Raf Simons
At home and at work with the most uncompromising fashion designer in the world
From the city of Antwerp, a hotbed of modernity in fashion, designer Raf Simons has made the most radical menswear of the past 15 years. He makes fashion that feels both natural and completely new by mixing tailoring with the aesthetics of teenage rebellion. Raf is revered for his bold shows and directional collections, as well as for his subversive work for the house of Jil Sander. Yet he has always kept a surprisingly low profile, rarely allowing himself to be photographed. While avoiding the public eye, Raf has managed to maintain his curiosity for fashion and his love for clothes. The designer is also an avid art collector and a keen advocate of men wearing sandals.
Fantastic Man n° 14 – 2011
Text by GERT JONKERS
Photography by WILLY VANDERPERRE
Styling by OLIVIER RIZZO
It is a sunny Sunday afternoon in May, and Raf Simons is cooking lunch at his home in Antwerp, Belgium. “Well,” Raf says, “I wouldn’t call this cooking, would you?” He is heating up two small salmon quiches that he’d bought the previous day. He serves them beside a carefully considered composition of chicory leaves, lettuce and tomatoes, and a little heap of shrimps covered in pink cocktail sauce. A two-litre bottle of Diet Coke stands in between us. It is just under a month before Raf presents his Spring/Summer 2012 collection for Jil Sander in Milan, and just over a month before he presents the Spring/Summer 2012 collection for his own label, Raf Simons, in Paris.
“It’s been a bizarre year for me,” says Raf. This is an understatement. Just three days before his Raf Simons Autumn/Winter 2011 show in January, it was announced that his business partnership with the manufacturer of his clothes, an Italian company called FUTUREPRESENT, had been suddenly terminated. It wasn’t clear if the show would even take place, let alone if anyone would be able to actually make the clothes for the stores to sell. The Raf Simons show, usually the highlight of Paris Fashion Week, looked to be a no-show for the first time in ten years.
But there was a show, miraculously, and it was a victory – in most people’s opinion the best of the season. It felt new and bold, while also harking back to the dark, collegiate themes that appeared earlier in Raf’s career. The collection was titled ‘Dead Prince College’. The clothes have been produced, and his label has survived. But not without the designer paying a hefty toll. “After the show I was seriously sick of it; I got really depressed,” Raf says. “Which was weird, as I’m never depressed. But it’s all good now; things are opening up again. In a way, I love times like these. I’m super excited about going back to Paris this season as an independent designer.”
In the 15 years since he showed his first menswear collection, Raf Simons has sustained a self-perpetuating extremism. He is among the most influential, and least conformist, of all menswear designers. Since 2005 he has also been exerting his authority over womenswear with his collections for Jil Sander. Yet he remains stubbornly non-famous, not even being particularly well known outside of fashion circles, also because he rarely allows himself to be photographed. His brand Raf Simons is a true cult label, currently selling at around 50 stores worldwide. He had more retailers in the past, he says, but the notoriously sloppy delivery practices of his manufacturer turned some off. “A few the stores that stopped selling us actually sent us flowers, with congratulations, when they heard of our break with the Italians,” he says.
Raf is currently in talks to secure financial backing from new partners. “But I’m not in any hurry,” he says. “First I need to recover from the breakup, and when I do step into a new partnership, I want the structure and circumstances to be really good this time. I think that what I’ve learnt by working in a bigger company like Jil Sander is how important the structure is. You can have ideas and you can have money, but if the structure isn’t right, if everybody at design and management and marketing and sales isn’t in the same key, it’s not going to work.”
As we eat our lunch, Raf is candid as to who he is in talks with and which other designer jobs at various luxury houses he has been offered in the past. He says exactly what he thinks about every other designer working today. He loves talking about the fashion world. “Do you have any good fashion gossip?” he asks, then happily shares the latest rumours. He prefaces these chats with the word ‘confidentially’. It’s one he uses often. It is as if he wishes he were able to voice his opinions in public, if only the status quo of the fashion system allowed him to do so.
“I’m very open about things, and I consider the people I work with my family. I don’t want to be this elusive person,” he says. “I’ve had the same cell phone number for the past 15 years – anyone can call me. I was a teacher in the fashion department at the University in Vienna; I want to be able to meet people. Sometimes when people call my studio in Antwerp and I pick up the phone myself, they’re shocked.”
