Miuccia Prada And Raf Simons Have A Masterplan

With the new see-now-buy-now model shaking up the fashion week schedule and designers switching fashion houses to the point that it’s hard to keep track of who works where, the industry is certainly receiving a welcome shake-up. But for Raf Simons, there’s room for plenty more disruption yet.

“I would be excited if Miuccia would do the Raf Simons brand for a season, and then I would do a season for Marc Jacobs in New York, and Marc would do Prada; I think the audience would be totally excited by that,” he suggested. “Maybe fashion should operate more like a museum, where you have a museum curator, but you have guest curators come in, too. I think that the fashion business has recently stopped exploring its own possibilities; it should become much more liberated once again.”

And he’s not alone. Simons mused this topic in conversation with Miuccia Prada in an extensive piece for System Magazine’s Issue 8, exploring the nature of hierarchy, structure and censorship in fashion. And Prada, it seems, is on board with his vision.

“I am thinking more and more about exactly this kind of idea, because it feels like it is needed – not just to get the world talking, but to broaden the horizons of what fashion can be, and also to have fun,” she told the magazine. “What I mainly think is that you have fun when you really do good stuff, and that fun comes with other people.”

However one thing that both agreed on was that the sensationalism that accompanies fashion shows now can overshadow the clothes themselves. “For instance, if Raf did the next Prada show instead of me, the whole world would be going ‘Wow!’ But maybe that’s all they would talk about," Prada mused. “So you have to be careful that the choices you make are not influenced by this increasing need for entertainment.”

Simons too saw this sensationalism when he announced his departure from Dior in 2015, before signing up at Calvin Klein earlier this year.

“It is not something that I see as such a big thing, this whole idea of leaving Dior. I know lots of people were like, ‘Oh my God, you left Dior’, but I don’t see it like that. There was no fight, there was no conflict; it was just a conclusion that I made quite quickly,” he said. “I have my thoughts about what I think Dior could become over time, and they have their ideas of what it will become. I wish them the best with it, but it just wasn’t my thing in the long run… As much as there was incredible beauty in that house and incredible people and ateliers and everything, I just felt like, ‘This isn’t for me, I am not the right person for them’.”

“I think there’s something slightly wrong about this idea of big brands,” Prada agreed. “Raf did the biggest thing by leaving [Dior] – chapeau, respect – because he probably didn’t feel comfortable anymore. Of course, Prada is my own company, so it’s my own fault that it is the size it is, but now I’m at a moment where I really want to focus on what I like, what I care about. I don’t have to care if we don’t grow enough for the market.”

For both though, a love of fashion remains at the heart of their approach to business – whether at Prada’s world-famous house or Simons’s smaller eponymous brand, or indeed in his new role at Calvin Klein.

“I am only interested if what you make is sublime,” Simons said. “If that comes out of chaos or organisation, who cares?”