Article Title 9

Fashion Theory, Volume 19, Issue 1, pp. 9–42

DOI: 10.2752/175174115X14113933306743
Reprints available directly from the Publishers.
Photocopying permitted by licence only.
© 2015 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.

Raf Simons and

Interdisciplinary
Fashion from
Post-Punk to
Nick Rees-Roberts Neo-Modern
Nick Rees-Roberts is Lecturer Abstract
in French at the University of
Bristol. His research focuses on
contemporary film and fashion. Since the launch of his menswear label in 1995, Belgian designer Raf
He is the author of French Simons has consistently caught the zeitgeist of contemporary fashion,
Queer Cinema (2008) and
co-author of Homo Exoticus:
supplying menswear with a range of styles, shapes, and symbols that
Race, Classe et Critique Queer articulate ideals of masculinity, influenced by European pop music,
(2010). He is currently writing youth subcultures, mid-century fine art, modernist architecture, and
a book on Fashion Film for
Bloomsbury.
interior design. This article examines the interdisciplinary relationship
[email protected] between Simons’ designs and their contextual influences, documenting
how his signature, first established in menswear, has been transformed
through his womenswear collections for Jil Sander (2005–12) and since
10 Nick Rees-Roberts

2012 for Christian Dior, where he has reinterpreted the house’s couture
heritage. Drawing on archive material at the MoMu Fashion Museum
in Antwerp and the Dior Impressions exhibition at the Christian Dior
museum in Granville in 2013, this article further argues that a cross-
gender dynamic is perceptible in Simons’ later designs, part of his for-
mal or “neo-modern” preoccupation with shape, color, and technology.
The article concludes by suggesting that Simons’ nomination at one of
the most prestigious of the Parisian fashion houses and global luxury
brands positions him as heir to the artistic and architectural strand of
the couturier’s legacy, making him instrumental in Dior’s projection of
its design heritage.

KEYWORDS: contemporary menswear; fashion, art and architecture,

Raf Simons, Christian Dior, Jil Sander

Raf is one of the great pioneers of convergence, transporting the art

of sub-cultures into contemporary fashion.

Peter Saville (Dazed and Confused, January 2011)

Mr Simons was at his peak, slicing and seaming plaid squares in

unlikely colors like mauve with green. Checks were worked into
an egg-shaped coat, the straight-line geometry further accentuated
by the seaming. The designer reinforced his clear, clean style with
brightly colored leather tops over slim pants or with the lines of
flowers set at an angle. This was a master class in “less is more.”

Suzy Menkes (International Herald Tribune, June 27, 2011)

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of having an architectural

calling.

Christian Dior (Christian Dior and I, 1957)

The sonic blast from Belgian dance band Technotronic’s 1989 hit Pump
Up the Jam signaled the start of the Raf Simons Spring/Summer 2014
show, part of the Paris men’s fashion week in June 2013. The setting
was unusual. Rather than present the collection in Paris, Simons chose
the recently inaugurated Larry Gagosian art gallery at Le Bourget in the
northern outskirts of the city. The gallery space, a vast 1950s industrial
structure transformed by architect Jean Nouvel, is positioned opposite
Europe’s largest business airport, a revealing indication of the project’s
commercial stakes. Simons’ decision to set a fashion show in a postin-
dustrial gallery space shows the extent to which contemporary luxury
and high-fashion houses strategically intersect with the global art and
design markets through what Hal Foster has termed “the art-architecture
complex”—the creative and commercial intersection of contemporary
 Raf Simons and Interdisciplinary Fashion from Post-Punk to Neo-Modern 11

art and architecture configured as “a primary site of image-making and

space-shaping in our cultural economy” (Foster 2011: vii).
Setting aside the conceptual experiments in formal tailoring present
in previous collections, Simons reclaimed his pop culture heritage by
returning full circle to the youthful freedom and graphic intensity of his
first collections in the mid- to late 1990s. The 2014 collection (Figure 1)
playfully included black jersey “onesies” gesturing to the innocence of
baby-grows and elongated print tops with advertising slogans in bold
colors, combining a pop modernity (through the use of saturated colors

Figure 1
RAF SIMONS (Spring/Summer
2014).
12 Nick Rees-Roberts

and synthetic materials) with a sense of futuristic potential (through

the reconfigured silhouettes and the unisex hints of gender subversion).
The calculated juxtaposition of influences from pop culture with other
inspirations from fine art, architecture, interior and industrial design
has become Simons’ authorial signature, evidenced by the menswear
collections for his own label since 1995 and his output as creative direc-
tor at Jil Sander (2005–12) and since then at Christian Dior, widely held
to be the most prestigious creative position in the fashion industry. In
the case of the Spring/Summer 2014 menswear collection, the conversa-
tion between fashion and the connective industries of art, architecture,
communications, and design was not simply a rhetorical gesture. The
choice of location provided a material representation of Simons’ con-
ceptual framework by taking advantage of the concurrent exhibition
of works by mid-century modernist sculptor Alexander Calder and
industrial designer Jean Prouvé, both celebrated in their time for their
expressive, forward-looking manipulations of form, shape, and technol-
ogy.1 The sequential procession of models was staged around Prouvé’s
large-scale structures with guests seated in and around the transparent
“Total Filling Station” (1969) and the iconic “Demountable House”
(1944). This imaginative use of the performance space was further en-
hanced by a number of Calder’s whimsical kinetic sculptures, metal and
wire mobiles that toy with notions of gravity and motion—“the idea of
detached bodies floating in space” illustrative, in the artist’s vision, of
“the ideal source of form” (Calder 1951: 8–9).
Simons is one of the most celebrated contemporary fashion designers,
part of a generation that emerged through the late 1990s and early 2000s,
including Alber Elbaz, Nicolas Ghesquière, Lucas Ossendrijver, Phoebe
Philo, and Hedi Slimane, all now in tenure in the leading Parisian design
houses. They are collectively associated with an architectural vision—
a shared focus on form, shape, and technology, which, I argue here,
requires the critical attention of contemporary fashion scholars. As we
shall see, Simons’ designs both for his nominal label and for Christian
Dior characteristically involve a collision between the elevated and
the immediate, the classical and the futuristic, the conceptual and the
wearable (Figure 2). In what follows, I shall attempt to chart Simons’
trajectory from an interdisciplinary perspective, seeking to tease out his
creative influences from across the spectrum of pop music and culture,
contemporary visual art, and modernist architecture and interior de-
sign. Beyond that contextual framework and beyond the fundamentally
collaborative nature of fashion design, I shall also examine Simons’ own
distinctive interrogation of the material object, paying formal attention
to shape, tactility, and technology. Drawing on the study of a number
of key designs archived by the MoMu Fashion Museum in Antwerp,
I juxtapose the revision of couture history at Christian Dior with the
groundbreaking ideal of masculinity that first shaped the streamlined
silhouette dominating menswear of the 2000s.
 Raf Simons and Interdisciplinary Fashion from Post-Punk to Neo-Modern 13

Figure 2
RAF SIMONS (Fall/Winter
2012–13).

Subculture

Simons trained as a furniture and industrial designer, securing an in-

ternship in 1990 at the Antwerp office of fashion designer Walter Van
Beirendonck, where he worked on the interior design for the label’s
showroom. It was there that he met artist Peter de Potter and stylist
Olivier Rizzo, both subsequent collaborators and contributors to the
designer’s aesthetic language. Van Beirendonck was part of the original
wave of Belgian designers (the “Antwerp Six”) emerging in the 1980s,
14 Nick Rees-Roberts

collectively positioned as a conceptual avant-garde (Teunissen 2011).

