Raf Simons and Pieter Mulier: Why Fashion Needs Disrupting

A Sunday morning in early June. Raf Simons, co-creative director of Prada, is in Milan. Pieter Mulier, creative director of Alaïa, is in Antwerp. I’m in London. We can see each other. We’re going to talk about Belgium, which, I realise now, has insinuated itself into my life in ways I’d never truly registered: through the sounds of New Beat and R&S Records; through the art of Ensor, Borremans and Spilliaert; through the films of the Dardenne Brothers, and the stupendous doc by Johan Grimonprez “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” and, through decades of the clothes on my back, a fair number of which came from these two. So let’s talk.

Tim Blanks: How would you define the national character of Belgium?

Raf Simons: I honestly don’t know how to answer that question... I would say quiet.

Pieter Mulier: Quiet people, yes, reserved, but not all of us. I think it comes from the size of the country. We have a built-in inferiority complex towards the rest of the world, because Belgium is a very small country in the middle of Europe. So you have to do more to get out. I think reserved and quiet comes from that.

Tim: Is it a case of still waters running deep?

Raf: I think you’re right. I think it has had very powerful creatives over the centuries... the Flemish masters, the Flemish primitives at the turn of the century, the Belgian designers.

Tim: You say reserved and quiet, but there is also a quite perverse element. Belgium might be a small country, but it has punched above its weight. Antwerp was one of the most powerful cities in the world at one point. The country had an empire. I wonder how you reconcile that with the inferiority complex. Maybe they reconcile themselves in this strange outpouring of dark energy.

Pieter: I think the dark energy comes more from the climate, the dark light. We have quite a specific light here. And I also think it comes from the fact that we have to be different because of our size, to measure up to the rest.

Raf: It’s an interesting question, but it’s not an easy one to answer, especially for Belgium. When you think about France, you’re already thinking about Paris, but when you think about Belgium, you don’t think about cities, you think about it being a country. Belgium would never say, oh, we have Brussels or Antwerp. We wouldn’t do that.

Pieter: We’re less chauvinistic than other countries. I think it comes from the deep Catholic roots. We’re not people that show off or sell ourselves easily.

Tim: You think you’re more internal, more solitary?

Raf & Pieter: Definitely.

Tim: So, when you talk about the countryside, you’re talking about the character being determined not by urban things but maybe by landscape, the flatness, the featurelessness. Everything that you create comes from inside, rather than from some kind of external inspiration. You’re actually having to find your own impetus within yourself. You know, Belgium also has incredibly weird serial killers.

Raf: It’s funny you bring that up, because I was almost gonna bring that up earlier, when you talked about darkness and all that. But it’s not the only country, you had people like Jack the Ripper in England. But yes, we had some really horrible things. But I want to add something to what we said before. It’s also the smallness that makes us look a lot outside…

Pieter: ...the language also helps push us to do that…

Raf: What I mean is you look for more when you’re creative. If you have the impression that your country or city has this incredible culture then you don’t look around. I was in a small village and the tools were not the tools we have today. So it was a lot about magazines and records, and that was very much London. I was always concerned to see things from outside. I was always in the magazine store, in the record store, watching television…

Tim: The power to dream is such a strong motivating force for creative people who feel they’re born in the wrong place. Did you feel you were born in the wrong place?

Raf: Maybe I did for a while, but definitely not anymore. I love going back there a lot.

Pieter: Me too. More in the beginning, I dreamed also of going away to New York, to Paris, to Milan. With age now, the more I come back here, the happier I am.

Raf: I feel exactly the same. It’s also a Belgian thing, it’s like the conclusion. It’s like, oh, it’s actually quite nice, the non-loudness, the non-chauvinistic attitudes, the calm and the beauty.

Pieter: Especially with Antwerp, when you come back here, it has the positive things of a big city, culture-wise, and restaurants and all of it, but it has something that is just comfortable.

Raf: Talking now with me and Pieter at the same time, of course, Martin [Margiela] was also part of it and many other people, we little Belgians all had that dream about New York. You’re gonna live in New York, oh my god! The dream’s finally coming true.

Tim: And when the dream came true, it was a nightmare.

Pieter: Maybe not a nightmare, but let’s say a deception.

