Raf Simons on Life in New York, Designing Under Trump, and the New Generation of Designers Who Look Up To Him
We sat down with the designer and new chief creative officer of Calvin Klein for an unusually raw and candid interview just days before his NYFW debut.
Raf Simons has settled in to New York. He’s relocated his life, his business, his partner, and his dog—a tall, intimidating beauceron named Luca. That’s who greets me with a few stern barks when I enter Simons’ office in midtown. “She just barks,” Raf tells me. Luca is a protector. The dog laps the perimeter of the room a few times before settling into a bed just outside the door. The wall by the elevators says Calvin Klein, but I came to talk to Raf Simons about Raf Simons, the label Raf started in Belgium back in 1995. Next week he will present the Fall-Winter ’17 collection of his namesake line at Gagosian Gallery in New York during NYFW: Men’s. Later next month, he will show his first collections for Calvin Klein, where he is now serving as chief creative officer. He’s wearing an oversized varsity cardigan from his acclaimed "Twin Peaks” collection, frayed and mended like he’s had it for decades (even though it’s from this season). A plate of pastries is delivered to the table in front of us and we begin.
GQ Style: Have you found your favorite coffee shop and place to get a martini in New York yet?
Raf Simons: I have to be really honest with you, we didn’t really do a lot, besides working. It’s the first season—maybe I should say seasons—and I know exactly how that goes. It’s the third time I’m doing it. It requires full focus, so we are always here, basically. And when we have the opportunity to take some time, we go out with her [Luca]. We go out of the city where it’s beautiful and green. We go to the Berkshires. We’ve been to Connecticut. I’ve been coming for many years to New York, for whatever reason. I come here for three days for a shoot, or a week to just hang out, and we’d do so much. Everybody always says, “Yeah, but when you live in New York it’s not like that.” I’m like, “No! I’m going to see shows every day, museums every day.”
No. I haven’t done a lot since [we arrived]. I saw a couple of shows. The Agnes Martin show at the Guggenheim, for example. Some gallery shows. In the beginning we’re taking care of the house. You close down the whole thing in Europe, move it over, organize the the whole thing. It’s a whole different life. We have a big dog. So no. Not yet. No coffee shop and all that. The house, yes. We have a house and it’s really nice and really together now. We feel very at home there.
Does living and showing in New York have an effect on your creative output?
Yes. Big time. The city is always inspiring. But I think when you are here all the time it is inspiring in a different way, obviously. I can be very honest about it: Both collections are going to relate very much to how I experience it. How I see it. How I have always seen it. And how I might want to see it. It relates to myself and my roots and Europe. Both collections, in a very different way—maybe one more America, the other one Europe.
You’ve come to New York during a fraught time. Do socio-political situations influence your work?
Yes. But I’m not gonna say—I’m gonna show. It’s too fragile to express in words. It’s something you have to feel. I’ve always thought that it’s interesting if I can cause a relevant dialogue, or a constructive dialogue.
Do you think that fashion and design can be a form of rebellion or resistance? With a situation like Donald Trump’s presidency, can it be a form of protest to design or to just get dressed in the morning?
Yes, I think it can be a form of resistance. But no more than any other person taking a position or speaking up. I don’t think that because it’s fashion it’s more of a resistance.
It’s also difficult to talk about because one thing is that when you come as a European to America, it’s already quite something. My whole existence had a very specific foundation in Europe. Belgium, Paris, Milan. My company was established there and is based there still. But I had to rethink the whole thing because the one thing that I said is that, if I step into a new creative director position, I’m not traveling anymore. I came to an age where I found that to be the very annoying part of the job. Because I’m really still challenged by doing these two different things. I always like to do that. In the early days, before I became creative director of Jil Sander, I was also always doing two things. The brand and art curating. Or the brand and teaching at university. And then it became two brands. Jil-Raf. Dior-Raf. Now Calvin-Raf. And it’s very interesting for me, those two roles. I think it makes me very alert. Instead of becoming lazy in your own settled thinking process and environment. But I just can’t cope with the travel anymore so everything was restructured. My people come here. We have an office here for my company.
So all of that together is a lot. Coming here. Living here. Your partner. Your dog. It’s a new city. New experiences. Starting a new job. And then suddenly—woosh!—something happens which is like the last possible thing you could even imagine.
Donald Trump.