The creation of Belgian fashion ex nihilo was supported by Antwerp’s
drive to establish itself as a cultural hub (Martínez 2007), thereby fash-
ioning a national brand that stuck to a second generation of designers
in the 1990s and to the parallel emergence of Martin Margiela, whose
deconstructionist challenge to fashion history caught the decade’s fin-
de-siècle zeitgeist of decadence and decay (Evans 2003: 35–7).
While working for Van Beirendonck, Simons was exposed to Paris
fashion, the main platform for the international promotion of Belgian
design, attending shows by Jean Paul Gaultier and Martin Margiela in
1989. More than the former’s elaborate sense of spectacle, it was the lat-
ter’s third collection (the “white collection” shown with black children
in a Parisian playground) with its trashy conceptualism, graphic purity,
and emotional resonance that captured Simons’ imagination. His pref-
erence for monochrome was further influenced by the non-referential
fashions of Austrian designer Helmut Lang, whose icy aloofness and
contrived simplicity impacted heavily on the dominant trend for mini-
malist design through much of the 1990s, perhaps best epitomized by Jil
Sander’s iconic white shirt. Superseding the perceived brashness of late
1980s European fashion (the excessive styles made famous by Claude
Montana, Thierry Mugler, or Gianni Versace), “it was Lang’s cool, ur-
ban silhouettes, marrying basic shapes with edgy color combinations
and advanced technological fabrics, which were both the crucial look
for fashion insiders, and the key influence on other designers, eager to
find a new vision of the modern” (Arnold 2001: 20).
Lang has described the challenge of his own designs, presented at
experimental séances de travail rather than at conventional catwalk
shows, along with the conceptual Belgian and Japanese fashions shown
in Paris since the 1980s, as a “silent counter-movement” to the domi-
nance of Saint Laurent, Mugler, and Gaultier, helping to configure the
more modern, streamlined silhouette that took root later in the 1990s
(von Olfers 2010: 54). Simons’ early run of menswear collections,
though influenced in shape and tone by Lang’s reduced silhouettes and
cool distance, reflected a more sinister frame of reference, bringing
the austerity and precision of the mod suit into dialogue with a new
range of codes and meanings. By 2005, Simons was perceived as one of
the most influential designers of menswear (Horyn 2005), known for
emblematic pieces such as the narrow-shouldered, skinny black suit,
foreshadowing Hedi Slimane’s aesthetic appropriation and commercial
exploitation of a similarly razor-tight silhouette for the Dior Homme
label (Rees-Roberts 2013). Other core Simons pieces include white
sleeveless shirt tops, wide-leg trousers, oversize layering, and low-key
street-wear with counter-cultural symbolism. Simons’ early designs con-
trasted the rough-and-ready style (frayed sleeves on shirt tops) with the
material delicacy of the fabric—a translucent cotton/linen mix with for-
mal, starched collars. Simons’ proposition for menswear is, in essence,
 Raf Simons and Interdisciplinary Fashion from Post-Punk to Neo-Modern 15

antinomic: fashioned around material formality and symbolic severity

(ciphered through the imagery of a disaffected youth culture) combined
with an underlying fragility (alluded to through the use of delicate fab-
rics on vulnerable bodies).
The graphic simplicity of Simons’ menswear was apparent from the
start: the videos made to promote his first collections between 1995 and
1997 (shown at art galleries and design studios in Paris) were statements
of intent, symptomatic of the emerging label’s core aesthetic sensibility,
cultural values, and formal shape. The detection of a more “feminine”
feel to Simons’ later menswear collections subverts the darker imagery
that his label has consistently traded in: a fashionable silhouette of an al-
ienated, youthful masculinity, now commonplace on the men’s catwalk
(Furniss 2011). Simons’ first collection for Fall/Winter 1995–6 took its
inspiration from English school uniforms with a characteristically tight
silhouette in dark colors. The promotional video for the Spring/Summer
1996 collection continued the tight silhouette inspired by David Bowie
in the late 1970s, showing three boys and a girl (fellow-designer and
former girlfriend Veronique Branquinho) hanging out, playing records,
and trying on clothes (Figure 3). It combines nods to both commercial
music video (set to a soundtrack of songs by Britpop band Pulp includ-
ing My Legendary Girlfriend and Underwear) and artistic home video
(through the coyly voyeuristic presence of the camera and the sub-erotic
display of bodies). Branquinho’s effortless cool is counterbalanced by
the hip boys, who show off Simons’ collection of oversized knitwear,
bomber jackets, and skinny ties worn under leather coats—a tribute
to the styles of British pop culture after punk, incorporating hints of
gender indeterminacy and an undertow of sexual transgression. “Pop
music,” as Jon Savage observes, “still requires the willing feminization
of young men” (Savage 1995: xxiv).

Figure 3
RAF SIMONS (Spring/Summer
1996).
16 Nick Rees-Roberts

The amateur video for Fall/Winter 1996–7 (We Only Come out at
Night) filmed a group of friends watching horror movies, playing ghost
games before getting dressed to go out. The display of Simons’ black
formal suits was couched in a broader set of musical references taking
in 1980s pop classics from Visage, The Human League, and Kate Bush,
whose own gothic sensibility complemented Branquinho’s romantic
androgyny. The last of the promotional videos shot for Simons’ early
menswear was the most ambitious: How to Talk to Your Teen (Spring/
Summer 1997) continued the New Romantic pop frame of reference
(with music by Depeche Mode, Japan, and Underworld) but crystal-
lized the label’s sensibility by shifting the generational focus specifically
to teenagers, foregrounding the social tension between conformity and
freedom, thereby underscoring the formal impact of uniformity and rep-
etition on fashion. The interest in movement is conveyed through shots
that are captured in slow motion of the teenagers dressed in school
uniform, escaping to a secluded meeting place in a futuristic concrete
tower. The scenario switches to sci-fi as they are transported to a sparse
white interior, the setting for a display of the designs. A kaleidoscope
effect culminates in the presentation of the monochromatic collection
with the alienated models assembled in a sectarian circle. The inclusion
of biker helmets signals the tonal shift from the world of sexually in-
determinate English pop to European electronic minimalism, foreshad-
owing Simons’ later show-length homage, Radioactivity (Fall/Winter
1998–9; Figure 4), to influential German synth band Kraftwerk, the
pop prototype of a minimalist modernity—both forward-looking and
stripped back.2
While the designer’s remapping of the visual coordinates of male
youth has on occasion been interpreted as a transparent vehicle for
social commentary (particularly the vision of global terrorism and
social insecurity in the Fall/Winter 2001–2 and Spring/Summer 2002
collections), his menswear designs in fact juxtapose a more diffuse set
of ideas, emotions, and states of being, blending the everyday quality
and commercial potential of the clothing—the shrewd combination of
pure lines and street styling—with less immediately legible references
and inspirations drawn from across the spectrum of pop culture, visual
media, and the applied arts.
Along with the publication in 2005 of a retrospective book of the
designer’s menswear, Raf Simons Redux (Frisa 2005), which sought
to enshrine him as one of fashion’s principal innovators, Terry Jones,
founder of i-D magazine, provided a synthesis of the designer’s creative
impact on the industry, describing his references ranging from architec-
ture to pop music as intended “to form garments that have celebrated
the alienation and absorption of adolescence.” Employing a regular
group of models cast from the streets of Antwerp, Simons’ early col-
lections played with the shapes and volumes of menswear with a preci-
sion that took him “beyond the confines of the form” (Jones 2013: 74).
 Raf Simons and Interdisciplinary Fashion from Post-Punk to Neo-Modern 17

Figure 4
RAF SIMONS (Fall/Winter
1998–9).

