‘Fashion became pop. I can’t make up my mind if that’s a good or a bad thing. The only thing I know is that it used to be elitist. And I don’t know if one should be ashamed or not to admit that maybe it was nicer when it was more elitist.’
Back in 2015,
@rafsimons graciously spent six months, on and off, discussing life at Dior for issue No. 6 of System.
@cathyhoryn ’s resulting piece presented a designer coming to terms with the ever-increasing demands of heading up one of fashion’s most monumental institutions – and the ever-decreasing time he had in which to conjure up newness, countless times a year.
And then came the announcement that Raf Simons had chosen to leave the house of Dior.
With half of our pages already printed, we pressed ‘pause’, asked Cathy to write an epilogue, and sat down to reread what Raf had said in the interviews, searching for traces of the deliberation that was clearly in his thoughts, if not his words.
With hindsight (that most revealing, yet futile of prisms through which to observe a situation), the intimacy of the piece offers a window into a man questioning his situation, his life, his future.
At one point, Raf asks the question, ‘how do you pull away from all this tension in your professional life? Do you buy a house and start doing pottery?’
Read the full interview, or explore the rest of issue 6 through System’s archive, at the link in bio.
#RafSimons #SystemArchive