The runway was set for a feast, with piles of fruit and vegetables, breads and cheeses, cakes, and stacks of waffles that the staff encouraged guests to eat. Around dozens of lush floral bouquets, hundreds of half-poured glasses and empty bottles of Champagne and wine were artfully arranged. Grape juice, however, wasn’t the elixir Raf Simons had been contemplating while making his latest collection. The extensive show notes cited the 1981 German film Christiane F. as a starting point. “Simons, like many Europeans of his generation, was exposed to the harrowing world of Christiane F. in high school, where the film and the book were discussed as a part of the curriculum,” the press release explained. It went on: “Christiane F. remains a cautionary tale, one that unashamedly and unapologetically depicts the realities of drug use and addiction.”
Christiane F. was a heroin junkie in late-1970s Berlin, a striking one with dyed red hair and a willowy, youthful frame, and she has turned up in a Simons collection before, circa Fall 2001. (Simons was leagues ahead of fashion in the late-2010s fixation on graphics and text.) Here, he seemed to be making a connection between his youth—or his youthful obsession, at least—and the opioid epidemic ravaging his adoptive country. This is Simons’s third collection since arriving stateside, and it’s tempting to see pessimism in the progression from Milton Glaser’s iconic “I ❤️ NY” design of a year ago to the strung-out photos of Christiane F. and the periodic table LSD and XTC patches decorating the knees of jeans tonight. Who among us isn’t pessimistic these days? But the vivid colors of the excellent outerwear and the ultra-sheen of skinny cargo pants and glossy vinyl gloves belie that idea about negativity. We were reminded somehow of Simons’s final collection for Jil Sander, with its clutch coats and, of course, its stunning floral arrangements. That collection had its fetish-y elements, too.
One of this show’s recurring motifs was the unfortunately named dickey. The false sweater fronts were suspended from turtlenecks and layered over the tailoring that dominated the lineup. It was a strangely compelling gesture, and a more sophisticated one than the half-hoodies with Drugs printed across the chest, in an allusion to an obscure mid-1980s play by Cookie Mueller and Glenn O’Brien. We’re dubious that those sweatshirts will open up a dialogue about addiction, though they will surely have Simons’s addicts eager for a fix. There was more than a winking nod here to the glamour and allure of illicit substances. That’s what made this collection powerful: its assured sartorialism combined with its very now sense of spectacle. Plus, who doesn’t love a free glass of vino?