Surpassing both the limited templates of menswear and avoiding a

glib citation of post-punk styles, Simons’ early designs envisioned an
alienating masculinity rather than reflecting back a mirror image of the
here-and-now.3 Rather than nostalgically reproducing the surface allure
of youth subcultures, the designer has consistently underscored an in-
definable element through the transposition of the language of punk.
Simons’ adoption of the term “interzone” references proto-punk writer
William Burroughs’ seminal work, the disjointed and hallucinatory
nonlinear narrative Naked Lunch (1959), as well as post-punk band
Joy Division’s later appropriation of the term for a song on their debut
18 Nick Rees-Roberts

album Unknown Pleasures (1979). “Interzone” is intended to capture

fashion’s inherent porosity (the in-between space connecting art, design,
and commodity culture) and the importance of interdisciplinary activity
to Simons’ creative practice. The term also alludes more precisely to a
futuristic, marginal, and otherworldly ideal of masculinity, the screen
prototype for which was David Bowie’s gaunt alien figure in The Man
Who Fell to Earth (Roeg (dir.), 1976). This menacing edge was apparent
in Simons’ contribution (2001 minus 3) to the Biennale di Firenze in
1998, co-curated by Terry Jones and Dante Ferretti. Simons presented
a disturbing live installation in which three teenage boys were confined
within a clinical, white reconstruction of the designer’s own Antwerp
apartment for the three-week duration of the event.
Simons’ menswear is concerned as much with control and precision
as it is with uniformity and repetition, a link to mod dressing and styling
that Alexander Fury has noted in the designer’s preference for buttoned-
up shirts. An inherent atmospheric quality of a Raf Simons show is a
“tension barely concealed beneath a tightly buttoned collar” (Fury 2013:
70–1). The “Confusion” collection (Fall/Winter 2000–1) blurred the
boundary between uniform and formal menswear by including pleated,
high-waist woolen trousers with wide bottoms and turn-ups, a veiled
reference to Bowie’s own mid-1970s take on earlier twentieth-century
menswear through the persona of the Thin White Duke. Dressing men
in uniform has also allowed the designer to exploit the historical fault
line in both high fashion and subcultural style between social con-
formity and individual rebellion, a recurrent feature of Simons’ work:
“Repetition has become this obsession for me now … By sending out
male models all wearing headscarves, I think I’m enhancing the sense
of repetition but not necessarily decreasing any sense of individuality
you might get from the guys I’ve cast” (Heath 2002: 370). The proces-
sion of half-naked (but nonetheless asexual) boys in the “Black Palms”
collection (Spring/Summer 1999) illustrated the particular relevance
to fashion of a conceptual understanding of difference within repeti-
tion—Gilles Deleuze’s postulate of “indifferent difference” through the
repetition of a unique series of objects as opposed to the generality of
cycles (Deleuze 1994[1968]: 15). The show’s visual impact was derived
from its serial rotation of tall, white male bodies, all shrouded in loose
black tailoring combined with elements of subcultural street-wear.
The “Teenage Riot” collection (Fall/Winter 1999–2000) built on
this monochromatic formalism combined with counter-cultural iconog-
raphy, employing the same set of models carrying placards with the
inscription of signifiers of insubordination, such as incubation, disorder,
and confusion, offset by the buttoned-up white dress shirts and formal
black trousers. Voluminous capes were used dramatically to emphasize
the models’ pale white skin and jet-black hair. This deathly procession
of disaffected youths included some striking elements of formal experi-
mentation such as chunky black knitwear under sleeveless coats, and
Raf Simons and Interdisciplinary Fashion from Post-Punk to Neo-Modern 19

black leather tunics in the shape of bomber jackets. The collection’s

only minor color variation was a series of gray suits and red jumpers,
continuing the same minimalist coding from the previous season’s sci-fi-
encoded “Radioactivity” collection, based around Kraftwerk’s heritage
with its emblematic red shirts. Franky Claeys was responsible for the
graphic design for all of Simons’ collections in the later 1990s includ-
ing the emblematic “Black Palms” collection in 1998, with its black
and red imagery used to frame the collection of heavy-metal-style prints
and tight silhouettes. Despite the overall graphic simplicity of such col-
lections, “Radioactivity” also included intricate garments in clashing
materials such as a black jumper covered in a spider’s web pattern in
wool on one side and leather on the other. Another fragile sweater, with
a regular knitted collar, cuffs, and waist, had deconstructed sleeves with
suede, cotton, and woolen chain-mail motifs, the garment designed to
hang loosely on the body.

The Man-Machine

The Raf Simons menswear of the early 2000s transcended the stylistic
reimagining of a post-punk youth to incorporate a didactic commentary
on global terror and social dystopia with collections entitled “Riot Riot
Riot” (Fall/Winter 2001–2) and a video (Safe) shot to accompany the
Spring/Summer 2002 collection (Figures 5 and 6), capturing a bleached-
out, dystopian environment with political slogans designed by Peter
de Potter inscribed on the surface of the garments. The pallor of the
garments was contrasted by vibrant splashes of red and the theatrical
use of flare guns. The bright, sleeveless hoodies with ripped armholes
harbored textual fragments with apocalyptic messages translating the
imagery of male angst serially reproduced elsewhere on the garments.
A visual template for this collection was Todd Haynes’ film Safe
(1996), which deals with the cultural desire to give narrative shape to
unexplained illness, toying with a provocative AIDS analogy. Safe fol-
lows the trajectory of an alienated suburban housewife, Carol White,
played by Julianne Moore, who develops Environmental Illness, a form
of chemical sensitivity that transports her from suburban normalcy in
Los Angeles to a New Age institute in the desert of New Mexico, where
she retreats to a post-apocalyptic igloo, conceived as a metaphor for
the narrative’s movement towards paranoia and isolation (Potter 2004:
145). Moore’s flatly minimalist performance underscores the film’s tonal
blankness. Glyn Davis has explained its interplay of whiteness, illness,
and heterosexuality, through which Carol’s etiolated body slowly fades
away, the preponderance of static distance shots that linger on her frail
frame emphasizing this loss of identity (Davis 2000). The film’s bleached
aesthetic works to merge subjectivity and anonymity, the bipartite struc-
ture translating the shift from “questions of space” to “questions of
20 Nick Rees-Roberts

Figures 5 and 6
RAF SIMONS (Spring/Summer 2002).