Working with a team, and being open to other people’s opinions, is crucial to him. “When we’re putting the show together I really like to hear my assistants’ or interns’ thoughts,” he says. “They’ve been such an integral part of the process of making a collection, so I want to know what they think.”
Once you’re heading a team without being open to other people’s suggestions any more, that’s where the trouble starts, in Raf’s opinion. He thinks that’s what did Dior designer John Galliano in when he lost Steven Robinson, who had been his right hand for decades. “Without Stephen, he must have become very lonely. That’s what I see when I see the online footage of him sitting in a bar. If you lose the friends around you that dare to be critical, that’s when you become extremely lonely and impossible to deal with.”
Is Raf ever lonely?
“Not at all. I grew up as an only child, so I love being on my own. But when I work, I love to have people around me.”
Raf’s home in Antwerp is a stunning, spacious three-floor apartment in its original 1960s state. The building’s wobbly lift opens directly into the living room. The kitchen has its original wood panelling, though previous owners had installed state-of-the-art kitchen appliances; those stand mostly unused. Raf’s balcony, which stretches the width of the entire flat, looks out on a quiet, broad, tree-lined street in the centre of town. “I love the feeling of this place,” he says. “I used to like really stark, white, minimal places to work and to live in, but not anymore. I’m really into cosiness these days. My apartment in Milan is ’60s, too, and has this great lived-in feel to it.” (It happens to be on the same street where Miuccia Prada and Donatella Versace live.)
His living room is not unlike an art gallery. On one wall is a giant piece by the American artist Mike Kelley. In the middle of the room is a large, protruding and precarious-looking sculpture by Evan Holloway – it’s the first big piece of art Raf ever bought. Under the stairs is a piece by Jim Lambie, made of concrete and 12-inch album covers. The house looks immaculate. “I used to clean the place myself,” says Raf. “Cleanliness is in my blood. My mother was a cleaning lady for most of her professional life. But here in Antwerp there’d be no end to it. I’d return from Milan and it’d be all dusty again, so I finally got a maid.”
The apartment is furnished with some spectacular pieces. The dining table and matching chairs are by George Nakashima. The sofa and set of club chairs are by Pierre Jeanneret and were made especially for the city of Chandigarh, India. “They’re extremely sought after now,” Raf says. Chandigarh is the 1950s utopian architecture project by Le Corbusier. The long-neglected city was recently in the news when campaigners tried to place Chandigarh on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. “The whole town has been more or less cleared by art dealers,” says Raf. “Which I guess is a bad thing, and people like me are perhaps to blame. But on the other hand, if we hadn’t snatched it up they probably would have burnt most of it.” The people of Chandigarh evidently failed to see the beauty of Jeanneret’s modernist designs. Raf shows me pictures of enormous piles of chairs, just like his, decaying in the open air somewhere in India.
Raf was born in Neerpelt, a town in northeast Belgium, not far from the Dutch border. He went on to study industrial design in the city of Genk. “At school I was laughed at for liking vintage design,” Raf remembers. “People were really into Philippe Starck back then. Do you know him? Terrible.”
Were Raf’s furniture designs any good?
“Looking back? No. In fact I think they were pretty bad. I remember making a huge circular Chesterfield-style leather sofa on wheels. Very clean – it looked like a spaceship. Back then I thought it was so modern.” Raf doesn’t own any of his old pieces. “I gave it all to friends. I think my parents still have a few stools that I made.”
Raf had planned to embark on a career as a furniture designer. He interned for fashion designer Walter Van Beirendonck, for whom he designed packaging, stalls and furniture. Van Beirendonck took him to Paris, where Raf was completely blown away by an early Margiela show. “I had never thought of making fashion,” says Raf. “The closest I’d got to fashion was buying a pair of Dirk Bikkembergs shoes.”
His star in menswear rose quickly. In 1995 Raf launched his own brand, and in 1997 he staged his first runway show in Paris, causing an instant sensation with his cultish dark collections, his slim tailoring, his Kraftwerk-inspired shows, his use of language, his youthfulness. His eighth show in Paris, in January 2000, was the first that I attended. I thought it was incredible. The collection was called ‘Confusion’ – a rather stark offering in black, white and grey. Some of the models arrived on the runway in a DeLorlean sports car or a black limousine. “That’s one of my least favourite collections,” Raf says now. “I can see that I was fed up with it all. I was 31, I had a staff of 18 people, things had grown so fast and I wanted to get out.” Which is what he did; Raf closed his fashion house and took a season’s sabbatical from fashion, only to revive his label one year later with a collection called ‘Riot, Riot, Riot’. It was a very apt title. His models were walking in layers and layers of hooded jumpers, bomber jackets, big coats; their faces shrouded in big scarves. Gone, at least for a while, was Raf’s sharp tailoring. Raf had done ‘punk’ before, using Sex Pistols imagery on T-shirts, but never had he done so in such a radical, grim and grimy manner. It was a direction he’d continue for several seasons, but as radical as it seemed at the time, it would soon mix perfectly with the ‘old’ aesthetics of the house of Raf Simons.
