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In the new documentary film Dior and I (to be released in the UK in March), director Frédéric Tcheng captures Raf Simons entering the Christian Dior design studio for the first time. It’s nobody’s ideal first day at work and no amount of experience in the limelight could prepare you for the level of attention and scrutiny of a film crew chronicling your every move. Most designers’ first days are marked by a carefully worded press release by a sympathetic journalist, but Dior had agreed to welcome a filmmaker known for interrogating his subjects in forensic detail. His previous films were 2011’s The Eye Has to Travel, about legendary fashion editor Diana Vreeland, and 2008’s unflinching portrait of Valentino in The Last Emperor. In an industry with notoriously “protective” PR machines, bringing the cameras in might have been seen as a high-risk strategy especially for a house for whom the dust was yet to settle after the departure of its last creative director, John Galliano. You’d have thought they would have preferred a bit of peace and quiet. Simons has the demeanour of a scientist or librarian and simply dressed in a jumper and jeans, looks almost boyish, like the youngest person in the room of anxious and excited staff. It is a simple coronation. He speaks English to the assembled seamstresses, secretaries, pattern cutters and technicians gathered in the overcrowded entrance hall. Thanking them, he promises to do his best, and insists they call him “Raf”, rather than the “Monsieur Raf” that couture convention dictates. He is informal, without the hysteria or preening that so often plague creative geniuses. He barely notices the camera crew, and later we learn he had little idea of who they were and what they were doing. Some weeks after seeing the film I meet Simons for lunch in New York. The shy reticence he demonstrates in the film in group situations isn’t in evidence. Instead
he is relaxed and friendly, able to make his point with intelligence with a wide-ranging references. I start by asking about his planned approach to Dior. As a designer known for his austere pared-down, almost Calvinistic vision, how was he going to follow in the footsteps of Galliano, whose Dior universe was all high baroque drama and embellishment? “At first, I was mainly looking back at the first decade of Dior’s work,” he explains. “I took a very simple approach and I thought, ‘They’re taking me because they are interested in seeing how I’m going to deal with it.’ So I just tried to link how I see things to the original founder. “I think it’s crucial to look at the house’s work over the whole time span, and not only what just came before you. It’s not that I want to reject anything on purpose because I think John [Galliano] did amazing work. But then, analysed over the total time span, I don’t define the house as baroque because the person who stayed as creative director the longest was Marc Bohan. He was there for 30 years. So this is not about what was strong or what was not strong; it’s about what is possible in the brand. Bohan wouldn’t have been there for 30 years if he hadn’t been loved; that’s a long time. I just tried to connect the house to what’s outside, with women and their lives today, reality, and this moment in time.” In the film Simons visits an art gallery and spots a Gerhard Richter painting that inspires a print for a dress. The technical challenges involved come from his selfimposed demand for perfection in realising his artistic vision. I ask him about the art world and the role it plays in his creative life. “I don’t really look at it as an art world, just as art,” he replies. “But I think it’s ingrained in my system because after music it was the first thing that interested me, and it is always going to stay with me. When I was 16 there was this Belgian curator named Jan Hoet, who
did an interesting exhibition in Belgium called Chambres d’amis. Hoet went on to do Documenta. And ever since that exhibition art has become a daily thing for me – it’s like breathing. People ask me, ‘What are you interested in?’ and it’s very difficult for me to say, because it’s something that I look at everyday. There is no day that I’m not looking at artworks.” What luck for the 16-year-old Simons to have stumbled on such a legendary show! Chambres d’amis was a groundbreaking work of curatorial genius. Hoet was, at the time, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, northern Belgium. For the 1986 show (whose title translates as Guest Room), he commissioned more than 50 contemporary artists to create site-specific works in private homes around the city. Hoet created an art exhibition that had escaped the museum and exploded across the city and into the lives of ordinary folk. It’s easy to see how it might have impacted on a young, bright and impressionable mind and how it could lead to a lifelong fascination with art. Raf Simons only got into fashion after working as an industrial designer for a couple of years, and getting bored. His motivation was as much social as aesthetic: “When I made the switch to fashion I felt very happy because I was suddenly in such a social environment. You immediately have lots of things around you. You work on the human body; you work with a lot of people you know, human beings, people who stitch, people who produce.” He created his first collection as a way of gaining entry to the fashion-design course at Antwerp’s legendary Royal Academy of Art, except Linda Loppa, the director of the fashion course who is credited with the discovery of the Antwerp Six, turned him down. Not because he wasn’t good enough, but because he was too good. As far as she was concerned the young Simons didn’t need academic training