being/ontology” (Doane 2004: 4)—from the perfect suburban interiors

to the estranged self-confinement within the futuristic pod.
Simons’ own video Safe transposed the tonal blankness of Haynes’
film to a series of monochromatic images of interchangeable models
wearing loosely cut, black and white casual clothing, including a number
of keffiyeh headscarves, which led the collection to be read politically, as
conveying a cross-cultural message. The dissolution of identity captured
through the final scenes of Haynes’ film was reframed by Simons’ com-
plementary vision of an anonymous, masked youth culture, marketed
as the insubordinate fear generation, filmed in a bleached urban desert.
Simons’ abstract social commentary, reducing contemporary politics of
the environment to an affectless and toneless look, communicated a
vision of male youth framed by the stark contrasts of “blinding white
and annihilating black” (Marchetti 2003: 55).
The use of theatrical staging to reinforce the visual impact of the
collections was later apparent in the nature-related “Virginia Creeper”
collection (Fall/Winter 2002–3), drawing on generic imagery from hor-
ror films. The artificial layering and padding of many of the garments
 Raf Simons and Interdisciplinary Fashion from Post-Punk to Neo-Modern 21

interspersed different types of fabrics and technologies to construct

an eerie image of the brutal industrialization of nature. The discursive
press releases accompanying “Virginia Creeper” and “Consumed: A
Reflection on Consumerism” (Spring/Summer 2003) reveal a designer
attempting to articulate a revised aesthetic language beyond the familiar
archetypes of post-punk pop culture, one concerned with the material
affect and future sustainability of consumer fashion. A subsequent col-
lection in 2008 was devoted entirely to the material world, showcas-
ing the juxtaposition of natural and artificial fabrics such as neoprene
in clashing colors (Figure 7). (This interest in techno-fabrics and the

Figure 7
RAF SIMONS (Fall/Winter
2008–9).
22 Nick Rees-Roberts

endurance of man-made fibers such as nylon or polyester—once the

epitome of mid-century modernity—was one that Simons developed
more thoroughly in his later womenswear collections for Jil Sander.)
Simons’ forward motion is not solely concerned with shape-shifting;
it also launches a critical inquiry into the haptic qualities of clothing.
Touches of material futurism such as fluorescent neoprene gloves made
an appearance in the Fall/Winter 2009–10 collection. Allusions to futur-
ist modernism (with shades of the early-twentieth-century celebration
of speed, industry, machinery, and youth) have also been made through
the settings of many of the shows. The visionary “History of the World”
collection (Spring/Summer 2005) wore its musical credentials on its
sleeve (with a soundtrack including New Order). But, with its futuristic
combination of white leather tunics, its setting at the spherical dome, La
Géode, situated in the science and industry park at La Villette in Paris,
and a press release name-dropping pioneering computer-scientist Alan
Turing and futurist physicist Nikola Tesla, the collection drew attention
to Simons’ own self-conscious positioning within a temporal dialec-
tic—the calculated fusion of past, present, and future. While Simons’
fashionable re-imaging of the doom generation tapped into fears of
globalization, unrest, and terrorism at the start of the twenty-first cen-
tury, his early menswear designs were equally prospective, revealing the
transformative potential of fashion imagery and pop culture.
Simons’ time-travel through the preceding decades of European pop
imagery combines references to the cold minimalism of British music
culture after punk, particularly the anguished introspection of Joy
Division, with the mood of Bowie’s Berlin period, which was marked
by the singer’s turn in the mid-1970s to a neo-European modernism
under the influence of Kraftwerk’s detached image and controlled
sound—a synth-pop conjuring up a vision of European pop as “mod-
ern, forward-looking, and pristinely post-rock” (Reynolds 2006: xxii).
In his retrospective account of the estate of Peter Saville, the art director
and graphic designer responsible for the iconic record sleeves for the
Joy Division and New Order albums, Michael Bracewell posits “elegiac
modernity” as the key locus, the set of all points through which the
graphic designer expressed both “the passing of modernism and the
replacement of modernist ideals with postmodern rearrangements of
context and quotation” (Bracewell 2012: 209). Saville’s combination
of the modernist geometries of form with the postmodern consumption
of imagery paralleled an overarching preoccupation with an “elegiac
pop minimalism”—the combination of an “exquisite, highly poetic
imagery with a kind of brutalist formalism” (Bracewell 2012: 218), a
sensibility close to Simons’ own. Given full access to the graphic de-
signer’s personal archive, the “Closer” collection (Fall/Winter 2003–4)
included a tribute to Saville’s work, transposing the language of fine
art to the world of commodity communications. The reproduction of
Henri Fantin-Latour’s painting A Basket of Roses (1890) on the cover
 Raf Simons and Interdisciplinary Fashion from Post-Punk to Neo-Modern 23

Figure 8
RAF SIMONS (Fall/Winter
2003–4).

of New Order’s 1983 release, Power, Corruption and Lies, was rerouted
through Simons’ own collection, re-inscribed on the front of T-shirts and
on the back of leather coats (Figure 8). The collection was accompanied
by the show’s invitation in the shape of a record sleeve. The ephemera
of catalogs and invitations are designed to complement the label’s visual
identity, dominated by monochrome black and white with disjunctive
splashes of red, close-up photographic portraits of the models and the
use of portentous post-punk language (“All shadows and deliverance”
was the strapline for “The History of My World” collection).
24 Nick Rees-Roberts

Intermission

Peter Saville’s graphic designs sit on the cusp between “the passing of
modernism” and “a postmodern environment of constant, simultane-
ous reclamations of the detailing and successive moods of pop-cultural
history” (Bracewell 2012: 148). Postmodernism can be situated as part
of the perverse legacy of Andy Warhol, whose prophetic vision of an
“art-celebrity-fashion nexus” is now the status quo (Church Gibson
2011: 5). The Warholian cliché of surface representation and serial
repetition is one that Simons has simultaneously challenged and per-
petuated through a visual interpretation of the artist’s legacy for his wo-
menswear collections at Christian Dior. His use of Warhol’s drawings
from the 1950s as a leitmotif running through the Fall/Winter 2013–14
ready-to-wear collection resurrects the artist’s more refined early art-
works, such as spidery shoe drawings embossed on handbags or por-
traits of women embroidered on bustier dresses, part of a commercial
partnership between Christian Dior and the Andy Warhol Foundation
for the Visual Arts. This type of co-branding operation puts the fashion
house into renewed dialogue with artistic creation—Christian Dior was
himself an accomplished art collector and gallery owner—while allow-
ing Simons to develop his personal interest in mid-century design and
his activities as a private collector of contemporary art. His collection
includes pieces by LA-based mix-media artist, Sterling Ruby, who is
known for his scratch-paintings and installations (Rawsthorn 2012).
As well as employing Ruby to design the interior of his Tokyo Aoyama
menswear boutique in 2008, Simons used images from Ruby’s splashed
paint prints on the satin fabrics used to make a number of gowns for his
couture debut at Dior in 2012.
A further collaboration with Ruby for the Fall/Winter 2014–15 Raf
Simons menswear collection (Figure 9) took the designer’s engagement
with contemporary art to a new level. Since Marc Jacobs’ celebrated co-
merchandising operation with Takashi Murakami for Louis Vuitton in
2002, art-fashion collaborations have become a routine part of fashion
branding, co-opting artistic signatures for commercial appeal. Simons
and Ruby, however, collaborated on the entire collection, blending color
with craft by splashing bright paint onto oversized formal menswear.
Danish fabric manufacturer Kvadrat, with whom Simons collaborated
on a parallel textile collection, provided the durable material for the
patched coats (Judah 2014).
Such collaborations investigate the potential interaction between the
visual arts and fashion, while at the same time delineating the formal
distinctions between both. Simons’ practice goes beyond a straightfor-
ward art-fashion collaboration (in which fashion is elevated through
artistic influence or in which art is commodified through product
development) towards a properly interdisciplinary project testing the
definitional parameters of both categories—interdisciplinary practice
 Raf Simons and Interdisciplinary Fashion from Post-Punk to Neo-Modern 25