Raf: I was really obsessed with living in New York, and there were really a lot of great aspects, but the actual physicality of being in that city I really did not think was agreeable at all. And then when you have the dogs, and you can never really find a place where you can go with your dog calmly, never really be in nature alone. I’m super happy to just visit New York. One week, do everything, see everything. Actually, I also end up doing much more when I visit than when I lived there. Of course, that’s a bit the same everywhere, all the time, but I have to say in Antwerp, I do go see some things. It’s a much smaller offer, but I do go.

Tim: The more interesting point is this idea of home as something you want to escape from eventually becoming something you want to escape to.

Pieter: That’s it. What is quite crazy is a lot of our friends work internationally but they always come back here. And I do the same. During the week I’m in Paris, and I sometimes come back just for 24 hours. I leave on a Friday night and I go back on a Saturday night. Just being here for one day, seeing the light, being in the apartment, and in a town that is less on top of you. I need it now. It’s nostalgia mixed together with what you know from where you’re born. And also, I think at one point you choose where your home is.

Raf: Hmmmm, that I always wonder. In my mind, it is Antwerp. I’m looking at 60 soon and I still spend so much of my time in Milan that I keep wondering where is the actual final home, not in terms of my mind but more the actual physical situation, the idea of being somewhere let’s say almost full time.

Pieter: Yeah, but is it physical, because I’m a lot more in Paris than I’m here and for me, home is here, not Paris at all.

Raf: Imagine for a moment you’re 65, 70 and you have to choose the place where you will, let’s say, spend 90 percent of your time. You would choose Antwerp then?

Pieter: I think I would.

Tim: Where would you choose?

Raf: It’s probably also because of the actual situation, but I think the south of France. I could see myself there for at least 80 percent of my time when I’m really old. It’s a weird thing, because when I was young, I couldn’t stand summer, I always wanted winter, and now it’s completely the opposite. It’s the climate cliché. I feel like I’m talking so clichéd, but I like the climate and the view.

Tim: Well, you always were quite a romantic person.

We talk for a while about growing up, Raf in his village, Pieter in Ghent, both macerated in the strict Catholicism that underpins Belgium’s educational system. Lots of church-going for both of them. Until he was 19, Pieter was cut off from the world in the kind of boarding school which pre-destines its pupils for a professional life. Nothing creative. He would become a lawyer: that much was set in stone by his parents. Raf was also in an all-boy’s college. He was officially a scout until he was 18 (only recently did he tell his dad he skipped the last two years). The school went co-ed while he was there—three girls, four hundred boys. There, the pressure to choose a profession—law, medicine— came from the school, never from Raf’s parents. Work hard, take things seriously, do your best: that was the most that they expected. His mother was a cleaning lady, and she worried that if her only child didn’t work hard, he might end up as a cleaning man. By his mid-teens, Raf knew there was no way that would be his future. But law or medicine didn’t feature in his plans either.

Pieter: When I was 19, I moved to Brussels, and basically my real life started there. I got in touch with culture. I went to architecture school. I love when Raf says his mother said, “Work hard”. That’s actually a very Flemish reference: work hard, don’t nag, just do it. That’s the most important.

Raf: I graduated as an industrial designer, but my dad didn’t really have any clue what that meant. But then I was also, “OK, what am I going to do now?” I had no money to stay in Genk, the city where I’d been living for five years in what we call a kot. I don’t know what you call it in English...

Pieter: ...a dorm room…

Raf: ...and that was my education. After graduation, I had to go back to live with my parents in the village. I didn’t really know what to do with my qualification. So I started to buy stuff in flea markets with my friend Elke. But my dad told me that’s not a proper job. He said, “If you don’t know what to do, you should open a Frietkot.” It’s a very typical Belgian thing, a place where you go to buy fries. He thought people will always want frites in Belgium.

Pieter: Honestly, I find my education in life quite hardcore, in a Catholic way, until I was 19 and what that period left me with— and I think Raf is the same—was the sense that you have to do something, and you have to do it well, and you have to go into detail. This mixed with some Catholic guilt that you always have from the moment you don’t do it. I still have it. I have the guilt if I don’t start at nine o’clock in the morning. I was very much educated with that. And I think that guilt gives a sense of ambition, which is quite interesting.

Raf: No, I don’t have that. I don’t feel guilty if I don’t wake up in the morning.

