there are a couple of things he seems happy talking about—specifically techno and art, both of which he’s geeked on. And which are both combined in the strangely bifurcated two-day gala: a dance party the next night and a 400-person dinner the night following.

Simons has come straight from the airport, arriving solo (meeting a Diet Coke his publicist had waiting for him), and despite the six-hour flight from L.A., the 45-year-old looks quite dashing—steely blue eyes highlighted by dark bushy brows. He’s wearing slim black pants and a brown thick-knit cardigan with a buttoned-on black collar over another sweater and a blue gingham shirt. “I go to L.A. very often,” he says, speaking softly in a deep voice with a gentle Flemish accent. “One of my closest friends is an artist named Sterling Ruby and he’s just got a baby boy and I went to see.”

Simons crosses the rotunda—past production people wheeling large dollies and staffers flown in from the Paris office—to a small stage where the techno musician Richie Hawtin, a.k.a. Plastikman, was doing his sound check. “I listen to his music every day,” says Simons, kind of dreamily. “I am quite an addict to it. I shouldn’t say this, but I listen to him up until my assistants say, ‘Now, that’s enough for today!’ and I have to change the music.” Plastikman’s music is now bleating like a broken spaceship engine.

Onstage, Hawtin, who has a mostly shaved head except for a groomed, blond comb-over, is operating a complicated-looking, vast control panel: the music, and also the impressive gigantic video sculpture—his creation, unofficially titled Obelisk—that is the centerpiece of the party. Hawtin says it’s “inspired by 2001,” the Stanley Kubrick movie. “But that object is black and sucks all the light in, and this is white light.”

“Do you know who designed the monolith in 2001?” Simons asks. “John McCracken.”

“No! I have a McCracken at home!” says Hawtin. “He’s one of my favorites.”

“I am sure. I am sure it’s a McCracken,” says Simons. “Well, I need to check online later.” As it turns out, McCracken did not design that monolith, and spent the last decades of his life amused that everyone thought he did.

A former furniture designer, Simons never studied fashion; he studied industrial design, which shaped his career as a sleek modernist, first with his namesake men’s brand (founded in 1995), then with *minimalist-futurist womenswear for Jil Sander, and now with Dior, where his collections have been the critical hit of the year.

“I used to be a club kid full-on back in the day,” he says, and first met Hawtin ten years ago at a techno festival in Ghent. “His music to me is like classical.” An electronic soundtrack seems appropriate for Simons’s stern menswear label, but more at odds with his output at Dior so far—the graceful, updated–New Look, full-length couture dresses with nipped waists, and sets featuring garden hedges and oversize flowers among the very ladylike touches. “How Dior is perceived by everybody and what it is transforming into becoming are two different things,” he says, a little gnomishly. And who says floral wouldn’t be appreciated in space?

Simons ascends the ramp of the tiered building to check out the Christopher Wool retrospective—a wry painter best known for stenciled-letter paintings. The first canvas is stark white with letters that spell out fool. The others are abstract, one with minimal circular brushstrokes, the other crowded. The rumbling music bleeds in and works so well with the paintings it makes the show seem like a complementary installation piece.

“I’m a huge Christopher Wool fan,” Simons says, pausing to admire the work, which will round out the décor at the Plastikman dance party. “The coming together of these two people I admire so much is quite unique.” Simons owns two of Wool’s paintings, he says, one of which hangs in his Paris atelier: “It says, GET THE **** OUT OF MY HOUSE.”

*This article originally appeared in the November 18, 2013 issue of New York Magazine.

Photograph by Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos/New York Magazine

nymag.com

 

[Marc10]

Raf Simons Opens His Atelier—and Shares His Label—to Artist Sterling Ruby for the Most Complete Designer/Artist Collaboration Yet

On January 15, Raf Simons will show his new men’s collection in Paris. Except it won’t be his name on the label. Or at least, not his alone. “For one season, the brand ‘Raf Simons’ will not exist,” the designer boldly declares. Instead, he’ll be sharing the billing with Sterling Ruby (below), “one of the most interesting artists to emerge in this century,” according to The New York Times. Same could be said for Simons, of course, but, on the surface at least, that looks like the only thing they’d have in common. Whether painted, sculpted, dripped, slopped, or bronzed, Ruby’s work is extravagantly physical, monumentally messy—or messily monumental. Simons’ isn’t. Extravagantly emotional, maybe, but otherwise a masterwork of purity and precision. But we know that surfaces deceive. Designer and artist are, in fact, a perfectly compatible duo. “We have similar sensibilities that surface when we speak about music and art,” Ruby confirms. “And even before our collaborations, we were talking a lot about textiles.”