Figure 9
RAF SIMONS (collaboration
with Sterling Ruby, Fall/Winter
2014–15).

understood as not only conjoining forms of knowledge or techniques,

but also undertaking “interrogatory work about what is left outside the
boundaries of given disciplines […] both the site of a productive joining
and the marker of the boundary between” (Downing 2012: 216, 218).
The fashion brands housed in the main European conglomerates
(LVMH, Kering, Prada Group, Richemont) are engaged in a cultural-
economic exchange with the global art market, investing heavily to
extend their influence across the interlocking forms of visual culture,
digital media, communications, design, and architecture, to create a
26 Nick Rees-Roberts

new intersectional definition of luxury, updating the historical dialogue

between art and fashion (Geczy and Karaminas 2012). The management
of this neo-luxury includes lucrative co-branding partnerships such as
Dior’s sponsorship—under Simons’ helm—of the annual Guggenheim
International Gala hosted by the museum in New York in 2013. Such
cooperation would suggest that Simons’ appointment as creative di-
rector at Dior was partly intended to facilitate the brand’s expansion
into the global art market while consolidating the designer’s creative
exchange with the visual arts. While the decorative aesthetic and the-
atrical sensibility of John Galliano, Simons’ high-profile predecessor,
had revitalized Christian Dior’s heritage in costume design, the strategic
appointment of a more circumspect couturier following the demise of
the star-designer enabled the house to reinforce its artistic lineage and to
project its intellectual aspirations. Simons’ previous engagements with
the art and culture industries had included curating a trans-medial exhi-
bition of imagery of teenagers, The Fourth Sex: Adolescent Extremes, in
Florence in 2002, and the Transmission: The Avant-Garde Diaries event
in Berlin in 2011, which was promoted as a “digital lifestyle hub and
event series” and sponsored by Mercedes-Benz to showcase emerging
talent from across the visual arts. (Simons chose an exhibition of pho-
tography by Peter de Potter called Image-Machine.) The event sealed
the corporate exchange between the fashion and automobile industries
focusing on shared interests in engineering, innovation, and technology.
Robert Radford locates the creative dialogue between art and fashion
in “the poetics of associated ideas” (Radford 1998: 155), a formulation
shared by Valerie Steele who has described fashion as a “cannibalistic
business” (Steele 2012: 25), channeling adjacent forms of visual media
(from high art to pop culture) to feed its constant creative need for con-
textual stimuli. Prior to his total collaboration with Sterling Ruby on
the Fall/Winter 2014–15 menswear collection, Simons’ artistic engage-
ment had involved embedding motifs from the work of earlier twenti-
eth-century artists in his own designs (Figure 10)—for Jil Sander these
included a chromatic tribute to Yves Klein’s blue (Spring/Summer 2008)
and a tonal tribute to ceramicist Pol Chambost (Fall/Winter 2009–10).
Simons reproduced Leonard Tsughura Foujita’s ink techniques show-
ing women’s faces on tunics in the Spring/Summer 2010 collection and
transferred Pablo Picasso’s ceramic designs onto sweaters in the Spring/
Summer 2012 collection. These stylistic flourishes draw attention to the
designer’s own fashionable translation of the formal preoccupations
with color, shape, and volume that inform the aesthetics of modernist
design. In an interview for a piece on nostalgia in Vogue in March 2012,
Simons described the allure of mid-century modernism and its influen-
tial transposition to his own Antwerp home, which contains furniture
by George Nakashima and Isamu Noguchi and ceramics by Valentine
Schlegel (Holgate 2012; Rawsthorn 2012). This contrived staging of
the designer’s own habitat aimed to complement his artistic reputation,
 Raf Simons and Interdisciplinary Fashion from Post-Punk to Neo-Modern 27

Figure 10
RAF SIMONS (Fall/Winter
2008–9).

but also, more strategically, to consolidate his neo-modern revision of

mid-century fashions and fabrics at Jil Sander and to promote an ongo-
ing reconfiguration of the couture heritage for the twenty-first-century
consumer at Christian Dior. Simons’ self-fashioning as an artist-by-
proxy follows in art and fashion’s shadow dance through the twentieth
century, including Dior’s own mid-century neoclassicism, which pushed
him “towards clarity of outline and shape, emphasized by black, and
carrying echoes of an ordered, formal world, where discretion rather
than spontaneity was stressed” (Wollen 2004: 173). Notwithstanding
28 Nick Rees-Roberts

the overall importance of the brand or the collaborative work of a de-

sign studio in the fabrication of ready-to-wear, Simons’ dialogue with
the visual arts strategically complements the authorship of his collec-
tions, a position rooted in the haute couture tradition with its emphasis
on the articulation of an individual signature and creative worldview
(Manzoni and Jourgeaud 2012: 5).
Unlike Jean Baudrillard’s earlier use of the prefix “neo” to indicate
an “anachronistic resurrection” of the past (Baudrillard 1998[1970]:
99), as symptomatic of cultural recycling, Simons’ re-evaluation of the
modernist design heritage transcends mere stylistic quotation and is
more attuned to the resurfacing of pure form characterized by the “neo-
modern” in contemporary theories of the built and designed environ-
ment. Tracing the historical convergence of fashion and architecture,
Bradley Quinn describes how early-twentieth-century architects drew
specifically on the formal functionality of menswear to argue against the
perceived feminine ostentation and decoration of the previous century.
Relying on core elements from engineering, mathematics and geometry,
such as proportion, volume, and mass, both fashion designers and ar-
chitects “produce environments defined through spatial awareness by
working with and against the human form” (Quinn 2004: 6).
Jacques Rancière has argued that the continued relevance of the
Bauhaus tradition of architecture and design, of the functionalist “para-
digm of the flat surface,” lies in its redefinition of “the place of artistic
activities in the set of practices that configure the shared material world”
(Rancière 2007[2003]: 103, 91). However, fashion’s return to the forms
of modernist architecture—“associated with smooth, pure and more
often than not, white surfaces” (Brennan et al. 2001: 5)—is also part
of a wider contemporary commodification of modernist design through
the communications strategies of luxury branding and the minimalist
aesthetics of corporate retail space, situated more broadly within an
era of total design (Foster 2002: 14). The pure lines of Simons’ later
menswear collections, for example, interpreted as a type of constructed
architecture (Menkes 2006), illustrate the designer’s willingness to align
himself with the stylistic heritage of the so-called “architectural” fash-
ion designers Christian Dior and Cristóbal Balenciaga. The recurrent
articulation of spatial metaphors also shows Simons to be operating
transversally, reshaping his aesthetic sensibility to suit his commercial
circumstances, imagining a design strategy that would cut across the
fine and applied arts, through what Rancière terms the regime of art, “a
network of relationships which informs the way an object, act, process
or practice is understood as art” (Davis 2010: 134). The philosopher’s
radical reimagining of aesthetic practice, as “a redistribution of the rela-
tions between the forms of sensory experience” (Rancière 2009: 24),
bypasses the standard historicist separation of modern from postmod-
ern, instead repositioning the artwork as an object of sensorial experi-
ence (Davis 2010: 136).
Raf Simons and Interdisciplinary Fashion from Post-Punk to Neo-Modern 29