Raf has always cast young men from the streets of Antwerp for his shows. His designs seem to be made for the boys that show his collections, yet his work can’t be deemed fashion for boys. “You know what teenage boys wear: jeans and T-shirts. That’s not what I make,” he says. “I’m intrigued by the psychology of men and what happens on the edge of adolescence and maturity.”
Often his collections look like old men’s clothes cut for a younger body, especially in his earlier shows: black suits, grey cardigans, cable-knits, long coats. Yet there were always hints of youth culture in his shows: pictures of the Maniac Street Preachers on sweaters, New Order and Joy Division on the soundtrack, slogans and a sense of insurgency everywhere.
At some point after lunch Raf stands up to change the music; for the last two hours he has had the debut album of The XX on constant repeat. “You must be annoyed by now,” he says, “but it’s literally the only album I’ve played over the last year. I play it all the time. The first time I heard it, I didn’t like it; I thought it was depressing, a bit too much Anne Clark. But then I got hooked. It’s really the new classical music. It never bores.”
Until 2005, Raf Simons had never designed womenswear. When it was announced that he would become creative director of Jil Sander, it caused some shock. “People were like: ‘Who’s this brat who has never designed womenswear?’” Raf remembers. “So it was a challenge. Part of the audience was sceptical, part was very welcoming. And I was convinced I could do it.” He likes the purity of the Jil Sander aesthetic, but found the heritage of the house to be so precise that it lacked the necessary variety from which he could draw inspiration. “I had to do my own thing there, otherwise it would have been quite repetitive. The fashion press is easily bored; they want new things, and I want new things too.”
In an hour he’s off to Milan, where he faces two days of fittings for the upcoming Jil Sander menswear show, one day of meetings with the accessory team, and two days of fittings for the next Jil Sander womenswear show in September.
What does that mean for his private life?
“My work schedule is intense, but I get by,” he says. Yes, he is single. “Maybe I just haven’t found the right person yet? I actually like being alone. I’ve never had the idea that life would be better in a relationship. It might happen tomorrow, who knows? God knows if I’d have time for it. But I’m a Capricorn, and they say we live our lives backwards. We’re born way too serious, and we ease up as we get older.”
Do you mean that, by the time you’re 50, you’ll lead the life of a promiscuous teenager?
“Maybe I already do?” Raf laughs. “Honestly, I feel like I’m 25. Maybe not physically, but in my mind I’m 25 years old.”
I suggest he must be the most disciplined person in the world, what with two labels, four men’s collections per year, and the spring/summer, autumn/winter, cruise, resort and pre-collections for Jil Sander womenswear. “Well, yes, I am disciplined,” he says. “For years I doubted whether I was capable of this fashion discipline. You always want to work longer on a collection, but there’s never time for it. That’s what bothered me so much in my first five years. But I’ve learnt to accept it, and in fact it’s also what fascinates me about fashion. You make something and then you quite easily distance yourself from it. Collection done, and on with the next one. I’m fast to move on with it, and that is something that drives my assistants crazy. They’re, like, ‘Shut up!’ The summer shows are in a few weeks, but in my mind I’m already thinking about the winter shows. I want new, new, new, new, new.”
Today Raf is wearing a pair of paint-splattered denim shorts by Alexander McQueen, a check shirt by some skate brand, and Raf Simons sandals. He likes wearing other labels than his own. “Of course I started designing because there were things that I couldn’t find. But then, over time, Raf Simons became a brand, and the brand and I are not the same. They can’t be the same. I think it should never be a rule in fashion that the designer should wear his own designs. I mean, Rick Owens and Stefano Pilati do it really well, I think. But what would happen if I would want to wear everything myself? Raf Simons would be a much easier label, and I don’t want it to be easy. I want Raf Simons to be about the psychology and perception of menswear, and how men see themselves and their clothes. I love the idea of ‘the mirror’. It’s interesting to see a model look at himself in the mirror. It’s never about my personal opinion, also because I’m not so extreme myself. I want the label to be extreme.”