Those collaborations have included the interior of the Raf Simons store in Tokyo and a handful of outfits from Simons’ first couture show for Dior, which referenced Ruby’s paintings. But this time it’s radically different. “Fashion has a long interest in collaborative situations,” explains Simons, “but what interests me now is to say that this is not just a collaborative thing, not just asking someone in my field to do the knitwear or the bags. This is all the way, all the way. There is not one shirt, one shoe, one sock that is not from our mutual thinking process.”

The challenges such an endeavor presents seem obvious. Geography, for one, when the creative process so physically involves one person based in Antwerp and another in L.A. Simons insists that even if Ruby wasn’t at every fitting, every single decision was made jointly.

Then, on some level, there is surely the issue of dimensionality, meaning the scale of Ruby’s own work versus menswear’s dimensions (there are rumors of a coat composed of seventy-five different types of fabric, which sounds pretty, er, massive). But that was a challenge Simons saw as his own: for the designer to find solutions to technical issues so the artist’s creativity wouldn’t be restricted. “It was less of a challenge than you might think,” Ruby offers. “I have been thinking about my studio as a kind of Bauhaus. In the last couple of years, I have been producing my own work clothes to wear at the studio, work shirts, pants, and jumpsuits. They are made from bleached denim and canvas, materials that I also use to make some of my artworks. In my work I have been thinking about the moment the utilitarian object becomes an aesthetic object.”

The last Raf Simons collection for men offered a shiny Warholian pop/art vision of the evolution of product in a synthetic world. This one promises the polar opposite: do-it-yourself handcraft dewed with the sweat of an honest workingman’s brow. That hypermasculine image is very much in keeping with the spontaneity and physicality of Ruby’s work. “But what shouldn’t be forgotten about the rawness of Sterling’s work is that it’s about someone who takes complete control as a person and an artist,” Simons points out. It’s a paradox he explored in his own early work, when his designs twisted the raw DIY ethos of the punk, new wave, and electronic scenes he loved into intensely disciplined dissertations on youth culture. Those days—before everything got so much more “industrialized,” as he puts it, for him—have been on his mind a lot lately. “When you’re thinking about a new collection,” he says, “your own history is very much in your thoughts.”

Even before the collection is subjected to the jury of public opinion, the experience has had a transformative impact on its protagonists. “Very liberating,” says Simons. “I know this independence is what people like most about my brand.” For Ruby, it’s been an education in the unholy speed of the fashion industry. “It seems like an endless cycle for designers, and they make decisions so fast,” he says. “I am thinking about how I could incorporate that kind of immediacy into my own work.”

Simons is keen to underscore once more the essence of the project. It is not a simple collaboration, a case of a designer bringing in an artist to create a T-shirt or a bag. But nor do the creators want what they’ve done to be perceived as art. January 15′s show space has been carefully selected so that it couldn’t possibly be construed as an “art” environment. (This from a designer who showed last season at Larry Gagosian’s newest Paris gallery.) “We are making a men’s fashion collection, not an artwork,” Simons insists.

But logic is equally insistent. With the Simons/Ruby collection being one of the most attractive and fully conceived offspring of fashion and art’s courtship, there will undoubtedly be people who prefer to hang the clothes on their walls. Simons is typically unfazed. “As much as we feel free to do this, anyone who buys it should feel free to do whatever they want with it.”

style

 

[Scott]

this is sounds brilliantly pure in its collaboration to me. and i'm a big fan of ruby's….i love the texture and rawness he often employs in his pieces and the sound of 75 different fabrics,bewitches me to no end.