Tim: What about the spirit of rebellion that also comes with all that Catholic rigour and guilt? Catholics are notorious for rebelling against their upbringings.

Raf: Yes, that’s true.

Pieter: I think Raf was a bit more rebellious than me on that level.

Raf: It depends how you look at it. I think that I was not rebellious against my family, for example, at all.

Pieter: But you were rebellious more towards fashion and everything you felt, you had to say it.

Raf: It goes back to what Pieter said earlier on, that he had no real clue about anything creative until 18 or 19. Well, it’s not completely true. I mean, there must have been some kind of attraction to investigate all that. It was a bit the same for me. There was no access. I didn’t really know what a fashion boutique was until I was maybe 17 or something. You know, when you start to realise, I can get out of the village with a train to Antwerp and then that world opens up. But I was aware of what fashion was through magazines, for example, or visual culture through records mainly, in my case. But the rebellion was very small. Like, for example, when I was early on in my industrial design education—let’s say 18, 19, 20, and the Belgians had started. There were a few of them that I was, of course, very interested in. And I would also save my money and then buy something. That was something that didn’t really kick in with my dad at all. For him, it was really, really not good. But my mum loved it. So there was this thing at home. I wouldn’t say I fought against my dad about it, but I would, on purpose, be even more extreme. I would buy the extremist sweaters from Walter Van Beirendonck and the weirdest shoes from Dirk Bikkembergs. And my dad did not like that. He tried to make me take them back.

Tim: So this was your rebellion into style.

Pieter: I have to say, I think my first pieces I ever bought were yours when I was 18 or 19. Before, I was in a uniform constantly, and I remember dragging my mom to a store in Ghent. I don’t remember the name anymore.

Raf: The way I dressed at that time was extreme for the environment I came from. My friend Elke would walk through the village and there was not one person who was not going into shock. A very beautiful, very tall woman, she would save up for all the really extreme Margiela stuff, like a knit in five parts bound around the body with ribbons, or a floor-length skirt and Tabi boots. We’re talking 91, 92, and people were shocked.

Tim: And a few years earlier, the Antwerp Six would be doing that, but they’d be wearing Mugler and Montana, and that would be the shocking thing at that time.

Pieter: Gaultier was gigantic at the time.

Tim: But Pieter, your introduction to fashion was Raf’s clothes. And Raf, your friend Elke was wearing Margiela. When do you think Belgium started looking to itself for fashion?

Raf: In 86, you had the group that showed in London and, locally, it was a big thing for people that were interested in fashion. That was really when many people in Belgium said OK, these are the designers that we are going to wear.

Tim: How do you remember that time? Was it a big thing in the newspapers?

Raf: In the press, yes. But also you definitely felt it in the streets of Antwerp. You had the Demeulemeester people, the Martin people, Bikkembergs people, Walter people. In full looks. In the early days, I did an internship at Walter when I was in industrial design class, which was not very much appreciated by the school. But I thought, I’m doing it anyway. And there I met Olivier [Rizzo] and Peter De Potter, because they were working in the same space as I was. Me, I was an intern, but they were kind of like vacation workers, you know, in the summer, when you help out. And soon after, Walter took me to Paris, because he was always presenting his collections in a fair called SEHM, and Dirk Van Saene and Dries and Walter would also take a booth in the Saint James Albany Hotel. It was not only the Belgians, it was international. I remember Richmond-Cornejo was there and some of the younger London labels. Why did I bring that up?... Oh yeah, Olivier and I would go and see shows like Helmut Lang and Ann Demeulemeester, and because we didn’t get invitations, we would copy them. And Paris at that time was completely different. You would see the gangs of the designers. People would go to a Comme des Garçons show in Comme des Garçons, but they wouldn’t change their clothes to go to another show. Like you had Martin people. But right now, I think there are a lot of people who dress in a brand, and then they get changed for the next show.

Tim: And there were Jean Colonna people and Martine Sitbon people and Body Map people. And, of course, there were people dressing in Belgian designers, which kind of leads back to what we were talking about at the start. What made Belgian design unique? I mean, it’s interesting sitting here talking to you two about the rigour of your Catholic upbringing. It’s quite similar to the Japanese design aesthetic which evolved from uniforms into a very conceptual way of thinking about clothing. Belgium and Japan seemed connected in some way.