The interior design of Simons’ retail outlets—both those for Jil Sander
and the standalone boutiques for the Raf Simons label in Japan—sug-
gests an affective manipulation of both commercial space and designed
object, a sensory experience that enables the designer to transpose the
material objects of fashion to another symbolic realm, one that seeks
to convey the immaterial values of brand identity as they are processed
through artistic and architectural paradigms. Ruby interpreted the Raf
Simons boutique in Tokyo as a visceral canvas by installing huge pho-
tographic prints of abstract splashes of blue paint on the walls and on
the furniture, so as to embed the clothing literally in the art. In contrast,
Roger Hiorns’ geometric structure for the label’s boutique in Osaka
carved out a sparsely hyperrealist space by dividing the boutique diago-
nally with a 9-meter mirror, surrounded by glass curtain walls displaying
clothes that appeared to float in midair. Angular geometry and reflective
surfaces were also the lynchpin of Simons’ own spatial design for the Jil
Sander boutique in SoHo, New York, in 2008 (Merkel 2010), conceived
as an art gallery presenting the collection sequentially in a static recrea-
tion of a catwalk show. At the rear end, vertical rotating slats shrouded
a white marble staircase, designed by artist Germaine Kruip, a creative
touch echoed by the freestanding, mirrored dressing rooms. This vision
of design was at once innovative and functional, translating into visual
terms the tonal sobriety and austere sensibility of the label.

Minimum–Maximum

Suzy Menkes’ report of the Jil Sander Spring/Summer 2012 collec-

tion, presented in Milan in September 2011, highlighted the designer’s
“meticulous modernism” in translating the label’s minimalist heritage
(beginning and ending with his take on Jil Sander’s iconic white shirt)
to the Italian alta moda spirit of couture (Menkes 2011). Rather than
simply consolidating Sander’s reputation as a minimalist designer,
Simons overturned the expectation by imagining a maximalist vision
of the label that continued to emphasize her purist sensibility through
experiments with color and form.4 Harriet Walker has traced the his-
tory of minimalism in fashion from the sartorial reduction associated
with early-twentieth-century modernism (architect Mies van der Rohe’s
maxim “less is more” transposed to Chanel’s fashionable functional-
ism), through the aesthetics of refusal associated with the artistic mini-
malism of the 1960s, to the purism of the late-twentieth-century mini-
malist fashion designs characterized by Calvin Klein and Donna Karan,
both influenced by the American tradition of casual sportswear. Sander,
who had founded her own label in 1978, became known principally for
her androgynous silhouettes and the conjunction of functional sobriety
with luxurious techno-fabrics such as neoprene, added for “architec-
tural fluidity” (Walker 2011: 92).
30 Nick Rees-Roberts

In Simons’ final collections for the Jil Sander label in 2011–12, a

feminine ideal resurfaced referencing Christian Dior’s neoclassical New
Look, preempting the designer’s subsequent tenure at the couture house
and aesthetically remolding modern eveningwear by banishing the ubiq-
uitous little black dress that had been a popular mainstay of the previ-
ous decade. The use of color blocking to offset the precise, functional
tailoring of both the Jil Sander menswear and womenswear introduced
a playful dimension to the label’s recognizable austerity. The women’s
Spring/Summer 2011 collection flirted with classical Hollywood glam-
our by ironically accompanying the display of billowing neon polyester
gowns with snatches of Bernard Herrmann’s musical score for Psycho
(Hitchcock (dir.), 1960). The collection included a floor-length evening
dress in vibrant orange made from a polyester outer shell and a smooth
silk lining, the synthetic fiber used to capture the garish color and the
luxurious fabric to sheath the body. This subtle disjuncture between the
haptic appeal and the visual quality of the garment was also to be found
in the winter collections, such as Fall/Winter 2009–10, which combined
fluid curves and mixed fabrics to modernize mid-century frock-coats
and dresses, using panels of robust fabric, ergonomically encasing the
body in a classically feminine shape. Simons’ individual contribution
to the label’s heritage was notable for such daring splashes of color,
“his embracing of bright neons, even romantic pastels, rendered in
everything from neoprene to chiffon and gauze” (Walker 2011: 152).
The abstraction of minimalism was undercut by the bold injections of
vibrant color.
Simons’ luxurious combination of classic tailoring and neon coloring
for Jil Sander was also manifest in the label’s designs for Tilda Swinton
for her role as Emma in Luca Guadagnino’s film I Am Love (Io Sono
l’Amore, 2009). Simons’ team collaborated with the film’s costume
designer, Antonella Cannarozzi, who was Oscar-nominated for her
work in fashioning the supremely elegant wardrobe of a family of rich
Milanese industrialists, including most notably the Fendi furs worn by
Marisa Berenson. Alongside this spectacular inclusion of luxury, the Jil
Sander pieces are memorable for their formal subtlety and chromatic
expressivity. Swinton’s character Emma, a Russian émigré and the adul-
terous wife of a rich textile industrialist, is delineated by Simons’ austere
tailoring, which on a purely narrative level indicates her social status,
but which on a symbolic level distances her from the surrounding opu-
lence through the maximal color coding. The film makes an obvious
opposition between Berenson’s “Italian” style—heavy on furs, jewels,
and leather goods, despite wearing the French label Hermès—and
Swinton’s pared-down model of functional professionalism (although
she too is adorned with an Hermès “Birkin” handbag). Emma’s subjec-
tive transformation from an empty clotheshorse to a passionate woman
is over-scored by Simons’ designs, which act out, rather than merely ac-
company, the character’s narrative arc. Karen de Perthuis has captured
Raf Simons and Interdisciplinary Fashion from Post-Punk to Neo-Modern 31

the formative role of fashion in I Am Love, describing how Emma’s

transformation from style icon to woman in love is conveyed through
the precise cuts, luxurious fabrics, and tonal range of Simons’ designs,
“the shifting palette of block colour signalling a clear emotional ba-
rometer” (de Perthuis 2012: 278). This is translated by the opposition
between the formal tailored dresses variously used to denote Emma’s
social function (in dark colors) or to signify her emotional awaken-
ing (in bright red), and the more shapely gown (in tangerine orange)
used to signal her sexual appeal, preempting a cathartic escape from
the stifling carapace of high-bourgeois fashion at the end of the film.
De Perthuis notes that Simons’ costumes act as a uniform for Swinton’s
character, thereby linking the designer’s purist fashions for Jil Sander to
his menswear designs with their parallel focus on serial functionalism.
The graphic simplicity of Emma’s wardrobe is a perfect fit for the actor’s
much publicized fashion sense and the director’s architectural sensibil-
ity, channeled through the location shooting at the 1930s rationalist
Villa Necchi Campiglio and the retro graphic design of the film’s credits,
which include a series of black and white photographic shots of hiber-
nal Milan prefacing the narrative.