He cites his Spring/Summer 2011 collection that he showed a year ago: a particularly odd silhouette of baggy and flared trousers, zip-up tops, lots of white and pastels. “It had nothing to do with what I would wear. I was fascinated with how young men can be feminine and androgynous, and for me the show referenced Martin Margiela’s first collections. Should I not do that because I wouldn’t wear it myself?”
Raf does wear Jil Sander, though. “I ordered 15 pairs of the same trousers,” he says. “I also love Prada. I think what Miuccia does is amazing.”
Although he is known for his fashion designs, Raf also has an alternate career as an art buyer for his friend Christian Cigrang, a Belgian shipping magnate. The first time I met Raf was in 2001, when I interviewed him in Amsterdam. I remember that Raf was wearing one of his own black bomber jackets over a navy crew-neck jumper, black denim trousers and white leather sneakers. After the interview we cycled into town, as Raf wanted to visit some galleries to look for works to buy for Cigrang.
The last place we visited that afternoon was the Paul Andriesse gallery on Prinsengracht. Raf was especially interested in a vast embroidered painting by the London-based Dutch artist Michael Raedecker, which did not come cheap. Raf asked the gallery assistant about the painting. She referred us to Andriesse himself, who then popped his head around the corner from his office in the back of the gallery. I could see that he was quickly scanning Raf’s appearance: the hooligan-esque bomber jacket, the black jeans, the sneakers.
“I don’t see clients without an appointment,” Andriesse said.
Okay. Could he get an appointment for today?
“No.”
Raf was slightly baffled, and I merely felt embarrassed about the treatment he had received from my fellow Dutchman. Of course Raf never returned to the gallery to discuss a possible purchase.
When I remind Raf of our gallery visit, he says: “Ah, yes. We never managed to buy a Raedecker, even though I love his work.” However, Raf doesn’t seem to find the scene embarrassing. “That’s how things work in the art world. You really have to earn your position. It’s not a matter of being Raf Simons and walking in to purchase a piece. I’ve done other things as a buyer and a curator since, but that still isn’t a licence to get whatever I want.”
There’s a quietness to art that is lacking in fashion, Raf thinks. “I can’t see myself growing old in fashion. I don’t think I can do fashion the Lagerfeld way. It’s hectic and it’s fast, and I don’t think you can cope with it forever. But I can imagine myself being old and still hanging around in the art world.” He’s thinking of Martin Margiela and Helmut Lang when he says: “I can totally understand why Martin and Helmut stepped out of fashion as young as they did.”
Over the years, Raf’s art profile has risen significantly. As well as buying for the Collection Cigrang Freres, he has managed to put together quite a collection of his own, too. “I think ultimately I’m more interested in art than in fashion. My colleague got me an iPad recently. She was fed up with me hanging around the office all night to read artnet.com and the art reviews on ‘The New York Times’ online.”
It’s only days before the Venice Art Biennale opens, and Raf is extremely excited about the event, even though he won’t be able to go there himself until mid-July. As I am due to visit the event, he is quick with advice. “The first thing you should do when you get to the Giardini is go straight to the Canadian Pavilion: they have Stephen Shearer, whom I love.” Raf has in fact been trying for years to buy a Shearer painting. It’s not such an unlikely interest; Shearer’s fascination for young adolescents with luscious, long hair is right up Raf’s alley. “I once had a chance to buy one through Stuart Shave Modern Art in London, but I wasn’t sure if I liked that particular painting. Which of course I now totally regret; now it’s my favourite Shearer piece.” That’s the thing with art, he says, and in fact also with fashion: what you find unsettling at first is usually what you end up liking the most.
Due to this year’s fashion-show schedule, Raf also won’t be able to go to Art Basel, which is about to open. “I hate missing it. I go every year, but it’s just impossible now.” It was in fact at Art Basel, three years ago, that he met Jil Sander herself.
