Raf Simons is the future. Still the future. The 40-year-old Belgian designer has long been the headlight for radical menswear. Throughout the '90s and '00s, his eponymous label showed how innovative design can embrace new technologies and fabrics and rethink traditional structures. In 2005, Simons turned from rogue independent to the man behind a megabrand, taking the reins of the men's and women's lines at Jil Sander. That label has always been known for its clean, utilitarian silhouettes, a precision that seems to particularly suit Simons, who, for the Fall 2008 womenswear collection, put the tailors on the dresses and the dressmakers on the tailoring. It was Simons way of again unsettling how we think of clothes
Simons has many fans well beyond the closed doors of high fashion. Take Kanye West, the hip-hop superstar who has pretty much restyled the music world over the past few years. He's never hidden his interest in fashion. When West went looking for inspiration in developing his upcoming sportswear line, Pastelle, he had the good sense to check out Simons. Their upbringings couldn't have been more different, but Simons and West are both fearless individualists. Here they talk about style, music, and why it's good to be the outsider on the playground. We started off asking them what they were like as children
RAF SIMONS: I was born in this very small village in Belgium. It wasn't really a creative environment. In school, creating was kept away from young people. The village was so small there was no outlet except for one little record store. I think that is where it started for me-just picking up records. I'm 40 years old, so it was LPs. The first LP I ever bought—you're going to be shocked—was Bob Marley. Then I switched to Kraftwerk, Joy Division, and that kind of stuff. I was a bit dark at that time because I felt so isolated. But not only me, there were some other young people who felt that way. We loved to dress in black. I was growing up in the New Wave period, but that wasn't allowed in school. I remember moments when they wouldn't let four people dressed in black stand together on the playground. Then, before I graduated, I remember finding this book, and there was one page about industrial design. Basically, I ended up going to school for that. At that time there was a big boom going on with fashion in Belgium. The more I looked, the more I became interested. Before that I never even thought to become a fashion designer or anything like that. I started feeling that work when I was 19 years old, but I didn't do my first collection until I was 27. I wanted to finish my education in industrial design first. My parents are very holy to me. They never said, "You should do this," or "You should do that." My dad had to go in the army when he was 16, and he stayed there. My mom was a cleaning lady her whole life. The only thing they said to me was: "Take it seriously. Do what you what you believe in, but take it seriously." So the fourth year, I had to go for an internship. I went to Walter Van Beirendonck. I knocked on his door, and I was super scared-because I had nothing to do with fashion. But he was interested. He had absolutely zero interest in all of the fashion work I had faked to impress him. He just went straight to my industrial-design stuff. He said, "I really want you to come because, next to the fact that I am a fashion designer, I have this presentation in Paris and objects to make. I'm not a traditional designer." I ended up doing that with him, and he took me to Paris, and I saw my first show, which was the third show for Martin Margiela. Nothing else in fashion has had such a big impact on me. It was a show where half the audience cried, including myself. I was just like, "What! This is fashion?" Only at that point did I understand what fashion could be or what it could mean to people. It was the "white" show, where all the models wore dresses in white and transparent plastic. Margiela had no money at the time, so the Maison ended up going to a black neighborhood in Paris and asking if they could use a children's playground for the show. The parents said, "Yes, you can have the playground, but we want our children to be able to see it." So little black children were standing with the audience in the front row. The children started to run over to the models, and they picked them up and held them around their necks
KANYE WEST: For me, I realized the psychology behind having Jordans growing up—what it meant culturally, or what it meant to be a child just trying to fit in. When my parents divorced, my mother moved to Chicago, and my father stayed in Maryland. My mother lived in an all-black neighborhood. My father lived in an all-white neighborhood. When I got to Maryland, I had to adjust to a more affluent neighborhood than what I was used to in Chicago. Then when I went back to Chicago, I had to readjust to that. Then my mother and I moved to China for a year when I was in fifth grade. I had to adjust to a place where there was nobody my age, not to mention any black kids out there. Those were scary situations, but it made me able to open up my mind to other cultures and be accepting. And that is the greatest blessing, to have those experiences, because I can adapt to other cultures and still be who I am. So you see, with my style, there is a bit of Paris and a bit of Japan and a bit of the suburbs. A lot of people's style looks very specific to one region