The Hanging Garden

Simons built his reputation on an abstract intellectualism centering on

the communication of thematic concepts and masculine ideals, a visual
language expanded through his precise tailoring and maximalist color
blocking for Jil Sander. A more poetic vision came to the fore in his
revision of the classic couture heritage of Christian Dior. Simons’ final
collection at Jil Sander in February 2012 set the tone for a more ex-
pressive vision of modernity in both the couture and the ready-to-wear
collections for the house of Dior, which included a fresh interpretation
of the cinched hourglass silhouettes and the classic bar suit jacket, re-
imagined by Simons as a sensual cross between a dress and a jacket
(ready-to-wear Spring/Summer 2013). Following historically focused
exhibitions on Dior’s artistic and cinematic inspirations, the Christian
Dior museum, located at the designer’s family home, Villa les Rhumbs
in Granville, organized a celebration of the artistic influence of impres-
sionism on the designer’s craft in 2013, tracing the house’s use of floral
imagery. The exhibition, suitably set in the superb belle époque villa,
reunited two of Christian Dior’s individual passions—architecture and
flowers.5
The late 1940s New Look was fashioned around the retrogressive
link between femininity and nature, the precise shaping of the body
in counterpoint to the expressive use of floral motifs drawn from the
artistic models of the late nineteenth century—the impressionism of
Claude Monet and the pointillism of Georges Seurat (Müller 2013:
32 Nick Rees-Roberts

9). Simons’ first haute couture collections (Fall/Winter 2012–13 and

Spring/Summer 2013) took inspiration from Dior’s own preference for
wildflowers: one bright red layered bustier evening dress embroidered
with poppies evoked Monet’s eponymous canvas from 1873 and an-
other white organza dress with pointillist embroidery was redolent of
the 1949 Miss Dior gown. Dior had himself always been resistant to
the anti-ornamental strain of modernism, a productive tension running
through Simons’ revision of the house’s couture heritage (Chenoune
2013: 14). The staging of his early catwalk shows for Dior comple-
mented the conventional feminine template by blending the standard
floral imagery with the architectural purity of the designs. The walls
for the first couture show were lined with flowers, encasing the clothing
within a poetic decor. In the Spring/Summer 2013 haute couture collec-
tion the neo-formalist experiments with shape and volume were con-
veyed through the imaginative manipulation of the performance space.
Erected in the Jardin des Tuileries in January 2013, the structure was
lined with external mirrors reflecting the image of the winter garden, a
visual effect echoed inside through the bleak setting of bare trees used to
delineate the winding catwalk, the sparseness of which was acoustically
enhanced by the ambient minimalism of the contemporary indie-pop
trio The xx.
Included in the Dior Impressions exhibition were examples of Simons’
tribute to the house’s pastel heritage, such as a layered polyester-tulle
gown, finely embroidered with Ollier sequins and Swarovski beads in
a floral motif (haute couture, Spring/Summer 2013), developing the de-
signer’s blending of the decorative, the luxurious and the synthetic. The
exhibition opened with Simons’ double-face bustier dress (haute cou-
ture, Fall/Winter 2012–13), made from white organza and embroidered
with floral motifs—a trompe l’oeil effect of plastic violets embroidered
on the front and a classical image of roses printed on the back. Dior’s
New Look was formally austere despite the flourishes of nostalgic
femininity (Wollen 2004: 173). Nevertheless, the house continues to
favor the promotion of its expressive sensibility. Christian Dior’s haute
couture collections between 1947 and 1957 simultaneously balanced
two ideals of an elite femininity—that of the sophisticate and the in-
génue (Palmer 2009: 36). There was a central paradox underlying his
reactionary turn to the courtesans and coquettes of the belle époque as
models for his sculpted silhouette of the mid-century Parisienne: despite
the decorative ornamentation, his commercial success stemmed from an
artistic sobriety (Pujalet-Plaà 2010: 222). Simons sought to exploit this
historical tension between an archaic (Western) ideal of femininity and
the contemporary international consumer of couture in the Fall/Winter
2013–14 collection, which was fashioned around the positioning of the
brand in the global and digital age, preempting the emergence of a “new
digital aesthetic” promoted by trend forecaster WGSN in their 2014
bulletin. The multicolored collection including 3D embroideries was
Raf Simons and Interdisciplinary Fashion from Post-Punk to Neo-Modern 33

divided into four continental zones to acknowledge the altered land-

scape of contemporary couture, particularly in light of the concurrent
economic rise and consumer might of Brazil and China. The formal
staging was radically juxtaposed by casual shots of the pre-show collec-
tion imagined by hip photographers such as Terry Richardson, whose
own louche signature style provocatively rubbed up against the precious
refinement of haute couture.
The Spring/Summer 2014 ready-to-wear collection was set in a
faux-tropical garden, providing a lush surround for the designer’s less
reverential take on Dior’s visual heritage. The collection, framed by an
angular scaffold draped with neon wisteria and artificial flowers, was
remarkable for its pop jewelry, its graphic use of language on floral
prints and its double-face pleated bar jackets, a gender switch carried
over from the designer’s concurrent menswear. A final flourish con-
solidated the opposition between the ultra-modern suits and the ultra-
feminine gowns: the models’ curtain call was used to present an entirely
new collection conceived as a summative snapshot of Simons’ revision
of the Dior heritage through the rotation of metallic silk ball gowns and
monochrome pant suits. This collection marked the transition from a
respectful homage to Dior’s iconic silhouettes to a more complex actu-
alization of the house’s heritage in creative dialogue with Simons’ own
parallel vision of contemporary menswear.

Movement

In light of the Raf Simons Spring/Summer 2014 collection, it is pos-

sible to conclude this critical inquiry into the designer’s trajectory by
remarking that the overall focus of his menswear has shifted from the
fashionable rerouting of subcultural icons, looks, and sensibilities to a
more sustained exploration of form through graphic experiments with
cut, proportion, and volume. This neo-formalist focus on the material
product, including the futuristic use of artificial fabrics for synthetic
panels and geometric inserts stitched onto traditional materials, has
been accompanied by the questioning of masculine archetypes (the
back and forth movement between alienated boys and suited men) and
the inclusion of certain unisex elements into the designer’s repertoire.
This is indicative of a broader stylistic shift in men’s fashion towards a
preoccupation with shape and tactility influenced by womenswear—a
trend marketed to male consumers as a technical (and therefore gender-
appropriate) interest in engineering and fabrication. It is also illustra-
tive of the broader “neo-geo” trend in twenty-first-century high fashion
through the “influx of bright, geometric patterning” (Dimant 2010:
206). The incongruous presence of industrial fabrics such as neoprene,
the synthetic rubber used to make practical consumables such as laptop
cases and drysuits, seen on a series of detachable neon sleeves worn
34 Nick Rees-Roberts

over formal suits in the Fall/Winter 2009–10 collection, follows Bradley

Quinn’s account of the contemporary manipulation of “techno” fabrics
in fashion. He argues that such “crossover materials mark a specific mo-
ment in fashion, in which garments are beginning to be characterized by
hybrid forms, and are in themselves emerging as complex, multifaceted
hybrids” (Quinn 2012: 94). Simons’ hybrid designs subvert the basic
rules and conservative assumptions of menswear—the natural reliance
on staples such as the structured suit jacket—by using a high percent-
age of synthetic fibers such as plastic (Spring/Summer 2008) and latex
(Spring/Summer 2011; Figure 11), or polyamide and elastane, which

Figure 11
RAF SIMONS (Spring/Summer
2011).
 Raf Simons and Interdisciplinary Fashion from Post-Punk to Neo-Modern 35

provide the necessary elasticity required for the designer’s shape-shift-

ing. Simons’ mixed ensembles best illustrate this material experimenta-
tion: Fall/Winter 2009–10 contained a tailored gray waistcoat with a
fine blue stripe on the front and a neon blue verso in neoprene. Fall/
Winter 2011–12 included a blue tailored dress shirt with wide-legged
plastic trousers and a rubber bolero jacket. This vision of contemporary
menswear is, in essence, bifacial—positioned on the cusp between the
formal and the recalcitrant, the natural and the synthetic (Figure 12).
Simons’ later menswear attempts to blend technology with formality
through the static security of tailoring. The designer’s use of geometric

