Last Thursday it was announced that designer Raf Simons was stepping down from his role as Creative Director at Christian Dior for personal reasons. The fashion house's Spring/Summer 2016 collection, showcased during Paris Fashion Week at the beginning of October, is therefore his last one for Dior. As Simons stated in an official press release: "It is a decision, based entirely and equally on my desire to focus on other interests in my life, including my own brand, and the passions that drive me outside of my work."
Designing for Dior was an "incredible opportunity", Simons claimed in the official statement as he thanked Bernard Arnault (chairman and chief executive officer of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior SA), but the Belgian designer enjoyed it for a relatively short time, having joined in 2012. His first Haute Couture collection was showcased in July of the same year and was also documented in Frédéric Tcheng's Dior & I.
Simons' collections for Dior - a mix of classic pieces from the fashion house reinvented in a futuristic key and remixed using the semantics of art - gave life to a new incarnation of the French house, putting distance between the present collections and the work of John Galliano (fired in 2011 after his anti-Semitic outbursts in a Paris café).
Simons' creations were critically and widely acclaimed, besides, according to the fashion house, sales boosted under the designer. The label enjoyed indeed a 60 percent rise in sales since 2011; revenues at Christian Dior Couture rose 12.9 percent in its fiscal first quarter (the three months ending September 30th) reaching €471 million (around $524 million).
So if his collections were praised and the sales went up, you really wonder why did Simons decide to leave? Some sources claimed he wanted the general image he had started giving to the company to be reflected in advertising and on fashion house boutiques (the untouchable side of Dior - designed by American architect Peter Marino...).
The real reason could be pressure, though: Simons had to work on the ready-to-wear and Haute Couture collections, but also on the pre-collections that nowadays have the nasty habit of being presented as itinerant shows across the globe (Dior showcased in Cannes and Tokyo), apart from running his own label. This may have put too much pressure on him and maybe took its toll.
If this is the real reason, Simons was honest enough to step away from it all and, though he may not be able to join another fashion house for some time due to a non-compete clause in his initial contract, he may finally get a much needed rest and find more time to run his eponymous Antwerp-based label. As an alternative, he may sell everything and enjoy new adventures into the world of arts and furniture (Simons studied in Genk and obtained a degree in industrial and furniture design in 1991).
After all, as reported by WWD, just before Dior's Oct. 2 show in Paris Simons hinted at the fast pace of fashion when he told the press "I'm questioning a lot. I feel a lot of people are questioning. We have a lot of conversation about it: Where is it going? It's not only the clothes. It's the clothes, it's everything, the Internet." As millions of images and videos relating to style and fashion get instantly uploaded, visualised and digested not just during catwalk shows and fashion weeks, but on an everyday basis pushing big brands and powerful groups to aggressively produce more at a fast pace, designers feel more and more pressure.
The worst thing when a designer dies/leaves a brand or gets fired is actually the fact that the brand usually survives like a malevolent symbiont that gets attached to another human being and consumes it.
The scariest thing about Simons leaving Dior is instead the beginning of a new game of musical fashion chairs (the one at Balenciaga recently closed when Demna Gvasalia, head of Paris fashion label Vêtements, was picked as the new Creative Director). This is becoming the most common but also the most tiring and irritating sport in fashion, fuelled by the habits of fashion houses of signing one person and then discarding them after three years only to start the cycle again (a cycle that also features other important steps such as getting on your side the cool ambassadors - that is the key fashion critics, the most famous celebrities, the most prominent bloggers and the poseurs with the best Instagram accounts - not to mention launching your IPO...).
Many are rumoured, few will make it into the final list of candidates and only one will fill the vacant role, but it would be interesting to see Dior getting someone with a proper Haute Couture training, maybe a woman for a change (Bouchra Jarrar?) or somebody terribly unlikely with a passion for science and technology (Iris Van Herpen?) rather than picking the candidate from the usual list of likely male designers currently topped by Riccardo Tisci.
For the time being everything is under wraps at Dior and the next pre-fall collection will be designed by the in-house team and shown in January in Paris. Yet Simons getting off the big and powerful fashion house bandwagon remains a shocking move: maybe he won't be alone and we will hopefully see other designers abandoning the fast and furious fashion train and getting off at the next station. This is maybe the only way to make the industry understand that, if it wants to go faster (in an innovative and edgy way and therefore develop new solutions, fabrics, textiles and ideas) it will have to slow down and it will have to do so as soon as possible.
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