Raf Simons Calls the Current Fashion Industry Model "Bullsh*t"

Raf Simons thinks everyone is focused on the wrong things.

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Last October, Raf Simons announced that he would be leaving his position at Dior. After three and a half years as the creative director for the luxury brand, Simons was exhausted by the breakneck speed of the fashion cycle and the toll it was taking on his creativity.

His decision to exit Dior hasallowed him to dedicate more time to his own label and other projects like his collaboration with the Danish textile brand Kvadrat. In a recent interview with The Telegraph, Simons talks about his latest textile collection and what he thinks about the fashion industry's future.

Simons, who worked in furniture design before launching his menswear label, explains how designing interiors is different from working in fashion, and what it has been like creating fabrics for Kvadrat since his departure from Dior.

“I was already working with its fabrics in my fashion collections so the relationship has evolved organically over time," he said. "I actually started this just before Dior but it didn’t see the daylight until much later because we took more than a year for the first development. There’s no hurry. It’s very different to how things work in fashion right now. Of course everybody’s happy if it’s successful, but not once have [the Kvadrat team] ever said to me, ‘this is our expectation’. Never. They believe in me, I believe in them and it’s a marriage. It’s in their nature to collaborate with creative animals.”

Simons explains how he has more freedom working for the textile company than he did when he was designing fabrics for his collections at Dior, which he said was sometimes done in a matter of hours.

“Having the timeline of a year is like heaven for me because at Christian Dior I used to do eight collections a year and each collection could contain up to 150 fabrics,” he said. “I’ve done three fabrics this year for Kvadrat and I really, really pay attention to it. It’s beautiful to be able to give a project substantial incubation time. When I did fabrics at Dior I had to choose them within a couple of hours sometimes—seeing everything, deciding, making colour palettes… then hoopla—launch.”

With many brands attempting to change up the current industry models, Simons weighs in on how he feels about the direction fashion is heading. “Everyone is paying attention to the wrong thing in my opinion. There’s this huge debate about ‘Oh my God, should we sell the garments the day after the show or three days after the show or should we tweet it in this way or Instagram it in that way?’… You know, all that kind of bullshit. Will all that stuff still be relevant 30 years from now? I don’t think so," he said. 

"What we should ask is will we have enough creative people who are strong enough and willing to do what is necessary right now to follow that madhouse. Lots of people are starting to question it," he explained. "My generation especially is shifting now… like me and Phoebe [Philo], Nicolas [Ghesquière] and Marc [Jacobs]. We’ve been around for 20 or more years. We know what fashion was and where it’s heading to. Now it’s a question of what we are willing to do and how we are going to do it.”

He also reflects on his time at Dior, explaining that he hadn't expected to be there for such a short period, but the pace that he was expected to work was just too much.

“It is a very beautiful house and it was incredible to be able to take part in that heritage, but in the end it was just too much for me. Do I think now it was a mistake to go there? No, no. It was a fantastic experience and a fantastic time. I wasn’t planning to go there for such a short period, but I was also not willing to sign up there for a long period. So it became complicated and I decided to get out," he said. "That is partly due to the system that fashion has adopted. It is speeding up and up. Every season I see so many things evolving at such a speed that I think certain creative people, including myself, are just not willing to do it any more. I don’t want to. If you work on that level, you miss out on a lot of things.”

To read the full interview head over here.

 

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