Laura Dern Was on the Clothing—And in the Front Row—at Raf Simons

Cinema has become a fairly recent reference point for Raf Simons’s collections, with the designer riffing on Jaws, The Graduate, and Twin Peaks while at Calvin Klein. At his Fall 2019 menswear show for his eponymous brand tonight, the designer took inspiration from another David Lynch classic, the auteur’s 1986 neo-noir Blue Velvet. Still images of Laura Dern and Kyle MacLachlan were collaged on knitwear and coats in the collection. Dern herself gave the collaboration her imprimatur, sitting front row at the show wearing a perforated Raf Simons Spring 2019 top.

In addition to the Blue Velvet collages, Simons added patches with words/text reading nomophobic, xanthophobic, heroes, losers, Burning down the house, Antwerp since 1995, and History of my world. For those not up to date with Greek root words, nomophobia is a fear of being without one’s cell phone (nomo is an abbreviation of “no mobile”) and xanthophobia is a fear of the color yellow. Make of that what you will, but know this for sure: With all the Blue Velvet homages, not a single blue velvet piece walked the runway. Instead, there will be plenty of leopard prints and charm-embellished coats for Simons stans to obsess over in 2019.