Raf Simons

Raf Simons was born in Belgium in 1968, going on to study industrial design at the LUCA School of Arts in Greece. After attending Martin Margiela’s landmark Spring-Summer 1990 show with Walter Van Bierendonck, and interning at Van Bierendonck’s design firm from 1991 to 1993, Simons launched his own label in 1995. After taking a one-year sabbatical from fashion beginning in March 2000, Simons’ Fall-Winter 2001 collection, titled “Riot, Riot, Riot,” cemented his status as an iconic, subversive designer. This collection was influenced heavily by various youth cultures, a theme that would be extraordinarily prevalent in Simons’ early-aughts work. Vogue called it “a rejection of the slim, gangly shapes of Simons’ early work,” and “a clean break from the hyper-slim suits of Simons’ peers.” Since then, Simons has served as the creative director of Jil Sanders from 2005 to 2012, the creative director of Dior from 2012 to 2015, the creative director of Calvin Klein from 2016 to 2018, and was appointed the co-creative director of Prada in April 2020. 

Simons introduced youth culture to high fashion, drawing on music, streetwear, and political influences in the early-aughts, and later coming back to these themes in the late 2010s. His archival work has gained extraordinary popularity in recent years, after celebrities such as Rihanna, Kanye West, and A$AP Rocky have all worn archival pieces such as the iconic camo MA-1 bomber jacket from the “Riot, Riot, Riot” collection.

(Many of Simons’ later collections do not have titles, which is reflected in the gallery below.)