Figure 12
RAF SIMONS (Spring/Summer
2013).
36 Nick Rees-Roberts

inserts and futuristic materials positions his designs alongside Lucas

Ossendrijver’s collections for Lanvin with their parallel emphasis on
form and engineering. Simons’ later menswear also subtly subverts the
ideal of an alienated male youth that his label has been so instrumental
in disseminating. The move beyond the limited templates and gendered
constraints of men’s fashion was pioneered by Simons’ mentor Walter
Van Beirendonck, who experimented with queer erotic apparatus and
cross-gender fluidity, using corsets, high heels, and dresses in his various
menswear collections (Steele 2013). In the more avant-garde forms of
designers like Rad Hourani or JW Anderson, a unisex aesthetic seeking
to transcend gender categories is emerging as a key signature in both
luxury ready-to-wear and advanced contemporary fashion. Gender
ambiguity (channeled through the expression of male femininity) was
noted as a key trend at the Spring/Summer 2015 Paris menswear shows,
across a broad spectrum of labels and houses, from the use of delicate
male models (Dries Van Noten) or female models (Saint Laurent) to
entirely genderless collections such as JW Anderson’s revival of the
heritage brand Loewe for LVMH (Flaccavento 2014). Simons’ own
transgender dynamic is noticeable in the cross-fertilization between the
menswear for his nominal label and the womenswear for Dior: Fall/
Winter 2012–13 included outsized floral shirts and Spring/Summer
2013 featured double-face men’s suit jackets with a formal blue cotton
front and a floral pleated effect on the back. Such designs incorporate
elements from women’s couture into a more amorphous vision of men’s
fashion, in touch as much with the material shaping of clothing as with
the projected image of masculinity. Alongside this conceptual vision of
menswear Simons has gained commercial visibility via co-branding deals
with popular sportswear labels Fred Perry, Eastpak, Adidas, and Asics,
each of which transposed the Raf Simons brand identity and design
aesthetic to casual staples such as polo shirts, sneakers, and backpacks.
Raf Simons’ high-profile nomination as creative director at Christian
Dior in 2012 enabled the house to distance itself from (what was ret-
roactively perceived as) an era of excess. Following John Galliano’s
dismissal from the house in 2011, the arch-theatrical vision of the
star-designer was strategically positioned as passé in the context of the
global economic crisis. His decorative aesthetic was seen as out of touch
with the more sober modernity of a younger generation of more concep-
tual designers, who had come to prominence through the 2000s, known
collectively for an architectural (rather than a thematic) vision of fash-
ion: Phoebe Philo for Céline; Nicolas Ghesquière for Balenciaga; Alber
Elbaz and Lucas Ossendrijver for Lanvin; Riccardo Tisci for Givenchy;
and Hedi Slimane for Dior Homme and Yves Saint Laurent. Following
the previous generation of star-designers (Tom Ford, John Galliano,
and Marc Jacobs—Karl Lagerfeld both precedes and transcends such
a chronology), this new generation has continued reviving the heritage
of the traditional Parisian couture houses by transposing their discrete
Raf Simons and Interdisciplinary Fashion from Post-Punk to Neo-Modern 37

codes, identities, and values to the exigencies of the early-twenty-first-

century global industry. Dior’s nomination of Simons is characteristic of
a wider trend in luxury fashion that emphasizes the self-effacement of
the designer in favor of the brand and the product, striking a precarious
balance between the designer’s individual artistic signature and the cul-
tural iconicity of the fashion house as it is channeled through corporate
branding. This strategic articulation of design innovation and brand
heritage has, in effect, been at the forefront of the financial consolida-
tion of European luxury and high fashion since the mid-1990s. In her
analysis of the cultural poetics of late-twentieth-century post-fashion,
Barbara Vinken pointed to the destruction of the “Western Paris-based
fashion system” (Vinken 2005: 64) based on the waning of the elit-
ist, aristocratic model of haute couture. Its revival in modified form in
the early twenty-first century, built on the successful branding of the
European heritage of luxury goods, provides the commercial backdrop
for the rise of a designer like Simons, able to continue developing his
own creative signature through an independent menswear label, whilst
in parallel reinterpreting the visual codes of an emblematic French de-
sign house and global brand.
Since the launch of his label in 1995, Raf Simons has caught the
zeitgeist of contemporary fashion, supplying menswear with a versatile
range of styles, shapes, and symbols that articulate ideas about mascu-
linity, influenced by European pop culture and electronic music, fine art,
modernist architecture, and graphic design. “It happened,” Monsieur
Dior noted simply in his autobiography in 1957, “that my own inclina-
tions coincided with the spirit and sensibility of the times” (Dior 1957:
45). Likewise, Simons’ nomination at one of the most prestigious of the
Parisian fashion houses was a perfect fit, positioning him as heir to the
artistic and architectural strand of the couturier’s legacy, and making
him instrumental in the brand’s global projection of its creative heritage.

Notes

1. Calder / Prouvé exhibition, Larry Gagosian Gallery, Le Bourget—

Paris, June 8–November 2, 2013.
2. Christopher Breward and Caroline Evans define modernity in
the context of fashion history as interdependent on “the relation-
ship between the two processes of production and consumption.”
Modernity refers to the impact of “scientific, technological, indus-
trial, economic and political innovation” on cultural and artistic
forms, the term used denote “the way that modernisation infiltrates
everyday life and permeates sensibilities.” Breward and Evans gloss
modernism as the “avant-garde artistic movements from the early
twentieth century that in some way responded to or represented
these changes in sensibility and experience” (Breward and Evans
38 Nick Rees-Roberts

2005: 1). Discussing the International Style of early-twentieth-

century modernist architecture, Peter Gay explains Mies van der
Rohe’s minimalist maxim (“less is more”) as “a plea for terseness,”
meaning “that the art of architecture consists in good part of elimi-
nating superfluous decoration and fussy detail” (Gay 2008: 298).
By the 1960s minimalism was widely perceived in art and design
practices as “a style of elegant refusal, of geometric contours, and
monochromatic hues” (Meyer 2001: 78). This aesthetic preoccupa-
tion with sparseness and reduction emerged in historical parallel
with pop, radically shifting the boundaries between popular culture,
art, architecture, photography, and cinema—“a gradual reconfigura-
tion of cultural space, demanded by consumer capitalism, in which
structure, surface and symbol were combined in new ways” (Foster
2011: 1).
3. Post-punk has been defined as the cultural and musical aftermath of
punk between 1978 and 1984, a period marked by the rise of new
wave pop and art-rock associated with a forward-looking “experi-
mentation with lyrical and vocal technique” (Reynolds 2006: xxiii).
4. Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli hired Simons as creative director
at Jil Sander in 2006 when the label belonged to the Prada Group.
5. Impressions Dior: Dior et l’impressionisme (Dior Impressions: The
Inspiration and Influence of Impressionism at the House of Dior)
exhibition, Christian Dior Museum, Granville, France, May 4–
September 29, 2013.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Kat Debo and Wim Mertens from the MoMu
ModeMuseum in Antwerp for granting me access to the collection, and
to Bianca Quets-Luzi at RAF SIMONS for kindly allowing me to repro-
duce the images.

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