Raf Simons Burned Out at Dior Way Before He Announced His Departure

Raf Simons takes a bow at his final Dior show. Photo: Getty Images

There has been much written recently about the expectations on designers to deliver again and again. The year kicked off a book dedicated to this topic: Dana Thomas’s Gods and Kings which chronicled the man against the machine crisis that ravaged the creative souls of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano, respectively. Before their spring collections, WWD’s Bridget Foley sagely polled both Raf Simons and Alber Elbaz about fashion’s current collision of art and commerce. Their responses were all too telling: “The more I talk with people, I see everybody looking for a change, everybody,” lamented Elbaz, who has since been ousted from Lanvin. “It’s almost like a confusion, about what we are, and who we are in fashion.”

So it is of little surprise to read in an excerpt of Cathy Horyn’s interview with Simons for an upcoming issue of System magazine that he was not impervious to these demands. The designer, who stunned the fashion world by announcing his departure from Dior last month, insinuates over the course of several interviews which took place from March through October (two days after his Spring 2016 show) that the taxing schedule gave him little room to take a creative breather. Here, Horyn gets him to elaborate on his stresses, just after the Fall 2015 show in March:

“You know, we did this collection in three weeks,” he tells me, not defending the show but, rather, stating the reality that now faces high-fashion houses. “Tokyo was also done in three weeks. Actually everything is done in three weeks, maximum five. And when I think back to the first couture show for Dior, in July 2012, I was concerned because we only had eight weeks.”

He goes on to further explain how an artist needs time for his ideas to ruminate:

“When you do six shows a year, there’s not enough time for the whole process,” he explains. “Technically, yes — the people who make the samples, do the stitching, they can do it. But you have no incubation time for ideas, and incubation time is very important. When you try an idea, you look at it and think, Hmm, let’s put it away for a week and think about it later. But that’s never possible when you have only one team working on all the collections.”

When Horyn asks him if his grueling system works this is his response:

“Technically speaking, it works. Does it work for me emotionally? No, because I’m not the kind of person who likes to do things so fast. I think if I had more time, I would reject more things, and bring other ideas or concepts in. But that’s also not necessarily better. Sometimes you can work things to death when you take too much time.”

Now that he’s extricated himself from the Dior machine, it seems that Simons is reveling in his newfound freedom. This week he’s popped up at back-to-back parties for the Guggenheim, which Dior has sponsored for the past three years. And unlike in years past, instead of posing on the red carpet with a phalanx of starlets, he clung, happily, to his boyfriend. Even better is that there seems to be no ill will between Simons and his former boss.

“The relationship with Raf is on a personal basis,” Sidney Toledano, Dior’s CEO, told WWD on Thursday. “He did a good job for the house and, as you can see, we have a very good relationship. It was important, also, the idea of unifying because we did [conceive of the Guggenheim fund-raiser] together. And with the friendship, it was natural for us to do it together again.”

So while the rumor mill has been swirling that Simons may go to Calvin Klein (not true) or Céline (seemingly also untrue), his initial decree of focusing on his own line (he’ll be showing mens in January), and his personal life, seems to be the most prominent projects on the table.

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