Raf: Definitely. There has been always a very, very strong attraction between Japanese design and Belgian design. I think the generation of the Antwerp Six and Margiela were obsessed with Japanese designers. And not just Belgian designers but Belgians themselves. The person who opened the first Comme des Garçons store in the world outside Tokyo was a Belgian woman named Jenny Meirens. It was in Brussels and it was magnificent. She was also the person who then launched the Margiela brand with Martin. And, the other way around, the Japanese were extremely supportive of and interested in the Belgians. It’s a very interesting question why that was. I’m not so sure it was about the physicality of the clothes. I think it is maybe going back to what we said at the beginning. There was a kind of calm, a kind of modesty… modesty is not the right word, but it’s very anti-glamour.

Pieter: Modest because it’s a reaction to what was going on in fashion at the time, no? From the Japanese, but mostly from the Antwerp Six.

Raf: Well, yeah, everybody knows, because that was when I saw that first Margiela show. But one thing is the proposal. I thought the clothes were mind-blowing. The other thing is the way it was kind of proposed as a show or as a brand that did a lot for me. It was very human. It was on the ground. The way I perceived fashion was always very different from how I felt comfortable with it. For sure I could like some of the designers that were prior to Rei and Yohji and the Belgians, but I couldn’t really relate to them, especially in men’s fashion. It always felt like big muscle guys, highly staged, very slick if I think about Mugler and all that. But then also the women, because everything felt so much about glamour and grandeur and spectacle.

Pieter: If you think about it, the Antwerp Six started from the moment the top models came. And Martin just showed normal girls. You know, there’s nothing glamorous about it. Zero.

Tim: So there was rigour, there was rebellion, but there was also rejection.

Pieter: Rejection of everything, in the way the girls looked, the way they wore makeup. There was no platform. They worked on the ground. And the way they wore things.

Tim: It makes me think of Belgian New Beat, and how that was a rejection of the bubbly Stock Aitken Waterman sound of the time. It appealed so much to kids who wanted something else.

Raf: That aspect of rebellion is maybe not so studied with Belgians. I wouldn’t say it came out of coincidence, more out of experiments and a different way of thinking about something. It was very non- produced. Fashion in Belgium, music like New Beat were very street. There was a smallness and a youngness. It’s difficult for me to really put it in the right words in a sentence. But New Beat just happened. Like some guy in a club put a record on the wrong speed and the kids were reacting weird, and then there’s like, oh, wow, that’s cool. And kids loved it. But soon after—it didn’t take very long—it became very Stock Aitken Waterman, very produced, and a lot of commercial crap. And it was in the news all the time, because I think that was the last time we’ve really seen a club culture look. That was really, really quite something, I have to say. It was shocking to me what happened there. And we were right in that moment. It was extreme, but it was a bit like the Belgians, very sincerely doing their thing in their smallness. I think it was not really so constructed, in the sense of “Let’s produce something here that is very different”. It just was very different. And then there was the reaction from the audience. Oh, wow, we love this! And that’s how it went, because the Belgians also went out of Belgium, because they realised it wasn’t really a platform where people were really paying attention. Maybe that’s what happened to me later. They actually found their platform in London.

Pieter: What is interesting is that they left, but they always came back. And I think that’s also why it’s so peculiar.

Raf: What was so fascinating about New Beat was something we had never really seen in Belgium, but we always saw it when we went outside, when music, dance, club culture and fashion mutated into a kind of religion for a generation. Like punk or New Wave or New Romantic, everything we were constantly kind of obsessed with when we were young looking outside, because Belgium was not like that. We didn’t really have that. It was always coming to us, and we had to go out for it. Because Belgium has a very, very big culture of touring performers, because the audience is so into music, it has always been and always will be very strong. Like in the 80s, New Wave and all that, in the 90s, grunge, huge, huge, but Belgium didn’t really have its own big music performers like you have in England. And then suddenly New Beat came. But New Beat was a different nature, because it was all created by kids in their bedrooms. It wasn’t about big performance anyway, it was very much about club culture linked to dress codes.

Tim: And suddenly Belgium was the place that everybody wanted to know about, in music, in fashion, in art. Belgium became an aesthetic. So what was it? You said, small and young and human and not structured and happening organically.

