Of course, it was as fraught an occasion as there could possibly be in fashion: Raf Simons’s first reappearance in public, less than one month since his fans had been hit by the body blow of his exit from Calvin Klein. The specter that sudden severance of a lauded major designer raised was more general.
Does it herald the death, or at least the belittling, of creativity and meaning in fashion? Simons had a tangential answer to that. “I don’t want to be negative,” he said. “I want to do something abstract and beautiful and elegant and proud and sophisticated, but without losing the edge of what the brand stands for: the young generation, the dark movies.”
