Alongside his own fashion label, Raf Simons' talent continues to find expression in a collaborative range of beautiful furnishing fabrics
Raf Simons has a habit of asking questions when he is answering one, but the queries are mainly directed at himself as he sifts through the validity and merit of what he has just said. This verbal tic provides an insight into the workings of a great creative mind – inquisitive, insistent, informed – that has helmed a much-lauded menswear label for 21 years as well as directing the houses of Jil Sander and Christian Dior. The Belgian fashion designer stepped down as creative director of Dior womenswear last October after a three-and-a-half-year tenure and his departure seems to have put a spring in his step. He is relaxed and upbeat as he talks me through the latest additions to his range of fabrics for the home, an ongoing collaboration with Kvadrat.
“Its DNA is very attractive to me,” he says of the Danish textile manufacturer. “I was already working with its fabrics in my fashion collections so the relationship has evolved organically over time. I actually started this just before Dior but it didn’t see the daylight until much later because we took more than a year for the first development. There’s no hurry. It’s very different to how things work in fashion right now. Of course everybody’s happy if it’s successful, but not once have [the Kvadrat team] ever said to me, ‘this is our expectation’. Never. They believe in me, I believe in them and it’s a marriage. It’s in their nature to collaborate with creative animals.”
Indeed, for almost 50 years the textile innovators at Kvadrat have worked with an impressive roster of artists, architects and designers including Verner Panton, David Adjaye, Patricia Urquiola and the Bouroullec brothers. Signing up Simons was nonetheless something of a coup – not least because the eyecatching fabrics that resulted from their collaboration have been so well received by the trade, and a home-accessories range (including cushions and throws) has made Kvadrat’s products easily accessible to consumers for the first time – and has no doubt also contributed to the company’s rapid growth in recent years. Its turnover has doubled in the past five years and international expansion is gathering speed.
Simons clearly relishes the slower, more considered pace of product development that the interiors world affords him, contrasting the breakneck speed that the fashion merry-go-round required of him with Kvadrat’s “roughly once a year” approach to new launches.
“Having the timeline of a year is like heaven for me because at Christian Dior I used to do eight collections a year and each collection could contain up to 150 fabrics,” he says. “I’ve done three fabrics this year for Kvadrat and I really, really pay attention to it. It’s beautiful to be able to give a project substantial incubation time. When I did fabrics at Dior I had to choose them within a couple of hours sometimes – seeing everything, deciding, making colour palettes… then hoopla – launch.”
The setting for the latest Kvadrat-Raf Simons presentation – a white-walled contemporary art gallery in Berlin, Galerie Thomas Schulte – is an intimate, minimalist riposte to the drama and decadence of those fashion shows (Simons’ Dior debut featured ‘rooms’ created from a million flowers). The sparse backdrop also serves to highlight its centrepiece – two spectacular hanging chairs by the neo-rationalist architect and designer Franco Albini. Originally created for the Milan Triennale in 1940, Simons saw a picture of the suspended ‘chairlift seats’ when he was studying industrial design.
“I was always struck by that picture and fascinated by the chair, but I could never find out what it was exactly,” explains Simons, who tried in vain to find the originals once they were attributed to Albini. “I have been looking for the past 20 years or more and never saw them in a gallery, a museum or an auction.”
When the Kvadrat team heard that the new fabrics were inspired by the striped upholstery of the Albini chairs, they managed to get hold of plans of a 1988 reproduction from the Triennale Foundation and were given permission to reproduce them. The new chairs were installed at the Berlin gallery as a surprise for Simons, who is still in awe that his fantasy has been made real and is bedecked in graphic fabrics of his own design.
“The fact that these chairs are here now is more striking to me than to anyone else I think,” he says, in lightning-quick but heavily accented English. “It’s a beautiful circle and very satisfying for me because I get the same feeling when I see the fabrics in stores or on a chair as I did when I first started designing and spotted someone wearing one of my coats.”
