A massive rave situation. A long bar that turned into a runway. A thousand young people, students, artists, designers, musicians, DJs, and fashion types, all pressed together in the chaotic spirit of euphoric togetherness that Raf Simons wanted to whip up around the showing of his spring collection in London.
“I decided to come to London last year, because I felt the energy was incredible,” he said, while prepping a show at Printworks, a massive post-industrial newsprint factory whose cavernous halls have long been reappropriated as a club night venue that is about to be torn down. Simons has been a visitor to London’s Frieze art fair for years; it falls this week.
Post-Covid, post-Brexit, he observed, “you feel London, and the country is a hurt animal, but it’s an animal that’s ready to go out. There’s something positive within the negative. I saw it again, this week, going to galleries. Somehow people mix up here, start conversations. Coming to the city, the streets, the community is always inspiring.”
Acting at the edge, in the margins—for and with youth—has always been the grounding of his brand. These gritty, dystopian times feel a lot like Raf Simons’s underground beginnings in the 1990s—it took him back to his memories as a kid of jostling with friends, faking tickets to get into fashion shows.
“So I thought, let’s not do that. Let’s just invite everybody instead. I didn’t want a show for 300 people sitting in rows. This is a show that’s pure democracy. No hierarchy. A London explosion of youth, life, dancing, and being together. So,” he added, “I was thinking a lot about the body, in relation to dressing up and going out and performing.”
Simons took that prospect as a challenge not to fall back into any comfort-zone of predictable youth-cult signifiers. “I started with the opposite of going out from my own past. It was about dancing, going out together, but I also didn't really want to fall in the trick of Blitz Kids, or the clichés. So I wanted to explore something I never did before, which was the body. To have the body liberated, to see and feel the body to expose it; also to allow the body to be in movement.”
As a brutal note-to-self, he embedded prints of scrawled works by the late Ghent artist Philippe Vandenberg on t-shirts and dresses. “They’re cruel words, like ‘Kill them all and dance.’ But he didn’t mean killing people—he meant killing things that you're doing creatively in order to move on and explore further.”
On charged the bar-top show, a propulsion towards coolly minimized tailoring and dancer’s leggings, inspired by classical ballet, partly an upshot of his recent collaboration with the New York Ballet choreographer Justin Peck, who directed the video of a dancer wearing a sleeveless jacket and red leotard that dominated the end of the catwalk. The onesies Simons had co-designed with Miuccia Prada reappeared, but this time shrunken into ‘bodies’—knitted, or as string vests or shirts.
There was an impression of legs, of sexiness, energy—and with it, a new kind of chic coherence. Looks that have turned a corner from away logos, labels and clunky oversized shapes. A lot of that was down to the cut and evident quality of the gray and black tailoring—hip-length jackets with sawn-off sleeves, trousers reduced to slit-sided miniskirts, pleated shorts, narrow coats, even some simple knee-length skirt suits. “I didn't want to do deconstruction in a complicated, conceptual way,” he concluded. “I wanted something very stripped-back, very reduced. Not overly styled and overdone.”
Still, it was simplicity with substance; a collection strong on plain, almost traditional knitwear, multi-strapped kitten heels, and—for the first time—a Raf Simons wardrobe (shift dresses too!) that is as obviously attractive to women as men. His night in London might have devolved into a long after-rave that Simons and hundreds of students and fans won’t forget, but as far as fashion’s concerned, the main event was his clear-headed consolidation of the directness and modernity that’s refreshing the direction of fashion now.
