The punk, anarchic toughness that informed much of Simons’s earliest work was put on hold for Spring 1999. Inside a mirrored geodesic sphere on the outskirts of Paris’s Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, he made a decided shift toward suiting. “I am obsessed by tailoring—very strong, linear clothes,” Simons told the International Herald Tribune’s Suzy Menkes in a preview of the show, titled “Kinetic Youth.” “I ask myself how I can bring that to young people—to a 14-year-old who you never see in a suit?”
Simons’s idea was to transform the lean-on-top, large-on-the-bottom silhouettes of ravers into structured, sleek garments. The first chapter of the show broke down this concept via 17 black-and-white looks that explored the elements of suiting and shirting, with the occasional geometric or Bauhaus-inspired graphic. Then came a parade of boys, all wearing identical white turtlenecks with the letter R scrawled on the collar and hip-slung trousers in a myriad of earthen shades: ash, tomato, ocean blue, black. They arrived as a uniformed unit, with little breathing air between their bodies, and darted in and out of the venue to the sound of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” From there, the real show began. There were light gray, inverse-pleated trousers with a bold, louche appeal; mint gauzy tanks; and peaked shoulder vests in bourgeois camel or grungy black leather. The colors were that of a ’50s diner, with Lynchian pops of lemon against steely gray, and mossy green that made your hair stand on end.
But for all the structure, form, and unity, Simons’s gents were still guerrilla guys at heart. For the finale they returned to the dome, walking in the opposite direction to Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall.” We don’t need no education, indeed.