Pieter: It was the hunger for something more intimate, more human, completely different from what fashion proposed back in the day.

Raf: It depends a little bit, because I’m the one who had an independent brand. If I think about it from a point of view that it was maybe followed, or there was an audience that was interested in it, or respected it, maybe yes, but in terms of something that would shape up and become a business, I can’t really say it was happening for me in Belgium, except maybe one or two stores. In the first five years, that was really happening for me in Japan, not in Belgium. And I think for a lot of the Belgian designers, the generation before me, it was the same thing. It wasn’t like they were big in Belgium in terms of, like, shaping up economically. I don’t believe that at all. And that was also a bit weird, because I remember when we were all very far into it, there was a moment when there were so many Belgian designers, first generation, second generation, and there was so much about Antwerp and about Belgium, that we were saying, “Why don’t we do a three-day fashion ‘week’ in Antwerp? Why do we always have to make the effort to go to Paris?” But that didn’t really happen. There were some talks, but then some of the bigger first generation people said, “Yeah, that’s a great idea but we would also show in Paris.” And my generation, we would say, “Yeah, but that makes no sense, because then people are not gonna come.” We needed the first generation to say they’d show in Antwerp. And my generation—and there were many—said we would show in Antwerp only, and then people would have jumped on the Thalys and we could have had two or three days that would have been really interesting, for the city and for the country. But it never happened. It’s a sad thing.

Tim: Pieter, if Raf calls himself second generation, does that make you third?

Pieter: Third... or fourth.

Raf: Who’s third if you wouldn’t be? Usually, there’s like a ten year difference, no? It’s very clear who the first generation was. It’s kind of clear with the second generation. They were a big group, much bigger than the first, 15 to 20 independent designers and we should really not forget that many of them have disappeared. But the third generation was not really such a big group of people anymore, and they went to work for the second generation.

Pieter: Yeah, that’s how my creative life started. And the third generation has always been creative directors, if you think about it. It’s people who work for other houses, because we’ve also seen the difficulty of having your own company.

Tim: So, do you think your expectations were different?

Pieter: Yes. Although I dreamt of starting my own label…

Raf: Pieter, you were on the verge. You kind of had it in place.

Pieter: I started my own collection a year or two before we moved to Dior, and then my father died, and then Dior came, and I’ve put it all to the side, because, as I said, I also saw the difficulty of having your own brand now, especially in Antwerp.

Tim: When you look at the first and second generation, how would you say your attitude to what you do is different from theirs?

Pieter: I truly believe this—and sometimes, I even think it’s a problem—we are less reactive than the people who came before us, I don’t think I react towards what happened before.

Raf: He means less rebellious against what has been before. But I think the big difference is something else completely. Your generation is already very aware of the meaning and importance of the words “marketing” and “social media”. That makes a huge difference.

Pieter: For a long time, I thought it was a problem that I’m not that revolutionary. And then, in the end, I think you’re right. I think we have another way of looking at things because of social media, because of the Internet that we grew up with. I also think that we dreamt more of being a creative director than to be something with our name on it.

Tim: You’d rather be free of that trouble and strife.

Raf: It’s like that for you, but not for everybody. There were also people who did start independent.

Pieter: I don’t know, after Dior and Calvin, I just didn’t feel to do it. And it’s also an age thing. If you start your own company, you have to do it very young, like you.

Raf: You didn’t have the naïveté that the first generation and my generation maybe had. When we started, we had no clue about the possible scale, and your generation knows exactly about scale and what it actually means to perform in a big brand. When we started, there was no system in place. We didn’t even have fashion shows in the first four seasons, and then when we did the fashion show, we didn’t really do it for the reasons that people do fashion shows now. We just thought, making these videos is getting so complicated, the collection has to be ready six weeks before, then there’s all the post- production, we were just, like, let’s do a show instead because in the end, it’s going to be cheaper than this video production. I remember Kuki de Salvertes calling me, saying, “Oh, I hear you’re doing a show in Paris, do you have a press agent?” I said no and he told me “You can’t do a show without a press agent. Can I be your press agent?” It was like that. It was not like now, I think people that start now, people that are young, they know all that. They’re not going to think, “Oh, you just start.” They’re already gonna know the financial consequences, you need this, you need that. They know it all. And it’s a burden. For us, it was just like we didn’t know.

