Raf Simons

Raf Simons studied industrial design in Genk before Martin Margiela’s work convinced him that fashion could carry the same intellectual weight as furniture or architecture. He launched his menswear label in 1995 with no formal fashion education, and the early collections — raw, confrontational, saturated with the energy of Belgian youth culture and post-punk music — arrived like a dispatch from a world the fashion establishment didn’t know existed. Simons was not designing for the industry. He was designing for the boys he saw at Warp Records nights and in the mosh pits of Antwerp clubs, and the specificity of that audience gave the work an authenticity that fashion’s establishment could sense but couldn’t replicate.

The Fall/Winter 2001 “Riot Riot Riot” collection and the Spring/Summer 2002 “Woe Unto Those Who Spit on the Fear Generation” are the twin peaks of his early career. Shown in the immediate aftermath of September 11th, “Riot Riot Riot” channeled collective anxiety into oversized hoodies, militaristic layering, and a palpable sense of alienation. The following season’s collaboration with Peter Saville — New Order and Joy Division graphics screen-printed onto bombers and parkas — fused music, graphic design, and fashion into something that transcended all three categories. The New Order Bomber from that era now commands five-figure prices on the secondary market and effectively invented the concept of the “archive piece” as cultural currency.

Simons’s subsequent career — creative director at Jil Sander, Dior, Calvin Klein, and Prada (co-creative director alongside Miuccia Prada) — has demonstrated that his sensibility scales without losing its edge. The Dior couture collections proved he could handle the most traditional house in Paris without capitulating to its conservatism. But it is the early menswear that endures as his most vital contribution: the proof that men’s fashion could be as conceptually ambitious, as emotionally raw, and as culturally engaged as any other form of creative expression. Helmut Lang showed that men’s minimalism could be radical. Simons showed that men’s maximalism could be, too.