Ever since Raf took over from Sander at her eponymous label after she had stormed out in 2004, he had been fantasising about meeting her. The people around him didn’t think it was a good idea for him to seek contact. Then, one day in Basel, he was eating a hot dog with his friend, the artist Germaine Kruip, and he thought he spotted Sander at a table nearby. “I wasn’t sure, so I checked with Germaine to see if she thought it was Jil. ‘Yes,’ said Germaine, ‘it must be her.’ Jil was sitting alone, wearing sunglasses. She’d seen me, too. So for the next ten minutes there was this really awkward situation where we were looking at each other, and neither of us knew what to do. Until I thought, ‘Okay Raf, you’ve got to be the gentleman.’ I walked up to her table, which was only about 20 metres away but I felt like Moses on his exodus through the desert. Whaaaa! I reached her table; she took off her glasses and shook my hand. That was nice. Then she started ranting about the way the Prada Group had treated her house, and the way seamstresses were being laid off and ateliers shuttered, and I really wasn’t in the mood for that. She went on like that until her friend joined us, and Jil introduced me to her friend, saying: ‘This is the man who takes really good care of my brand. I’m really happy that he does it.’”
It is Friday, June 17, the day before the Jil Sander menswear show, and Raf is finishing the final fittings at the brand’s headquarters in Milan. He is wearing the same McQueen denim shorts as a month ago, with a black Jil Sander shirt and black espadrille platform shoes from Prada.
There is a set procedure to the day. Raf is sat behind a table at one end of the room. Models are dressed by assistants in a dressing room set up behind a screen at the opposite end. As soon as they emerge, Raf picks up his remote control and cranks up the music in the room. The model starts walking towards Raf. The models must have been instructed that whenever the music plays, they walk. The first model I see that day is a young gentleman by the name of Philip. As soon as Raf turns off the music, some 15 seconds later, Philip stops walking. “Don’t like,” Raf says. “Can we put him in the snake-print T-shirt and black shorts instead? Plus the plastic coat.”
Philip changes into the suggested outfit. Music on. Walking. Music off. Raf: “Not the plastic coat. Can I see him in the boxy jacket?”
Philip changes into the boxy jacket.
“Not the boxy jacket.”
The fittings go on all day. Some looks require considerable time to put together. With Raf giving orders from behind the table, it takes a good 20 minutes for his assistants to juggle with a small snakeskin document wallet that hangs from a chord around the neck of a model. Wallet horizontal? Wallet diagonal? Higher? Lower? Under the jacket? Over the jacket? But sometimes decisions are made with speed and precision. At one point, a model emerges from behind the screen. Raf turns on the music, only to switch it off four seconds later. He says “Love!” – meaning the look is perfect. “What shoes do we have for him?”
There is a calm order to the process that one wouldn’t expect on the day before the show. A dozen assistants walk around, carrying in piles of shirts, bags and endless rounds of cappuccino. Bouquets of flowers arrive with encouraging notes attached to them. The make-up team comes in. “We want something natural but pale,” says Raf. The hair has already been decided earlier; the models are to appear with a very flat, wet hairdo as if a bucket of water has just been emptied over their heads. “A bit as if they’ve just stepped in from a toxic rain shower,” says Raf. “Think Putger Hauer in Blade Runner.”
The sturdy, army-like leather shoes, meanwhile, have the initials ‘JS’ and their size written on the heel, in what looks like handwriting in chalk. “It reminds me of how army shoes are stored, and also the codes one finds on Jeanneret’s furniture for Chandigarh,” says Raf, referring to his own vintage pieces at home. It’s one of the many references that Raf uses in this Jil Sander collection. The snakeskin-print T-shirts have the words “Jil Sander Menswear Show S/S 2012” printed on the back, in what seems to be a direct reference to Helmut Lang’s T-shirts that had the words ‘Helmut Lang Backstage’ printed on the back. “Absolutely,” says Raf. “When I had just got into fashion, I would take the train to Paris to try and get into the shows of Helmut and Martin. We would copy invitations, trying to sneak in. I was obsessed by the models coming out after the Helmut show with their ‘Backstage’ T-shirts on. I never managed to get one myself. So, yes, those T-shirts are totally a reference to him.”
The next day, straight after the Jil Sander show is over, Raf flies straight to Paris to start preparations for his Raf Simons show, due to take place in exactly seven days’ time.
Backstage, after the show in Paris, Raf is pretty much exhausted but electrified. What he showed is a clear example of the designer rebooting his brand. “Clean up, clean up, clean up,” he says. “I wanted to clean up and get back to the basics of the label. This may be the most sober show I’ve done in a long time. Unlike, eh, next season.”
So, eh, you already know what you’ll be showing in January 2012?
“I do. It’ll be extreme.”
