RAF SIMONS STILL DOESN’T THINK OF HIMSELF AS A FASHION DESIGNER. BUT THE GREAT TRANSLATOR OF MODERN EMOTION, YOUTH CULTURE, AND OUR COLLECTIVE FUTURE HAS TRANSFORMED THE WAY MEN DRESS—AND REDEFINED THE WAY WE THINK ABOUT FASHION
It is evening in Antwerp, and Raf Simons has had a full day of fittings and was out late the night before celebrating a staff member’s birthday. His voice is husky and a bit strained, but his fluidity with words belies any fatigue. Contrary to his reputation as press-shy and reclusive, the 40-year-old designer is, in fact, quite a talker. He speaks without hesitation about his repressed childhood growing up in a little village in northern Belgium under the shackles of a Catholic education (“They wanted to keep you away from anything that had to do with creativity,” he sniffs), and is forthright about every topic set before him, save one: his rumored takeover at Maison Martin Margiela. Last fall, during the women’s collections in Paris, talk of him replacing Margiela, the fashion world’s supreme recluse, reached fever pitch. It was even reported that the two designers met to discuss the idea. But Simons refused to comment then, and when pressed now, he keeps mum. “I hate that I have to say this,” he admits, sounding genuinely pained. “But I cannot comment.”
Gossip aside, in fashion circles Simons is all the talk right now, his name invariably accompanied by adjectives like influential, innovative, and important. But while his profile has been raised greatly since he assumed his position as creative director of Jil Sander in 2005, Simons has been impacting the way men dress since the start of his career in the mid ’90s. As one of the first designers to send out slim-cut suits on skinny kids plucked off the streets, he helped initiate a new attitude in fashion—a youthful awkwardness that would soon become the ideal. “It was very different from what menswear had been up until then,” Simons recalls. “There was this power man with muscles. We were young skinny kids, shopping at the flea market trying to find a look for ourselves, an unglamorous approach. We didn’t relate to Versace.”
Simons has since built his career on capturing, like lightning bugs, the ephemeral attitudes and ideas of youth culture. In the summer of 2001, he sent out a collection called “Sometimes You Have to Fight for Your Freedom.” Inspired by the worldwide anti-globalization protests of the previous few years, it included big trench coats and baggy sweaters, hooded tops and balaclavas. It reflected Simons’s ambivalence about his own place in the fashion firmament and demonstrated his willingness to inject politics into his collections—a choice that came to seem eerily prescient a few months later, after the attacks of September 11th.
“At the end of the day, fashion is connected with what is in the air,” Simons says. “It is very much about the moment in time. It can be meaningful today and completely unmeaningful tomorrow.” And by channeling “the now” through extreme tailoring and innovative fabrics, Simons always seems to be pushing fashion forward. Funny how the fashion visionary never had any formal fashion training.
“Yes, it’s true!” he admits. “I was so isolated in the village I grew up in, I was not even aware that art or fashion schools existed.” Instead, he studied industrial design,
something he’d learned about from an architecture book. It was 1985, around the time that the seminal Dutch fashion collective the Antwerp Six was emerging, and Simons found himself drawn to the young designers. He began interning for one of them, Walter Van Beirendonck—designing not clothes, but furniture and perfume bottles. Soon after, he witnessed his first fashion show. It was Margiela’s, held in an abandoned children’s playground in a predominantly black part of Antwerp. As the models emerged, dressed all in white, the local children ran to them; the models picked them up and continued on, the kids sitting on their shoulders. Simons—who is, as one soon learns, a very sensitive man—started crying. “But I looked around and everyone was crying!” he recalls. “Before that, fashion was very abstract to me. This way of presenting a feeling—I’d never experienced it. I was never aware of that kind of impact, and that was the point when I realized that was what I wanted to do.”
Simons, who launched his line in 1995, is reluctant to credit his industrial-design education with the streamlined aesthetic of his clothing. For him, fashion is about humanity, about expressing feelings and telling a story. His Spring 2009 collection, with its sleeveless bodycon jackets, cigarette shorts, and elongated tops with the collars sliced off, presented the sharpest silhouettes of the season. It reengineered traditional tailoring in ways that are sleeker, smarter, more modern. It is clothing configured for Simon’s own sublime notion of the future—a place full or art and poetry and ideas never before imagined—and will undoubtedly influence the direction of men’s fashion. The approach comes naturally for him. He has never felt pressure to produce an intrinsically modern collection, he says. “I have an interest in exploring the future, in being more conceptual and extreme. I never sit down and think, ‘What should I do?’ It’s the life and environment [my design team and I] breathe in and out. It’s our soup and potatoes. We communicate a lot, and build collections out of that.” The situation is similar at Jil Sander, a brand that, like Simons’s own, has always embraced the future. “It was so natural to go there,” he says, adding that it took him a tenth of a second to say yes. “But I was scared. One of the goddesses of fashion walked out, and I walked in, and I had never done women’s clothing before. But at the same time, I felt very supported.”
Despite his success in the industry, Simons says he still doesn’t regard himself as a fashion designer. He explains it’s because he has so many other interests. Art, in particular—he gets choked up expressing his love for it. “It is so fascinating for me to experience someone else’s point of view. I take it very often as an inspiration. It’s even hard for me to talk about it—it’s such a part of me and so woven into my life. If I have money, I buy art. I like to have an environment where I have it present. I think about it constantly.”
A few years ago, Simons’s passion for art led him to begin questioning his own purpose in life. “I said, ‘What are we doing? It’s all about aesthetic, surface.’” And a friend who works with me said, ‘What we do is give something beautiful. Look at how much shit there is around. For a lot of people, that is very important—it is something that makes their lives complete.’
“To think of it that way gives me such energy,” Simons says, sounding close to tears again. “It gives me a very good feeling.”
ALL CLOTHInG RAF SIMONS
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