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Raf Simons spring / summer 1997

By putting his suits on sapling-thin Belgian boys who were not agency models, Simons introduced the idea that a young man’s physical size was not at variance with his sense of isolation, a feeling that would have been ordinary to anyone who had grown up in Antwerp — or Rotterdam or Manchester — in isolated apartment towers built since the war, and who had spent a lot of time listening to bands like Joy Division and Kraftwerk, whose 22-minute song, ”Autobahn,” managed to convey the monotony of riding on the German superhighway. If Gucci’s caftans and Jean Paul Gaultier’s cowboy chaps didn’t represent the same emotional trip to this generation, Simons’s minimalist suits did. They became the dominant silhouette of the late 90’s. I once asked him what made him think of that shape. As usual, he had a straightforward explanation. ”It was just because we were so small,” he said.