Four metal tubes, dressed as corsets. That is how Raf Simons (°1968, Neerpelt) presented his graduation project in 1991 at what was then SHIVKV in Genk (today LUCA School of Arts). The series of accessory cabinets was called ‘Corpo’, and it won the province’s first prize. Furniture did not interest him. The line where furniture and fashion touch did.

From Genk to the catwalk

That same year Simons travelled to Paris for Martin Margiela’s very first show. All in white, on a deserted playground. He wept, and went home with a different trade on his mind. Between 1991 and 1993 he interned with Walter Van Beirendonck. Renzo Loppa taught him the tailor’s craft. In 1995 he launched his first menswear line under his own name: narrow, straight silhouettes drawn from punk and gothic, worn by non-professional models he recruited on the street. Pride in individuality, not in type. The presentations — car parks, escalators, bridges — were as unconventional as the clothes.

In 2000 he shut the line down and became director and teacher of fashion at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. A pause, in hindsight. By 2001 he stood at the drawing table again.

Jil Sander, Dior, Calvin Klein

From 2005 Simons was creative director at Jil Sander. In April 2012 he moved to Dior as John Galliano’s successor. There he went into the house archive and carried the New Look of 1947 into the present: sober silhouettes in navy, grey and pale pink, shown in a set of one million fresh flowers — because Dior loved flowers. Alongside Dior and his own label he worked with Eastpak, Fred Perry, Adidas, Dr. Martens and the Danish textile house Kvadrat, among others.

He left Dior in October 2015. In August 2016 he became creative director at Calvin Klein, but that collaboration ended early, in December 2018.

Prada

In February 2020 Prada announced that Simons would join Miuccia Prada as co-creative director from 2 April. Her intellectual radicalism, his youth-culture edge: the two visions collide and reinforce each other, collection after collection. Their first joint collection, spring/summer 2021, was filmed in September 2020 at the Fondazione Prada in Milan.

Genk centre stage

Six months later he was standing in Genk, and not for Prada. For the autumn/winter collection of his own label, Simons chose neither Milan nor Paris but the Barenzaal at C-mine: the machine hall of a coal mine that closed in 1988 and became an art site only years later. On 24 March 2021 he showed his collection film there. Thirty years after his graduation project he returned to the city where he began — and he put his own name on it, not that of a house.

In 2022 Simons closed his own label. After 27 years torn between two loyalties — his own signature and the houses he worked for — he chose Prada alone. A simplification that perhaps reached back to that same pause in 2000. The Barenzaal was, in hindsight, one of the last images he made under his own name.

Limburg roots that last

Modemuseum Hasselt acquired a substantial part of his archive in April 2012. MoMu, Antwerp’s fashion museum, holds further work. A designer from Neerpelt, a school in Genk, a mine site in Genk, a museum in Hasselt — the geography cannot be written out of the story. That school and that mine site are one address now. In 2009, eighteen years after his graduation project, the successor to SHIVKV moved to C-mine. Today it is called LUCA School of Arts, and it teaches on the grounds where he showed his collection film.

It is not about the labels his name stood on. It is about a designer from Neerpelt who began at a school in Genk with cabinets that looked like corsets — and who keeps coming back here to make his decisive images.