As usual, his mother, Alda, has attended the show. “Raf was such a sweet kid,” she tells me when I run into her afterwards. “He’s still very sweet, by the way.” Raf’s mother is a bit hesitant to talk. “Really, I don’t know what to say!” I tell her I’m just curious to hear about him from her and that I’m not digging for gossip or secrets or anything. “Oh, but I don’t have any secrets. Nor has Raf.”
As a kid Raf was very fond of animals, she tells me. “He’d regularly come home with a little bird or an abandoned duck that he had found and that needed to be fed. He once came home with a Danish dog that they were going to put down because his skin pattern wasn’t perfect. Raf couldn’t bear the thought of killing a dog just for that, and so that dog was with us for eleven years.”
In recent years, Raf’s mother has befriended Martin Margiela’s mother. They met through a mutual friend, because Margiela’s mother was really keen to meet somebody who also had a son in fashion. Surprisingly, Raf has in fact spent quite a bit of time with the famously reclusive Margiela himself. “The sweetest man I’ve ever met,” he says. “But extreme! Oh my God, Martin is so extreme.”
Raf and I meet again two days after his show, on June 27th. It is an excruciatingly hot day in Paris. We are sitting in his temporary showroom, a giant artist’s studio drenched in daylight in 18th Arrondissement. Raf has been up until very late last night installing and arranging the collection in the showroom; today the first buyers have their appointments to come and place their orders. At the very last minute Raf had had to hire more staff to handle requests from retailers who were either new to Raf, or who hadn’t bought from him for a while. It looks to be quite a fruitful season for him.
Even with having to arrange the showroom, Raf has already had a chance to look through all the new menswear shows online and has an opinion on each of them. It is here that the word ‘confidentially’ enters the conversation again. Raf doesn’t think it’s been a very exciting season, with only a few standout collections. “Too much busy styling, which to me is not fashion,” he says. What was his favourite show? “The show that impressed me most was Kim Jones’ debut for Vuitton. I think he did a tremendous job. That collection was very, very together. It’s perfect for Vuitton. It makes you want to run to the store and buy it. Rick Owens was also really strong. God knows how he’s going to sell those long dresses for men.”
Two weeks later we’re in Berlin. Raf has shown up in a brand new Jil Sander snakeskin-print T-shirt under a Jil Sander blazer, Jil Sander trousers and Prada shoes, to host a dinner in celebration of a weekend of cultural amazingness that he has curated for the launch of Merecedes-Benz’s new car. At Raf’s request, the Michael Clark dance company, Fischerspooner and These New Puritans will perform. Designer Peter Saville has sent his vintage Mercedes to be displayed; Raf’s friend Germaine Kruip is exhibiting two new sculptures; and the Belgian artist Peter De Potter, a friend who worked closely together with Raf for years, filled the glass façade of the Berliner Congress Center with his formidable photo collages.
I ask Raf if he’d ever fancy designing a car. “I’d love to,” he says, without hesitation.
Raf doesn’t have a team as big as the universe, so it’s rather mind-boggling how he manages to fit everything into one fashion season: six months of four collections, finding new funding for Raf Simons, heading the prestigious jury at the Hyères fashion festival, headlining an extravagant weekend in Berlin. Yet Raf doesn’t appear at all tired. From Berlin, he will fly to Milan, followed by that snatched visit to the Biennale in Venice. Then he’ll be in Antwerp for a week. The cycles of his work both continue and change. His upcoming womenswear show for Jil Sander in September will be his last under the current contract. He’s negotiating a possible re-signing. But as one of the most revered fashion designers of today, Raf is also being heavily courted by several other houses; he might suddenly pop up at a big French house, or elsewhere.
But first he’s off to the south of Italy, where he’s borrowing the house of a friend for the month of August. “I’ll bring a pair of shorts and flip-flops, and that’s it.”
No books?
“Maybe a book, but I’m not a big reader.” There’s fruit trees, fresh figs, fish from the market. Friends are welcome to come by on one condition: Raf is absolutely not going to entertain. “I’m just going to sit there, eat, drink fresh strawberry cocktails, and stare over the sea,” he says.
Photographic assistance by Romain Dubus and Chad Gevaert. Fashion assistance by Donatella Musco. Production by Isabelle Verreyke and Lora Wouters at Mindbox. Thanks to Henri Coutant at D’Touch and Elisa Allenbach and Paula Dantas da Rocha at Janvier Paris.