Tim: Do you think something’s been lost? The naïveté, the spirit of youthful rebellion, the challenge, the transgression, the sense that you could feel like you were doing things first...they no longer exist in anything.

Raf: I don’t think that I ever thought about risk. There was maybe “Urgh, what are people gonna think?” but there was never thinking this is a risk.

Tim: And if people are going to be risk-averse, they’re not going to take the bold steps or challenge the orthodoxy. Especially now with AI, where you can map things out to such incredibly detailed degrees, you know what’s going to happen. Pieter, what do you think about that? I felt your last collection for Alaïa was a challenge. It was like your “lumps and bumps” in a way.

Raf: I totally agree, and it’s not because he’s my brother that I want to put marmalade on his lips but imagine the shock if you had done that as your first Alaïa show. It’s interesting to me how the order of things is sometimes reversed. I think maybe for my generation, the generation before, the shock effect was very much in the beginning, and it could be interesting to think that newer generations become stronger over time. Because in the beginning there is fear, but once they know that things are going to kind of work out, they show less fear.

Tim: That is the most exciting idea I can think of right now, that you age into radicalism.

Raf: Of course, you have to take into account that the huge disruptor now is the financial crisis. Pieter and I talk about how interesting it is to perform in a brand like Alaïa because of the fact that it’s such a small company but such a huge name in the landscape of all the big companies.

Pieter: The thing about Alaïa is that it’s literally structured as an Antwerp company. A small company with a big name, so it means because of the foundations of that name, I have the freedom to do what I did in the last show. Nobody’s gonna say, oh, my God, this is too extreme or whatever, because it’s inherent to the name. You can do a lot with it, and we’re not part of a big group like LVMH or Kering. It’s more like an entity on its own, even if it’s owned by Richemont. I think the difference also between our generation and the two first generations, Raf, is that LVMH was hardly existing— or very small—when the first and the second generation appeared. And Kering was very small because they’d just acquired Gucci. The power of the big groups wasn’t there yet. It was not easier, but I think it was more...in French we say insouciant... you didn’t have those calibers on the fashion platform, there were many more smaller companies. Nowadays, Alaïa is a small company but anyone you compare us to is owned by the big groups, and the press now talks about turnovers and financial success and, yes, they’re important, but people don’t look at clothes anymore. The first sentence of a crap review is how much money the company made. We talk about numbers constantly. So, for me, that’s a reason to be quite fearful in the beginning when you first enter a house.

We talk about change for a bit, how we miss the independent multi-brand stores and the magazines that fed the fashion mainstream in the 80s and 90s. How the industry was so much smaller and less greedy, how real fashion used to be very elite...

Raf: I’m all for democracy, but really high fashion...is that for everybody? I don’t see it in the streets. It used to be for a small audience, but you can’t say that.

Pieter: I have a very strong opinion on it, based on my current situation at Alaïa. We talk to a certain audience because of the name and the size of the company and, on that level, we have much more freedom. So it means we can propose real fashion without being worried about an economic backlash. And people are ready for it. There’s a hunger now for smaller companies that make radical decisions. We can do that because the collections are not big. We try to make statements in fashion shows because, otherwise, I don’t know why we would do them. And it works, because people are fed up with the idea of luxury that is being pushed in their faces.

Tim: What are the words that resonate now?

Pieter: Honesty, creativity, being different. Trying to make something because you believe in it, not because you think it’s going to sell. Less merchandise.

Raf: I think there are so many different cultures connecting to it, that it’s very difficult to make one conclusion. One thing I find important is that it’s not right to just always go back to the past. This was better, that was better. The best attitude you can take is that this is the world right now and let’s keep going and do what we think is the right way to balance it out. I think about it often. But you can’t really make up an answer. I mean, I’m now talking from a creative director position in a brand, which is probably different from when I would have had my own brand.

Tim: Is this as fundamental as the conflict between art and commerce?

Raf: Well, we are talking about fashion, but it’s everywhere. Are you watching “The Studio”? This guy who really believes in creativity, and because of his desire to put himself in a top position, he is in this duality…

Tim: With everything that’s happening in the world right now, why are we talking about fashion?