The evolution of social media has made street style spotting immediate wherever you are in the world, and identifying the Albini chair would be much simpler and swifter now, yet Simons questions its perceived value. “These days it’s a different way of consuming [culture]. It’s now looking and then swiping to the next thing – looking, next; looking, next; looking, next; next, next, next, next – there’s less dialogue and engagement with it in general,” he says, comparing the vogue for swiping and liking with his own youth. “There weren’t that many things reaching us, so that when we picked up on something, we went in-depth. We would investigate, we’d follow, try to understand… whether we liked it or hated it we would still have a conversation about it.”
Simons’ own rise to prominence is a fashion fairy tale of a plucky small-town dreamer whose parents were a night watchman and a cleaner. Born in Neerpelt, Belgium, in 1968, Simons studied industrial design in Genk but became disenchanted with the prospect of having to move to Milan to make a name for himself in the product-design world. Inspired by the work of Belgian designers such as Martin Margiela, making waves in the early Nineties, Simons headed to Antwerp instead with the intention of studying fashion. The head of the fashion department at the city’s Royal Academy was so impressed by the samples he took to his entrance interview that she encouraged him to start his own label without further ado. Launched in 1995, the Raf Simons menswear label has led the charge of those forging new ideas in men’s fashion rather than merely presenting centuries-old tailoring with the aid of stylistic twists.
“When I started out it was a time when you could do that kind of thing without a structure but it’s not possible any more,” he says. “Fashion has become such a big thing. When you are just a kid from the streets somewhere you start slowly, maybe with just two people watching and then 10 and 50 and 100. These days that can grow really fast. Suddenly millions of people are watching.”
Although Raf Simons is still a relatively niche brand – often highly conceptual and always infused with counter-cultural references – where Simons leads others follow, in both immediately obvious and more subtle sartorial ways. He laments the lack of space for young fashion brands that share the same spirit of innovation to thrive in an increasingly commercially driven industry.
“Everyone is paying attention to the wrong thing in my opinion. There’s this huge debate about ‘Oh my God, should we sell the garments the day after the show or three days after the show or should we tweet it in this way or Instagram it in that way?’… You know, all that kind of bullsh*t. Will all that stuff still be relevant 30 years from now? I don’t think so. What we should ask is will we have enough creative people who are strong enough and willing to do what is necessary right now to follow that madhouse. Lots of people are starting to question it. My generation especially is shifting now… like me and Phoebe [Philo], Nicolas [Ghesquière] and Marc [Jacobs]. We’ve been around for 20 or more years. We know what fashion was and where it’s heading to. Now it’s a question of what we are willing to do and how we are going to do it.”
For now, Simons is concentrating on his menswear label and more mainstream clothing collaborations with Fred Perry and Adidas, but since his exit from Dior the fashion rumour mill has been rife with speculation about his next big move. He doesn’t exclude the possibility of taking another similarly high-profile position (“It’s not like now it’s only about small and niche because I do think it’s interesting if your voice reaches out to the world”) but is keen to clarify the motivation behind his departure.
“It is a very beautiful house and it was incredible to be able to take part in that heritage, but in the end it was just too much for me,” he says. “Do I think now it was a mistake to go there? No, no. It was a fantastic experience and a fantastic time. I wasn’t planning to go there for such a short period, but I was also not willing to sign up there for a long period. So it became complicated and I decided to get out. That is partly due to the system that fashion has adopted. It is speeding up and up. Every season I see so many things evolving at such a speed that I think certain creative people, including myself, are just not willing to do it any more. I don’t want to. If you work on that level, you miss out on a lot of things.”
Simons still divides his time between Antwerp and Paris, but his comparatively relaxed schedule has afforded him the opportunity to indulge in simple pleasures such as buying a Beauceron puppy with his boyfriend. His work for Kvadrat suits this more domestic lifestyle. “Working with this Danish company is so small and intimate and it’s something I can do all by myself at home if I want,” he says. “It’s an ongoing project until they get fed up or I get fed up. But that won’t happen anytime soon because it’s extremely satisfying for us both. I think Kvadrat is incredibly original and strong without being trendy just for one season. It’s long-lasting and I like that.”
Raf Simons’ new collection for Kvadrat is available at Skandium from May 1
He didn't know Dior had so many collections before signing... Oh well.
