Raf Simons trained in industrial and furniture design in Genk, taking his degree in 1991, and undertook an internship at the studio of Walter Van Beirendonck, one of the Antwerp Six, while still a student. Encouraged by Linda Loppa of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, he produced his first menswear collection in 1995, founding the Raf Simons label.

The signature came together in lean tailoring on adolescent frames, narrow-shouldered parkas and bombers, knit pieces printed with graphics from New Order sleeves and Joy Division covers, a wardrobe of subculture dressed in formal proportion.

In June 2005, the Prada Group, then owner of Jil Sander, appointed Simons creative director of the German house, his first time designing womenswear and accessories alongside the men’s collections. He widened the brand’s commercial range with the diffusion line Jil Sander Navy, and from 2010 staged three couture-inflected collections that played with the shapes, colors and proportions of haute couture.

The work sat in the lineage of Sander’s own white shirts and cashmere coats while opening into tulip skirts and bonded silk, a counterpart to the minimalism Phoebe Philo was developing at Céline. His final collection for the house was fall-winter 2012, following his dismissal by then-owner Onward Holdings ahead of Jil Sander’s return.

In April 2012, Simons was named creative director at Christian Dior, replacing John Galliano, and he opened with a haute couture collection for fall-winter 2012 that returned to the Bar jacket, the A line and the H line.

A three-year tenure followed, ending in October 2015, after which he became chief creative officer at Calvin Klein in 2016, leaving in 2018, then took up the post of co-creative designer of Prada with Miuccia Prada in 2020.

The Prada partnership, announced in April 2020 with equal responsibility for creative input, debuted with the spring-summer 2021 womenswear show presented digitally from Milan in September. Inside Prada’s nylon archive and gabardine suiting, the co-designed collections place Simons within the longer argument of his career, the youth-cult menswear of the late 1990s now folded into one of the most established houses in Milan.