RS: That's very good. Having your feet in the middle, you can see everything very differently. I think it's beyond fantastic, actually. Dress codes and gestures and attitudes have always inspired me, as has youth culture in general, although now I question it more. If you analyze youth cultures over history, there has always been something strict about them-you have to be like this or like that. I'm actually surprised that in the 21st century, it can still be so present: They are still environments with walls around them
KW: What I've noticed in the last few months, especially since my mom passed, is that everything is a cult. I don't mean cult in a bad way, just that everything's been cultivated for us. New ideas are the new roads, the dirt roads, that people have to pave. In order to go through the dirt roads, you have to get scratched with sticks, and you end up dirty if you have any new concepts. America is made not to have new concepts. It's there to live alongside strip malls and be beaten by mundaneness. Even hip-hop is: "You can't do this, you can't say that. These are the rules of hip-hop." One of my friends, Ludacris, wanted me to make a song called "Did It for Hip-Hop." On the song I was gonna talk about how I didn't do anything for hip-hop-I did it for myself. I did subscribe to the cult of hip-hop at one point, and I am very hip-hop because of it. But I have a lot of ideas that extend way further than the rules of hip-hop. In Japan you see guys that are dressed completely hip-hop, but they're completely nice also. They'll come up to you, looking like they'll rob you and instead they bow. I find a lot of similarities between myself and the Japanese, because sometimes they look at something from the outside, and take the best of what they like about it, and then they'll work extremely hard at pushing it to another level. They'll take a piece of Americana, like jeans, buy all the jean mills, and then be the master at those jeans. From a music standpoint, I stayed in Chicago, where there's no music industry, no outlets, nobody else that can make beats with me, not on the level of New York. Whereas in New York, everyone knew one another-you could be a small producer and sell a beat really quickly. So I would work on the beat so much that by the time I got to New York, the ones I was making were way better than anyone else's. They were like, "Damn! Your beats sound like they're completed songs!" Cause people would just do beats that were a sample, like a really basic idea. Then they'd have a keyboard player come in, a person who's a specialist at drums, and an engineer. And I'm doing all this in my room, right next to my mother, trying to beat five producers, taking the entire summer off, not getting a haircut, not getting any new shoes, cause I couldn't afford them—and it's like what Japanese people do: They see it and they end up doing it way better than the culture that made it. You once told me that if you didn't do fashion, you would have done psychology
RS: I like to find out things about people. I'm interested in them. But part of being a psychiatrist is also having to find out about people you don't have an interest in
KW: Right. That's the problem. Whenever you take a job that you think you're gonna love, there's gonna be situations like that, where you also have to work with people who you're not as interested in, until you get to the point where you're at the very top of your game and you can just be like, "No, I don't want to do this at all." Until then, you haven't reached your ultimate goal in life—a lot of people don't realize that the ultimate goal in life is to not have to do anything you don't want to do. Most people think the solution is to make a lot of money. The only problem is some people fall into the trap where money becomes the prison, and they end up having to do a bunch of things that they don't want to do for money to get that couple weeks of vacation where they feel like they're not doing anything they don't want to do. So, for me, I try to design my life like it's a big vacation every single day, every moment of my life. That's the goal. Like, I wouldn't rather be doing anything more right now than talking on the phone with Raf Simons, one of my idols and someone I've studied so much. I was in a Jil Sander store for an hour yesterday, looking at the collars and studying the way the marble print was put on the sweaters