Yeah. That’s how we experienced it. Literally, you start thinking, Oh my god. What did we decide here a half-year ago? And then you can go and sit there and [cry] or you can just say, I’m going to do my thing. I have things that I have to do. And I have not only a responsibility, but a challenge.
I’ve felt a lot lately like I felt a very long time ago when I started in fashion. I had a love hate relationship. I’m not trained as a fashion designer, I’m trained as an industrial designer. It’s quite a different kind of dialogue that people have in that world. It’s more like the environment of architecture and design and art. It’s a different way of behaving. A different dialogue. A different speed, also. A different process to come to an end result. I used to have this love and hate relationship with fashion because I thought it was a lower form of creative expression. And at the same time I started to feel that it was dull. I thought, Oh my, we just keep on producing clothes, clothes. Like, we could do something so much more relevant, you know? Until one person said to me—and I’m not going to name the person—but the person literally slapped me in the face and said, you have to start looking at it differently, because otherwise you’re never going to be proud and happy about what you do. Because you inspire people. You bring something out that they literally need. So you do a good thing. Not a bad thing. And that’s how I’ve started to think lately.
You ask these questions, I cannot answer them literally. I can just say that I know that I’m doing something that people are going to feel good about. I know that. Maybe some of them hate my stuff, and they can go somewhere else. But I’m not doing nothing. I’m already doing something. I think that if people have to deal with this thing that they can’t deal with, and there is something they really like, it’s going to make them feel better.
I’m constantly thinking about what could I do on a bigger scale. I’m thinking a lot about it. And I’m watching a lot of the people who do speak up. Like the march and all these women. But I also question a lot. Like, What is this all going to become? I open the newspaper and I see that he’s ordering a wall. I’m like… It’s almost like the middle ages or something. I cannot believe it. You know, I’ve been doing this thing for 21 years. People do their thing. I do my job. Then you watch a television series like Game of Thrones and you think, Oh my god, it was like that back in the days. Then you see all the evolution. You know, we went through the sexual revolution—I thought.
The civil rights movement.
It’s almost incredible that something like that has been manifesting in a country like America.
Throughout your career, you’ve referenced youth and rebellion. How has your perspective on that changed? Because in the 21 years since you’ve been designing, what it means to be a young person has changed radically.
This collection is going to relate very much to your question.Very much. I’m thinking a lot again about that period when there was a political climate that caused punk. My thing is not gonna be punk, but you know, what it meant, and why it came at that point—the whole thing with England and Thatcher.
I’ve been thinking also about the bourgeoisie of fashion—and the new youth of fashion, who has no interest whatsoever in the bourgeoisie of fashion. Then I’m thinking about the structures of the high fashion world. And I’m thinking about all these young kids who have a whole new world out there which does not relate to the events where the high bourgeoisie is. It’s also about the relationship between things which are the highest and the lowest. Which could possibly be the garment itself. What could be the lowest of the lowest, and what could be the highest of the highest?
And then there’s this other thing: The mother and the son thing. Also with Thatcher and the punks—I think that a good president or a good king should be a good father or a good mother to their children.
So thats where it started when I began thinking about doing that kind of collection, which might be the beginning of a series that I’ll try to do. It’s eras with me very often. There was this era where I started to think a lot about the relationship between audience and spectator. And I made them all standing again, and there was a party mood and freedom. I said what I needed to say. Now we’re talking about something else. And I think that body of work that I’ve been showing in that last 3 years maybe, with all these shows, from the Sterling [Ruby] show on—the Twin Peaks show and the Florence show—they were not reactive shows. They were not reacting against or reacting. They were just shows that were more related to a collaboration, for example, with Sterling. Or they were related to things that were always in my mind, whether it was Twin Peaks and horror movies, or my parents. Right now it’s way more related to what's going on in the world for me.
.. huge fan, I think he's perfectly capable of capturing sensuality (which is far more interesting than sex appeal) but his work, if you're familiar, has always evolved a bit in snail pace, which to me is normal in every field actually.. that's how interests and exploration work, not in fashion of course, you're supposed to do and be a bit of everything and sometimes not yourself apparently. Just as he was starting to explore silhouettes (mostly female curves) and different beauty types, all these commercial gigs came along (which Dior contributed to) and I think that whatever he was trying to go from there was left hanging and became quite bland, a bit like trying to build legacy out of one doodle. 
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