Raf: Why does it make itself so important?

We talk about the fashion merry-go-round, big brand musical chairs, the industry’s need for the spectacle of change to make global news, the pressure that’s put on designers and how new arrivals need to be given a chance. And as Belgian disruptors, who or what do they think is disruptive now?

Raf: What would really disrupt fashion, not in terms of an individual making collections? What would really disrupt fashion, I think, is if every creative director in the world took themselves out of their position and said we don’t want to do it anymore for this brand. We are all moving to independence, all of us at the same moment. That’s my happy, romantic thinking.

Tim: It will be glorious chaos.

Raf: We are all so far in it that, of course, 95 per cent of us would think, how are we going to do that? We need starter money, the whole thing would collapse.

Tim: From your beginnings and your risk-taking as an independent designer, when you become as successful as you are, could you ever go back to the way things were?

Raf: Yes.

Pieter: Me, too, because I have quite a nostalgia about the years in Antwerp, working with Raf in his company. It felt freer creatively, with more collaboration than I experience now, much more like a think tank, but that’s also Raf because you create that platform for everybody around you. It’s the sense of working together. So I think I could easily go back.

Raf: That word you dropped a few times...luxury. When you work in big places like we work, and I don’t really care if it’s 300 million or 10 billion, it’s not really how we ever thought about that word. It’s not considered by us in the same way it’s considered everywhere right now. It was more a way of thinking: “This is what we really believe in, it would be so great if other people would like that.” This kind of dialogue made the audience challenge it, but at the same time support it. And I always had the feeling that it was a luxury for all brands to have an audience, not at all thinking about scale.

Tim: That sounds like a humble, human idea.

Raf: I do this process sometimes with Miuccia in the sense that the limitations that you have in terms of how you connect to your audience these days are gigantic because of how the fashion world seems to love luxury.

Tim: Do you think newness is possible?

Raf: I have to always believe that.

Pieter: It is. I also believe that. It can come in a shock, like, poof, the new, but it can also develop over time. It can go wrong, and then it can go okay. And then it’s there.

Tim: Trial and error. You have to be allowed to make mistakes.

Raf: My fear, a little bit, with these houses, is that everything that is around the work is going to have too much influence on the actual possibilities of the situation.

Pieter: Nowadays, you cannot make an error when you are responsible for a $10 billion company. You get killed in a second. There’s too much at stake. It’s already financially quite difficult for the big brands to maintain the same level. I mean, it’s going to be an interesting month in September.

Tim: That sort of suggests that newness can be about context, and disruption can be about context. So disruption in a $10 billion company is going to read as newness. Risk is going to read as newness. But the challenge is the balancing act between the professional reality and a personal reality. You have commitments to yourself as a creative person, and you have commitments to your company as a creative director. Do you end up becoming dissatisfied about not being able to realize your personal needs?

Pieter: That’s for sure. But I think if you sign to such big companies, it’s quite logical that you say bye-bye to some of your personal ambitions. You compromise, and especially today, you compromise because the risk-taking has a cost.

Tim: There’s never been a time like this in fashion. You have the outside pressure of the business, of the stock market or the shareholders, and then you have the internal pressure of companies needing to find a way to satisfy customers who are looking for newness and beauty and whatever, with all this change.

Pieter: I was actually quite anxious for a house like Alaïa when I started reading all the positions. If there’s so much newness around, it means the options get bigger. And now I’m more like, how much newness can an audience take? So basically, it’s quite good to be consistent in what you say at the house that you’re in, because, with all the newness, people are going to go back to what they know always. If 50 percent of the fashion houses are new, I think it’s a good thing for the other 50.

Tim: We’ve been talking for two hours and I’m coming back to what you two said about walking away and your nostalgia for the early days. Do you think there’s a subliminal urge to go back to that source?

Pieter: I’m actually very sure that’s it, mixed with I’m most happy here in my apartment. I go very calm when I come here. And it’s also nostalgia for what the city meant to me a long time ago when I started working here. So it’s nice to shut it all down. And I think in Antwerp, you can shut it down. It’s not just geographical, it’s emotional.

Raf: I had no fear when I started, I think I have no fear to stop it.

Tim Blanks’ conversation with Raf Simons and Pieter Mulier first appeared in Self Service issue 63.