RS: That means a lot to me, and that's also why I continue to do what I do. For me, I think that the 21st century almost doesn't allow the beauty of something really small and out of the spotlight. I deal now with two labels, my own, which is a very small label, and Jil, which is a very big, corporate business label. I see the difference, and every day I work there I think, What is now best for me?—because I like both very much. My own mentality is to make it small, like my own environment. In that sense I relate to what you were saying because I enjoy just working with my people every day. But our society doesn't allow that. Our society wants things to grow, and our society wants things to become bigger and bigger. Everything has to be put under the spotlight
KW: Where I came from in Chicago, we didn't have the term hip-hop. People didn't even know how to state the way I dressed or acted and what my mannerisms were. It's like how you said there were only a few people who dressed in black. I can't even think of one person in my school who dressed like me. There are new boxes and barriers that I'm breaking down every day. Coming from the hip-hop community, one of the things that you're never allowed to do is to speak about gay people unless you're disrespecting them. You couldn't be friends with gay people, you couldn't be in the car with them, you had to look at them in a completely different way, like they weren't even real people. I was working with my interior decorator, which was a big step for me because he was gay and I would have to ride in a car [with him] to go pick out fabrics and furniture. And I'd always think, What if a picture of me got shot and they put it on the Internet and they all said that's my boyfriend? Then in hip-hop, they would be like, "Oh, Kanye's gay, so we can't listen to his raps because he broke a rule of hip-hop."
RS: You break them, and you keep on breaking them, I would say
KW: Yeah. Now that I've broken that, I feel much freer that I can be creative and not deal with stereotypes. America beats stereotypes into people. Recently there was this whole Bonnaroo situation. I didn't realize that actual racism was still alive, because at a certain point, once you become famous, you're no longer black or white, you're just green-you're just money. So when you walk in any store there's a certain level of: "Oh, he's not a black guy. He's a famous guy now!" When I went to that Bonnaroo festival in Tennessee, they definitely reminded me that I was a black guy. On 12 port-a-potties they wrote in bold letters fuck kanye. They didn't allow my crew to load on the stage; the promoter allowed Pearl Jam to do three encores. The sun was starting to come up, and the whole point of my show was that it was glow in the dark. They bled my cryo tanks so I wouldn't have smoke. I felt so naïve, cause it clicked in my head: Oh, wow, this is really done on purpose
RS: Being popular, is it something you want?
Simons has many fans well beyond the closed doors of high fashion. Take Kanye West, the hip-hop superstar who has pretty much restyled the music world over the past few years. He's never hidden his interest in fashion. When West went looking for inspiration in developing his upcoming sportswear line, Pastelle, he had the good sense to check out Simons. Their upbringings couldn't have been more different, but Simons and West are both fearless individualists. Here they talk about style, music, and why it's good to be the outsider on the playground. We started off asking them what they were like as children
RAF SIMONS: I was born in this very small village in Belgium. It wasn't really a creative environment. In school, creating was kept away from young people. The village was so small there was no outlet except for one little record store. I think that is where it started for me-just picking up records. I'm 40 years old, so it was LPs. The first LP I ever bought—you're going to be shocked—was Bob Marley. Then I switched to Kraftwerk, Joy Division, and that kind of stuff. I was a bit dark at that time because I felt so isolated. But not only me, there were some other young people who felt that way. We loved to dress in black. I was growing up in the New Wave period, but that wasn't allowed in school. I remember moments when they wouldn't let four people dressed in black stand together on the playground. Then, before I graduated, I remember finding this book, and there was one page about industrial design. Basically, I ended up going to school for that. At that time there was a big boom going on with fashion in Belgium. The more I looked, the more I became interested. Before that I never even thought to become a fashion designer or anything like that. I started feeling that work when I was 19 years old, but I didn't do my first collection until I was 27. I wanted to finish my education in industrial design first. My parents are very holy to me. They never said, "You should do this," or "You should do that." My dad had to go in the army when he was 16, and he stayed there. My mom was a cleaning lady her whole life. The only thing they said to