Raf Simons
Unlike fashion, art isn't applied. It doesn't have to serve anybody. It doesn't have to be there for any other reason than to give an impression of what the world is about.
Berlin is in a state of transition. There are lots of people who don't stay here. They pass through. They might not 'clean up,' but they mature. It is a city where people spend a significant time in their lives, and then they move on.
Antwerp literally was a trash hole, but fashion changed that. The designers there were extreme, and their work was hard to understand. But now, people from all over the world come to Antwerp to shop.
We Belgians love when we can go to L.A. because the city is amazing and the climate is fantastic.
The fashion world doesn't know the word 'stop,' so you have to make sure there are sublime moments every day.
People who don't know me look at my world as something very hard-core, and I don't feel it that way. It's not what attracts me.
Somewhere, in some city in America, someone is wearing my clothes, and I'm happy with that.
I'm not an isolated person. The more I connect to people, the more I have the feeling that things work.
I see there is a lot of behaviour in men's fashion, which is systematic. It's a lot about all these kind of clothes that can be easily combined with each other, and it's less and less, I think, about making a fashion statement.
I dont want to show clothes, I want to show my attitude, my past, present and future. I use memories and future visions and try to place them in todays world.Collection: Memories
I’m very attracted to things that I can’t define.Collection: I Can
The future, for me, is romantic, I don’t understand people who say the past is romantic. Romantic, for me, is something you don’t know yet, something you can dream about, something unknown and mystical. That I find fascinating.Collection: Dream
The fashion world doesn't know the word stop, so you have to make sure there are sublime moments every day.Collection: Fashion
When it's only clothes, that is not satisfying enough for me. I don't think I could do this for 10, 20 years if that was all. It also has to be about a psychology or a mentality or a concept.Collection: Thinking
Camouflage is about much more than concealment and going unnoticed. There's a whole game involved between revealing and hiding.Collection: Hiding
In fashion, general people will look to the piece itself. [Some designers] concentrate on, 'How can I make this seam look special?' or 'What am I going to do with that button so it looks interesting?' I am not interested in that. At the moment, I am more interested in the shape and the form. I have a big desire to make clothes without defining them.Collection: Fashion
Becoming a fashion designer is agreeing with the fact that what you experience or what you see as free is also connected to a system. Does that mean giving up your freedom? I still don't know the answer. There's a very different kind of psychology going on in the fashion scene than in art.Collection: Fashion
Both costume and fashion are about telling a story, except that in a ballet the story has already been written by the composer or the librettist.Collection: Fashion
I wanted an idea of the future, a new femininity. I wanted you to feel that you wouldn't quite know where these women were coming from and where they were going to.Collection: Ideas
Contemporary art for me is a real driver; it propels us into the future. And at the same time, it's what connects us to the past, from a perspective of artistic evolution in which the succession of eras and styles gives meaning to creation.Collection: Art
My aim is a very modern Dior, but at the end of the day, I also look back.Collection: The End Of The Day
And even being in the middle of it, at the LVMH group with Dior, there are certain parts of it that I'm just not really in, because it's not in me or my nature. The whole scene around it, the events, the photography ... It's never really been my thing. But I don't take a critical position on people who are very much about that either.Collection: Photography
I would prefer to use the word free. I think the Dior thing is so much freer. There was not so much free about Jil's way of working.Collection: Thinking
Robert Gober, for example. He doesn't seem like somebody who is just going to show in a gallery that asks him to show. He's just making his work, and when he's ready, he's going to show it.Collection: Example
I have so much respect for John [Galliano]s technical skill and the fantasy, its just something that I dont find relevant now, especially when it restricts a woman, because in every other area they have so much freedom.Collection: Skills
I always try to connect with what's happening in the world-reality, modernity, the 21st century, all that - and with Jil it started to feel very disconnected from the outside and how women were looking at fashion, experiencing fashion, interpreting fashion.Collection: Fashion
You do what you do. Or you do what you have to do. I don't know how to explain it better. I think that in the moment, you can't see connections, but sometimes afterwards you do.Collection: Thinking
The psychology for the person who's actually doing it is completely different. I think I probably needed to put that [hired-hand] psychology in my own head to be able to do the job. Otherwise it would just be too scary. People outside make it much bigger than me. I'm not saying in my head, "Oh, my god, what an amazing idea!" It scares me if I would do that.Collection: Jobs
I never really have to sit at a desk thinking, "What should I do now?" It doesn't work like that for me, and it never has. My thinking process is constant. The difference is that once I was in Antwerp only doing two men's shows a year. And the weird thing is I thought I was busy then.Collection: Thinking
I think it's different in fashion, because even if I would be an outsider, I would still be in the middle of the whole world of contemporary fashion. But it's interesting to think what outsider fashion could be. Does it mean to be completely disconnected from the regular system or just disconnected style-wise?Collection: Wise
I don't see Dior as something that could become mine. I see it as a dialogue with the women who wear it. I want to stay connected to them rather than to an abstract brand.Collection: Dior
Sometimes it’s more a matter of collaboration which matters in a collection.Collection: Collaboration
I've always seen myself as a small entity, and it will always stay like that. I'm not changing. But I think the big challenge for me taking on the Dior thing is to see how I can connect that to such a huge institution.Collection: Thinking
Well, my own men's collection always felt very free back in the days before Jil. Once you make it this kind of dialogue with other people, with a fashion show and clients and whatever, it becomes something else. Free meets not so free.Collection: Fashion
But overall I want to make sure people fall in love with the clothes and that they are satisfiedCollection: Falling In Love
It felt wrong for me to stay totally connected to that very strict way of approaching the heritage - what it can be, what it cannot be. That was also the period where I really thought, "No, let's open it up."Collection: Heritage
When artists connect to a system because they want to make a living, it's their own choice. In fashion, designers don't have that choice. I know everybody mentions Azzedine Alaïa, but he's been going for a long time in the system - showing to people, selling to clients - and I think it's admirable how he's transformed it into his own system in a way, but it's still a system.Collection: Fashion
The Dior heritage is so broad. It has a strong presence in the work. So, when people have to define it quickly, it's, like, the Bar jacket and the movement and the luxury and the Belle Époque and so much more.Collection: Strong
It was a challenge for me to see how I could deal with that at Jil, and I had a lot of doubt about it. I wondered if maybe it was just better to do your own thing in the long run, like an artist.Collection: Running
We are very excited to re-launch the collaboration with Fred Perry. We have great appreciation for the heritage of the brand as well as their dynamism in guiding the brand towards the future. Their openness to create synergies between both our brands will bring interesting, creative results.Collection: Appreciation
Collage – SS13 offers a very controlled and pure do-it-yourself attitude. The collection shows a juxtaposition of very different materials, prints and colours, therefore giving the wearer a possibility to combine the garments in different ways.Collection: Attitude
I don't find it difficult anymore, because these days, Raf is only men and Dior is only women. I found it much more complicated when I was doing Jil Sander for men and women. It wasn't that it was the same, but I'm specific about where I want to go, and when you suddenly have to do two men's collections in the same moment, that was more difficult.Collection: Men
I see my position in that whole Dior construction very differently from my own brand. My own brand will stand or fall because of me. Dior won't fall if I fall. It will also still stand if I'm not there. I'm coming in there and it's like a - I don't know the English word - like a passage.Collection: Fall
My own show with Sterling Ruby, for example, seems like such a huge disconnection from Dior couture, but then I think, yeah, in both collections there was a very strong focus on the human hand and the actual work of people making garments. So in that sense, they were completely related. But I didn't realize that during the process.Collection: Strong