Photos by Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times Looks from Raf Simons’s fall-winter 2010-11 collection.Waiting in line backstage after Raf Simons’s show last night, one guest murmured to another, “That was great.”
The guest nodded. “Finally,” he said.
There have been some sparky collections this season — you’d have to put Rick Owens and Comme des Garçons in that group; Louis Vuitton, too — but Mr. Simons seemed to really punch it up. A number of designers have done things with layering; his long striped knits under jackets suddenly looked very different. And a lot of designers have focused on sharp tailoring and classic details (John Galliano, Kim Jones at Dunhill). Mr. Simons, too, offered tailoring, but he replaced traditional buttons, in, say, horn or brass, with metal press buttons. They gave his suits in charcoal and loden check a graphic element that was also functional and modern looking. Maybe that’s why another guest after the show said: “Modern ‘Mad Men.’”
The clothes had classic snap—you can’t get more traditional than loden or a wide sports stripe in navy, yellow or maroon—but Mr. Simons wants to make fashion, and last night there was always that riveting quality of something extra and challenging. So the three-color loden plaid suit had graphic red stripes (the material was Velcro) around the sleeves and down the back. The knit layers at first suggested a skirt, but the idea wasn’t really defined (as it was at Givenchy). Nor was the reference to an Asian or Middle Eastern culture. In fact, Mr. Simons said afterward that the layers were a connection to things that Helmut Lang once did in his show. Mr. Lang is one of his fashion icons. And the striped knits referred to another icon, Jean Paul Gaultier.
Mr. Simons said his two most recent collections had a lot to do with the early days of his career, in the mid ’90s, when his goal was to create tailoring for young men. “Now we see the real modern Raf Simons man — someone interested in tradition but also high fashion,” he said.
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