Hitting pause on the production of any fashion show with eight days’ notice is a logistical nightmare, but that’s espe - cially the case when you’re dealing with the most hotly anticipated cat - walk show that London has seen in years.
Over the past four weeks, that’s the situation that Raf Simons, the esteemed Belgian designer, has been navigating. Originally set to present his eponymous label’s SS23 collection on 16 September during London Fashion Week, plans that were almost a year in the making ground to an abrupt halt when news broke of Queen Elizabeth II’s passing. While he could have pressed ahead, he chose to put the show on hold out of respect for the late monarch — a decision taken by a number of other brands originally set to show during the week.
‘I have to say, it’s been the strangest experience in my life — and I’ve been doing this for 27 years!’ he says down the line from Antwerp when we speak. ‘It’s the first time that we were showing abroad, which already complicated things, but then we had to cancel. I never realised how complicated that would be. You almost have to start from scratch.’
The difficulties aside, the new rescheduled date felt almost like kismet. His decision, after all, to present a collection in London — the first time his namesake label has foregone its usual spot on the Paris schedule — harks back to last year’s edition of the art fair. ‘I hadn’t really been in London for a while, but after the fair, we went to so many different exhibitions, restaurants and walked around,’ he reminisces. Mayfair’s Georgian terraces, Camden’s oregano-hawking punks, Soho’s night-time din: it all amounted to a madeleine moment, a sudden reminder of ‘how I just love the energy of what’s happen - ing in this city so much. At that moment, Bianca [Quets Luzi, Raf Simons’ CEO] and I instantly agreed that we had to do a show here.’
Simons’ choice to come to London represented a much needed endorsement of the city’s status as a global fashion capital. A vindication that, despite sterling’s recent nose - dive, London’s style currency remains strong enough to draw in one of the most important designers working today.
The scope of Simons’ influence is hard to quantify. Whether or not there’s anything in your closet with a Raf Simons label on it, if you are a wearer of what could loosely be defined as menswear, you have probably been subject to the designer’s effect.
Simons is one of the few designers to whom Miranda Priestley’s infamous cerulean sweater monologue in The Devil Wears Prada wholeheartedly applies. His runway shows have been at the epicentre of some of the most significant shifts in menswear history over the past quarter century. The slim tailoring of his earliest collections countered the stuffiness of the suit with a boyish naivety, essentially prefiguring the rakish silhouettes that were a tent pole of menswear in Paris from the late 1990s until the early 2010s. The graphics-strewn oversized bombers, squared vests, skate tees and knit sweaters he has fielded since the turn of the millennium have played a crucial role in shaping today’s insatiable appetite for luxury streetwear, and its unfathomably lucrative primary and secondary markets — four years ago, an MA-1 bomber from his AW01 collection, Riot! Riot! Riot!, fetched $47,000 (£42,500) on fashion resale platform Grailed.
The only places I’ve ever felt that people really do extreme fashion to go out are London or Belgium
The designer has also significantly impacted womenswear design history. During his tenures at the helms of Jil Sander and Dior, he fused traditionally feminine codes with a sharp, garçonne-ish sensibility, and at Calvin Klein, his cerebral revisions of the brand’s Americana heritage were critically — if perhaps not commercially — lauded. Currently, he is a co-creative director of one of fashion’s most revered houses, Prada, a seat he occupies alongside Miuccia Prada. And beyond fashion, his work has had a pronounced effect on the worlds of art and culture. He has collaborated with American multimedia artist Sterling Ruby and the estate of Robert Mapplethorpe. And in music he created a capsule collection with band The xx, while rappers A$AP Mob released an entire song, ‘Raf’, as an ode to the designer.
To echo Cher Horowitz from Clueless, Raf Simons is indeed a totally important designer. It was, therefore, with both a collective sigh of relief and an unabashedly excited squeal that news of the designer’s London rescheduling was received. Roughly a month on from its originally intended date, the show is happening during this week’s Frieze, the global art event of which Simons is a longstanding patron.
His love for London extends back to long before he had even visited the city, to his bored adolescence in the Flemish village of Neerpelt (now absorbed into the wider municipality of Pelt), right on the Dutch border. His strict Catholic schooling fuelled a dissident ‘desire to be individual’, he says, a fire that was stoked on discovering early issues of magazines such as The Face and i-D. ‘Very early on, they really introduced me to the London scene — Leigh Bowery, the Blitz kids, Terry and Tricia’s [Jones, i-D founders] street-style photography, with people shot against the wall in the street…’ he fondly recalls. ‘All of that is very much at the base of who I am as a designer.’
In the early 1990s, as an industrial design student in his early 20s, he then saw those pages come to life on the regular trips he would take across the Channel — spending days wandering Camden’s labyrinthine markets and admiring the city’s night owls in their peacockish get-ups. ‘One of my most distinct memories is of getting the Tube on Friday and Saturday nights and seeing all the party kids,’ he says with a chuckle, memories that have echoed across the aesthetic tapestry of his output since formally starting his fashion design career in 1995.
