Raf Simons

Raf Simons launched his label in 1995 in Antwerp, after training as an industrial designer and working briefly under Walter Van Beirendonck. The proposition was unusual for the time, a menswear line shaped by youth subcultures, post-punk music, and the visual codes of European adolescence.

Critics quickly labeled the work as part of a new wave of conceptual menswear from Belgium, with Simons often described as the designer who brought the teenage boy, awkward, slim, and slightly alien, into fashion’s main conversation.

Menswear was the core of the house, not a category beside something else. The early collections paired narrow tailoring with oversized parkas, college knits, and graphic-heavy outerwear, often referencing bands like Kraftwerk and Joy Division or artists such as Peter Saville, who later collaborated on prints.

Tailoring sat close to the body in the shoulder and chest, while coats and bombers were scaled up, sometimes drastically, a proportion play that influenced a generation including Kim Jones, Kris Van Assche, and later Demna at Vetements. The fall-winter 2001 Riot Riot Riot collection and the long-running collaboration with Sterling Ruby are routinely cited in museum surveys, and Simons received the CFDA International Designer of the Year award in 2014 during his tenure at Dior.

The brand operated independently for years before Italian group OTB, owner of Maison Margiela and Marni, took a majority stake in 2018, which funded broader distribution and the Raf Simons Runway expansion.

Simons spent parallel stints leading Jil Sander, Christian Dior, and Calvin Klein, then served as co-creative director of Prada alongside Miuccia Prada starting in 2020. In late 2022 he closed his namesake label after 27 years, ending one of the defining menswear projects of its era.

Its legacy sits in the vocabulary it gave the industry, the oversized silhouette, the graphic bomber, the merging of fine art and music references into men’s clothing, a template still visible in the work of younger designers from Matthew Williams to the team at 1017 ALYX 9SM.