me was: "Take it seriously. Do what you what you believe in, but take it seriously." So the fourth year, I had to go for an internship. I went to Walter Van Beirendonck. I knocked on his door, and I was super scared-because I had nothing to do with fashion. But he was interested. He had absolutely zero interest in all of the fashion work I had faked to impress him. He just went straight to my industrial-design stuff. He said, "I really want you to come because, next to the fact that I am a fashion designer, I have this presentation in Paris and objects to make. I'm not a traditional designer." I ended up doing that with him, and he took me to Paris, and I saw my first show, which was the third show for Martin Margiela. Nothing else in fashion has had such a big impact on me. It was a show where half the audience cried, including myself. I was just like, "What! This is fashion?" Only at that point did I understand what fashion could be or what it could mean to people. It was the "white" show, where all the models wore dresses in white and transparent plastic. Margiela had no money at the time, so the Maison ended up going to a black neighborhood in Paris and asking if they could use a children's playground for the show. The parents said, "Yes, you can have the playground, but we want our children to be able to see it." So little black children were standing with the audience in the front row. The children started to run over to the models, and they picked them up and held them around their necks
KANYE WEST: For me, I realized the psychology behind having Jordans growing up—what it meant culturally, or what it meant to be a child just trying to fit in. When my parents divorced, my mother moved to Chicago, and my father stayed in Maryland. My mother lived in an all-black neighborhood. My father lived in an all-white neighborhood. When I got to Maryland, I had to adjust to a more affluent neighborhood than what I was used to in Chicago. Then when I went back to Chicago, I had to readjust to that. Then my mother and I moved to China for a year when I was in fifth grade. I had to adjust to a place where there was nobody my age, not to mention any black kids out there. Those were scary situations, but it made me able to open up my mind to other cultures and be accepting. And that is the greatest blessing, to have those experiences, because I can adapt to other cultures and still be who I am. So you see, with my style, there is a bit of Paris and a bit of Japan and a bit of the suburbs. A lot of people's style looks very specific to one region
RS: That's very good. Having your feet in the middle, you can see everything very differently. I think it's beyond fantastic, actually. Dress codes and gestures and attitudes have always inspired me, as has youth culture in general, although now I question it more. If you analyze youth cultures over history, there has always been something strict about them-you have to be like this or like that. I'm actually surprised that in the 21st century, it can still be so present: They are still environments with walls around them
KW: What I've noticed in the last few months, especially since my mom passed, is that everything is a cult. I don't mean cult in a bad way, just that everything's been cultivated for us. New ideas are the new roads, the dirt roads, that people have to pave. In order to go through the dirt roads, you have to get scratched with sticks, and you end up dirty if you have any new concepts. America is made not to have new concepts. It's there to live alongside strip malls and be beaten by mundaneness. Even hip-hop is: "You can't do this, you can't say that. These are the rules of hip-hop." One of my friends, Ludacris, wanted me to make a song called "Did It for Hip-Hop." On the song I was gonna talk about how I didn't do anything for hip-hop-I did it for myself. I did subscribe to the cult of hip-hop at one point, and I am very hip-hop because of it. But I have a lot of ideas that extend way further than the rules of hip-hop. In Japan you see guys that are dressed completely hip-hop, but they're completely nice also. They'll come up to you, looking like they'll rob you and instead they bow. I find a lot of similarities between myself and the Japanese, because sometimes they look at something from the outside, and take the best of what they like about it, and then they'll work extremely hard at pushing it to another level. They'll take a piece of Americana, like jeans, buy all the jean mills, and then be the master at those jeans. From a music standpoint, I stayed in Chicago, where there's no music industry, no outlets, nobody else that can make beats with me, not on the level of New York. Whereas in New York, everyone knew one another-you could be a small producer and sell a beat really quickly. So I would work on the beat so much that by the time I got to New York, the ones I was making were way better than anyone else's. They were like, "Damn! Your beats sound like they're completed songs!" Cause people would just do beats that were a sample, like a really basic idea. Then they'd have a keyboard player come in, a person who's a specialist at drums, and an engineer. And I'm doing all this in my room, right next to my mother, trying to beat five producers, taking the entire summer off, not getting a haircut, not getting any new shoes, cause I couldn't afford them—and it's like what Japanese people do: They see it and they end up doing it way better than the culture that made it. You once told me that if you didn't do fashion, you would have done psychology