Throughout Simons’ oeuvre, there are distinct references to London and wider British culture that stand out — his adoration for David Bowie and Mark Leckey, and his repeat collaborations with Peter Saville, Fred Perry and Dr Martens to name a few. More than any particular set of cultural touchpoints, though, what he’s most drawn to is the city’s inimitable spirit. ‘There’s something very interesting in the clash between the history and tradition of the city and the people within it and the way they dress,’ he muses. ‘And then there’s the buildings, the atmosphere, the light — sometimes you really feel like you’re in Jack the Ripper’s time and 2022 at once!
‘And from a fashion perspective, that energy — that clash of different kinds of styles, attitudes, ethnicities — is something that you really feel in the streets,’ he continues. ‘In London, I feel fashion everywhere, at any time — and it’s not only fashion in the sense it’s usually understood. It’s style and individuality — how people dress up, how they have their hair, how they have their make-up, how they behave, how they walk.’
He adds: ‘The only places I’ve ever felt that people really do extreme fashion to go out are London or Belgium. In Belgium, we had the New Beat era [the grungy precursor to hardcore and gabber rave popular in the late 1980s]. You’d go to a club and it would have a specific music genre, a specific way of dancing and a specific dress code. Not that it was obliged, it just naturally happened.’
Just head to one of the many queer and POC-run parties — Maricxs, Pxssy Palace, Cousins and GutterRing among them — to see this same spirit alive and well. It’s exactly this energy that Simons sought to both venerate and manifest at his show at Printworks, the defunct printing press turned techno temple in Rotherhithe — London’s answer to Berlin’s Berghain, the designer says. Upending the linear show-to-afterparty trajectory, the party itself is the runway. Or rather, the runway runs through the party, as Simons explains with infectious excitement: ‘It’s in a space that’s already very much set up for a club night. When you enter, it’s all going on. Clara 3000 is DJing, there is a bar on one side… And then at one point, we switch on the lights and music, and the focus shifts to the raised bar, where the models walk. The show happens, the waiters come back and the party continues!’
More than just an excuse for a knees-up, though, Simons’ main intention here was to upend the hierarchies that govern almost any fashion show. For starters, it’s a standing affair, immediately doing away with the seating chart politics he knows well from having staged some of the hottest-ticket events in contemporary fashion history. ‘We didn’t want to have everybody seated and invite only the usual fashion crowd,’ which, out of 800 attendees, only ‘makes up approximately 20 per cent of the audience. We’ve also invited many students from London’s fashion schools, designers, gallerists, curators and friends.
‘I really love this idea of democratising a fashion show — of seeing a person who might usually find themselves on the front row next to a club kid or a student in their first year at CSM. We prepared for some chaos,’ he continues with a knowing giggle, ‘but I’m really interested in that at the moment. I’ve done a lot of shows where everything is very overproduced and controlled, and I want the opposite of that mood for my brand.’
The clothes themselves pay homage to the sweat-hazed dance floors Simons so often looks to for inspiration — though hardly in ways that one would expect. ‘I didn’t want to come to London and show you Blitz kids. That wouldn’t feel new,’ he says. ‘But I also can’t come here and not think about what it means to go out dancing. Ultimately, it’s a very reduced version of what you could possibly see as “being dressed up” for movement, or to go clubbing. It’s also about freeing up the body, and it’s quite sexual, too. But I think it’s actually the barest, most minimal collection I’ve ever done.’
It’s about freeing up the body, and it’s quite sexual. It’s the barest, most minimal collection I’ve ever done
An exercise in subtractive cutting, menswear archetypes are strategically hacked away at, reduced to their most minimal versions. A tailored, grey wool blazer is pared back to become a skimpy tank top, while classic men’s trousers are ‘cut to such a degree that there’s hardly anything left except a front panel and back panel’, the designer says. ‘Literally the only things that you would need to be covered.’
A bit of trivia for any art nerds reading: the material is also intended as a subtle homage to the slumped, stuffed-hosiery ‘body’ sculptures of Sarah Lucas, an artist Simons deeply admires. While that reference may be intentionally obscured, the designer’s deep-seated love for art makes itself less obliquely known in this season’s collaboration with the estate of the late Belgian painter Philippe Vandenberg.
Known for his moody, abstract tableaux and provocative text works — some created using his own blood — the artist tragically died by suicide in 2009. While his output could hardly be described as joyful, Simons argues that there’s nonetheless a glimmer of hope to be found in the pieces that have been incorporated into the collection. ‘You’ll see some of the paintings, but also some of the text drawings, which are extremely radical — and which can be easily misunderstood,’ he says. ‘Some of them say things like “KILL THEM ALL AND DANCE”, but when he writes that, it’s not about actually killing people. Rather, it’s about being able to kill your own work, to evolve and then make something new. It’s about the choice to reject your own things, or even destroy them, in order to come to it again with this kind of new energy, these new possibilities. In some senses, it’s almost euphoric.’
As intense a sentiment as it may seem, it hints at what has spurred Simons consistently to produce work that not only resonates with but defines the time in which it’s created: fearlessness in the face of the new. ‘For most designers, you tend to like what you like — to always sit in the same kind of language, or with the same kind of ideas. But with this collection, it was simple,’ he says. ‘I just really wanted to try things that I would have never tried before.’
