Rage and alienation: is this Raf Simons’s comfort zone, the place which connects him back, as a 51-year-old man, to the teenage experience his work continually fetishizes? Well, Simons doesn’t have to play nice to any bosses anymore. After his exit from Calvin Klein, he reports only to himself. And what the free Raf Simons wants to say is exactly how much he accuses and despises corporate America. Quite apart from the slogans, it was there rather clearly, breaking through on the soundtrack, a voice which intoned, “Big lie...media America, corporate America...fascist America.”
Sometimes, watching a Simons show can feel like sitting an exam or trying to crack a cryptic crossword. His work is exclusionary to the extent that you need to be a qualified Raf-ologist to understand what it means. This time, he refused to speak after the show to give any gloss on his meaning and layered references. Maybe he didn’t trust himself to answer questions about why the set was populated with standard office chairs, bound in black plastic tape. Or to add anything to what could be read, partially or wholly, in his textual graphics.
It was pretty bluntly unmissable though. “STONE(E)D AMERICA” was one recurring motif. And on the back necks of many garments: “My Own Private Antwerp.” To be fair, it wasn’t a question of Simons lobbing criticism of Trump’s America from afar, now that he’s living back in Belgium. He’d been critical enough about the political atmosphere of Trump’s America while he was working at Calvin Klein, what with his American Psycho and other horror movie thematics. Now, though, after a couple of seasons when he’d diverted his energies into exploring a certain European elegance in his own collection, his raw anger against the power of corporate USA was back with a vengeance.
His boys seemed to belong to some underground crew—maybe the last surviving boys on Earth, possibly the victims or maybe the perpetrators of some toxic social endgame. There were more text labels reading “RS-LAB,” which explained the lab coats, but why the hospital gowns? Why boxer shorts and padded gloves that looked as if they might be made for handling radioactive chemicals?
Styling and heavy meaning apart—and this might sound frivolous, considering—it was also a plumb-center commercial collection for all of Raf Simons’s fans, of whatever age. The arty, painted T-shirts, the leather coats, the colorful baggy sweatshirts and overshirts. Whatever post-American psychological fallout is going on in Simons’s life, it hasn’t affected his ability to serve his faithful audience. Maybe it’s improved it.
