"Fashion Is Another Animal These Days": Why Raf Simons Pivoted to Design (EXCLUSIVE)
Why is modern product design so boring? Raf Simons wants to know. We’re seated inside his well-preserved Milanese palazzo, both slouched inside cocooning red Jean Royère armchairs. He points disapprovingly at my laptop’s dull silver lid, the same uninspiring shade customary for practically all modern technology.
“If you think back in time, like to the 20th century or to early modernism — so many beautiful colors. In the ‘50s, you would go in the street and you would see only incredibly beautifully colored cars,” says Simons. “Today, all the cars in the street are kind of greyish. The phones, computers, everything is… greyish.”
The designer’s demeanor hadn’t shifted once during our first forty minutes of conversation about his new homeware collection with Danish textile innovators Kvadrat. However, now that he’s fixated on this widespread banality of color, Simons’ tone takes on a new urgency. He’s even speaking a little louder.
Color was and remains a cornerstone of Simons’ practice. In the ‘90s, he’d use it sparingly to make a point; 20 years later, while overseeing Calvin Klein, Simons continued to use color for dramatic effect. He gets worked up because it is essential to find the right color. But it’s admittedly time-consuming.
“Kvadrat is very strict on quality. The level is the highest in the business, which brings limitations. But we work it out over time,” says Simons. “I’m then the one who is difficult with the colors, which also takes time. It's testing after testing, and lab dips after lab dips.”
The latest Kvadrat/Raf Simons collection comes three years after the last, a culmination of shared patience (or is it knowing stubbornness?). This one is a two-parter, comprising both newly developed fabrics for furniture upholstery and an eight-piece kids collection.
The latter is entirely new for Simons, allowing him to explore new venues of creativity. One standout is a wall organizer made of Vidar, the tightly woven and richly textured bouclé Simons counts as his favorite Kvadrat fabric; it’s modeled after the storage system a young Raf used to organize knick-knacks like his favorite fossils and keychains. Each piece is part of a matching textile set, so the organizer is accompanied by softies like a pillow-shaped storage pouch and updated versions of the jacquard towels from a previous Kvadrat collab, now made smaller and with a hood so that they can be worn like a cape. And, “Obviously, there needed to be a teddy bear,” Simons says. The bear is a collaboration with Steiff, the inventor of the original teddy bear, which handmakes every bear in its German workshop using Asator, a soft but dense cotton-velour fabric developed by Kvadrat.
This all took years to create, from the specificity of the red hues to the tactile plushness of the Kvadrat fabrics.
Simons estimates it took four years just to realize his dreams of a new bouclé, more varied in texture than the Kvadrat Vidar. The process included developing a new yarn of hardwearing worsted wool mixed with a polyester binding thread, which he calls Saxion. Now, it can be produced in seventeen distinct colors.
This was another new experience for Simons, even after over a decade of Kvadrat collaborations. Thirty years of working in fashion, creating umpteen seasonal collections every year, means that he’s accustomed to a more relentless pace. “This is very different from fashion. I almost cannot say how much I like this pace,” he says. “Fashion is another animal these days. It's always against the block, nonstop.”
This relentless churn has its consequences. After nearly 30 years of being so ahead of fashion’s curve that he became one of menswear’s great cult figures — so influential that he has an entire song dedicated to him — Simons tired of keeping up with the industry’s endless demands. He shuttered his eponymous brand in 2022. “I decided to stop the brand to have more private time,” he says.
He is hardly retired, however. Since 2020, he’s shared the title of co-creative director with Miuccia Prada, with whom he still creates four yearly Prada collections and oversees countless interceding projects. But the Raf Simons brand was a fiefdom and Prada is an empire. As such, even with his responsibilities at the Milanese fashion house, he suddenly has time to do things he’s always wanted to do.
Travel tops the list. At least once a year, he goes to Japan (“I love the culture, I love the streets, I love everything about it,” he says), and he also attempts to attend art exhibitions around the world; next week he’ll be in London for Frieze Art Week, then straight on to Paris for Art Basel. Simons has also been pondering the possibility of “going public with an art institution,” though he admits that he doesn’t quite know when he’d have the time.
For now, he is reveling in this newfound freedom. So much so that, even after cutting ties with all the other collaborators who worked with the Raf Simons brand, he’s kept the Kvadrat collaboration alive. This is partly because he enjoys working with the expert fabric company, but also because it has no strings attached — he tells me there’s not even a contract. As such, everything that comes next is totally up in the air, exactly where Simons likes it. Today homeware for kids, tomorrow — who knows?
“We don't really know after this, do we do another one?” says Simons. “And if we do what it's going to be, is it for pets or maybe the garage?”
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