A month after the conclusion of his warmly received Spring-Summer 2023 show in London, Raf Simons has shocked the fashion world with an abrupt announcement that this would be his namesake labelโs final collection โ the denouement to a 27-year odyssey that has left the industry a more thoughtful and charming place.
The Belgian designer โ whose career has variously seen him turn in star performances at Creative Director at Christian Dior (2012-2015) and Calvin Klein (2016-2018) โ took to Instagram earlier today to announce the โfinal season of the Raf Simons fashion brand.โ
โI lack the words to share how proud I am of all that we have achieved,โ Simons continues in a written statement.
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โThank you all for believing in our vision and for believing in me.โ
Understandably, those with a deeply embedded love of Simonsโ idiosyncratic vision of fashion (particularly menswear) have come from every corner of the internet to greet his labelโs dissolution with heartfelt tributes. Samuel Hine, GQ Americaโs resident Fashion Writer, remarked that it was โfrankly hard to imagine a menโs fashion landscape without [Simonsโ] biannual dispatches from the culty corners of youth cultureโ.
In an industry that all too often surrenders to its most elitist tendencies, Simons was synonymous with propounding a culture of clothing that celebrated youth and fringe identities. Since the founding of Raf Simons in 1995, his eponymous label has tackled all manner of niche cultures through the prism of the runway.
His industrial designerโs eye for shape and sophisticated graphic motifs โ playing out against grandiose themes of post-punk music, queer photography, and cyberpunk (to name but a few) โ won him a legion of fans in the 2010s, including a notable contingent of hip-hop artists, including A$AP Rocky and Quavo, who embraced Simonsโ simultaneously niche-but-universal designs.
Although Simons has not publicly explained what provoked him to shutter his own label, itโs no secret that the designer expressed frequent opposition to, as Hine puts it, โthe relentless pace of the modern fashion system.โ In the course of the 2014 documentary Dior and I, Simons observed how the titular brandโs demand for at least four collections per year deprived him of the โincubation timeโ that is essential to the creative process of fashion design.
โI think I can deal with the highest level of expectation within the business, like massive blockbuster shows [and] commercial clothes,โ he said in an interview with Cathy Horyn around that time.
โBut I donโt think that necessarily makes you a better designer.โ
Going forward, fashionistos neednโt fret that Simons is resting upon his laurels. The conclusion of โRaf Simonsโ the brand, means that the award-winning designer now has significantly more bandwidth to pursue the projects that he remains passionate about: including an interdisciplinary collaboration with Danish textile lab Kvadrat and, of co-creative authority over at Prada. Whatever Simonsโ next steps, bet on the fact that fashionโs brain trust is most certainly paying attention.
