There is a complicity between the very young and the very old. It's obvious to anyone who's watched grandparents with their grandchildren. The fashion industry, obsessed with youth and novelty, is the last place you'd expect to find trenchant commentary on this relationship. And yet, in the past week, two of the signal collections of this particular moment have made it their cornerstone. First, Gucci in Milan, and then, tonight, Raf Simons in Paris.
Raf never knew his grandfathers but he has become familiar with their idiosyncrasies through photographs. The way, for instance, they—and their friends—would go on wearing the same suits they'd worn for years. No need for novelty, their clothing was their crutch. The way clothing shapes and expresses identity has been an obsession of Simons' from the very beginning of his career. That's what his gangs were always about. So when he said tonight's collection was "very gang," you instantly knew what he meant.
The hoods were the biggest clue. Half of the models walked with heads wrapped in check shrouds, vision obscured to the point where at least a couple of them pitched off the raised catwalk. Hoodies have become a contemporary emblem of truculent youth, but Simons made his hoods medieval in shape. Monastic, in other words. And that automatically created a connection between the hermetic brotherhood of a medieval monastery and the hermetic brotherhood of a 21st-century gang. More, his hoods were cut from the cloth old men might choose for custom shirts. And what do old guys sitting around in a coffee shop look like? "Generation communication" has been Simons' motivator from day one. So he said. Here was visible backup.
It's not like the senior citizens of the world are suddenly going to demand to be kitted out in Simons' trousers that flare to puddles of fabric on the floor, or his lean coats that also fall floorward in a cascade of cloth. But, in his mind at least, he was building a kinship between past, present, and future. It was abstract, to be sure. There was a lot of granddad-ly knitwear, some of it pieced together to literally extend its life, other bits of it shrunken into soul-boy crop tops. There were tailored ensembles that did indeed hint at suits lovingly preserved over decades. There were coats that took a hesitant, hand-painted shot at creating a classic plaid (the evolutionary principle at work in these pieces was a thing of peculiar wonder).
And, more than anything, there was a soundtrack spun from Mark Leckey's titanic piece of celluloid mythmaking, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore. The utter gorgeousness of peak moments in anyone's past is defined by that film. Raf's past for sure, but his young models could find equivalents in their own lives. So could the grandfathers he never knew. And that is the enduring melancholy that touches everything Raf Simons does. All things must pass.
