Raf Simons connections in FW18

Raf Simons is one of the worlds most decorated fashion designers of all time and very highly regarded in the fashion community. Throughout Simons work one could see frequent teen angst imagery with references to movies,patches sewn on in a rushed punk style ( Take the infamous Riot Riot Riot bomber for example),and connections with artists that fit the same characteristics. With a personal relationship between raving and Raf the question is pressed into the viewers mind," Whats with all the drug/rave imaginary and where did this all come from?"

Firstly I will talk about Raf Simons and his own experience with rave culture and how that ties into FW18. For more information you can check out @BlissFoster on Youtube and he has a whole video getting down to the nitty-gritty of this runway (I used you as reference Bliss I love Chanel). With plugging sources out of the way I can continue. Raf grew up in In Belgium and was a teen around the early 80's at this time there was a massive party scene and Raf like a lot of other teens was apart of it. And with raves comes drugs, I could imagine that Simons had his run in's with party drugs at one time or another telling by the literal massive patches on the jeans most notably (but basically plastered on every garment any person could think of) with the names of common party drugs like LSD,XTC, and GHB.

Raf Simons usually uses a ton of other references in his work and he's been doing that for ages now.What sets him apart the way he does it is so low key yet so In your face it's a perfect balance. Also plastered on literally every garment in the collection were shots from Christiane F the movie. At first glance this looks like giant aimless pictures of a crying girl with horrible hair, smacked on a T shirt. This is where Raf does what he does best... Yeah these seemingly random pictures are actually from a random German movie Christiane F... still random? Christiane F is a movie about a young woman basically falling into a helpless spiral of heroin addiction and this was shown in Belgian middle schools as a tool to ward kids off of the same path the poor Christiane F did.(Again Bliss does a really good job talking about the movie in detail) I think Raf can relate to Chistiane F in the sense that he had some of the same experiences that she had in the movie. The connections in this collection make your head spin just to see how everything is intertwined one way or another and that is why this collection is as good as it is.

It's hard not to turn this into a rant about how good Raf Simons is at saying what he wants to say just through graphics from seemingly random foreign films but I promise Im trying my best.

To sum this up I think Raf is genuinely a little freaked out from seeing some things that the average 12 year old probably shouldn't see, but we got this insanely good show out of it in the end called Fall/Winter 18. I would also like to address that at first glance this seems like a pretty corny collection with the word DRUGS stamped on everything not to mention everything else I mentioned above, but at a deeper glance This show has so many connections and that is why I will still fanboy over any Raf Simons show because there is an explanation to anything and everything.