RS: I like to find out things about people. I'm interested in them. But part of being a psychiatrist is also having to find out about people you don't have an interest in
KW: Right. That's the problem. Whenever you take a job that you think you're gonna love, there's gonna be situations like that, where you also have to work with people who you're not as interested in, until you get to the point where you're at the very top of your game and you can just be like, "No, I don't want to do this at all." Until then, you haven't reached your ultimate goal in life—a lot of people don't realize that the ultimate goal in life is to not have to do anything you don't want to do. Most people think the solution is to make a lot of money. The only problem is some people fall into the trap where money becomes the prison, and they end up having to do a bunch of things that they don't want to do for money to get that couple weeks of vacation where they feel like they're not doing anything they don't want to do. So, for me, I try to design my life like it's a big vacation every single day, every moment of my life. That's the goal. Like, I wouldn't rather be doing anything more right now than talking on the phone with Raf Simons, one of my idols and someone I've studied so much. I was in a Jil Sander store for an hour yesterday, looking at the collars and studying the way the marble print was put on the sweaters
RS: That means a lot to me, and that's also why I continue to do what I do. For me, I think that the 21st century almost doesn't allow the beauty of something really small and out of the spotlight. I deal now with two labels, my own, which is a very small label, and Jil, which is a very big, corporate business label. I see the difference, and every day I work there I think, What is now best for me?—because I like both very much. My own mentality is to make it small, like my own environment. In that sense I relate to what you were saying because I enjoy just working with my people every day. But our society doesn't allow that. Our society wants things to grow, and our society wants things to become bigger and bigger. Everything has to be put under the spotlight
KW: Where I came from in Chicago, we didn't have the term hip-hop. People didn't even know how to state the way I dressed or acted and what my mannerisms were. It's like how you said there were only a few people who dressed in black. I can't even think of one person in my school who dressed like me. There are new boxes and barriers that I'm breaking down every day. Coming from the hip-hop community, one of the things that you're never allowed to do is to speak about gay people unless you're disrespecting them. You couldn't be friends with gay people, you couldn't be in the car with them, you had to look at them in a completely different way, like they weren't even real people. I was working with my interior decorator, which was a big step for me because he was gay and I would have to ride in a car [with him] to go pick out fabrics and furniture. And I'd always think, What if a picture of me got shot and they put it on the Internet and they all said that's my boyfriend? Then in hip-hop, they would be like, "Oh, Kanye's gay, so we can't listen to his raps because he broke a rule of hip-hop."
RS: You break them, and you keep on breaking them, I would say
KW: Yeah. Now that I've broken that, I feel much freer that I can be creative and not deal with stereotypes. America beats stereotypes into people. Recently there was this whole Bonnaroo situation. I didn't realize that actual racism was still alive, because at a certain point, once you become famous, you're no longer black or white, you're just green-you're just money. So when you walk in any store there's a certain level of: "Oh, he's not a black guy. He's a famous guy now!" When I went to that Bonnaroo festival in Tennessee, they definitely reminded me that I was a black guy. On 12 port-a-potties they wrote in bold letters fuck kanye. They didn't allow my crew to load on the stage; the promoter allowed Pearl Jam to do three encores. The sun was starting to come up, and the whole point of my show was that it was glow in the dark. They bled my cryo tanks so I wouldn't have smoke. I felt so naïve, cause it clicked in my head: Oh, wow, this is really done on purpose
RS: Being popular, is it something you want?
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