Introduction
Raf Simons is a Belgian designer and Co-Creative Director of Prada, working with Miuccia Prada with equal responsibility for the house’s creative input and decision-making. Trained in industrial and furniture design, he entered fashion through an internship with Walter Van Beirendonck and founded his menswear label in 1995.
Simons subsequently led Jil Sander, the women’s haute couture, ready-to-wear and accessories collections at Christian Dior, and the unified creative organisation of Calvin Klein. He joined Prada effective 2 April 2020; the appointment covered the Prada brand across its creative facets and was neither a menswear-only post nor a succession announcement.
His independent label continued alongside Prada until its final Spring/Summer 2023 season. At Prada, the first jointly designed collection was Spring/Summer 2021 womenswear, presented in September 2020. The internal division of work between Simons and Miuccia Prada remains private, while their public authority is equal.
Design ethos
Simons approaches clothing through youth culture, music, art and the discipline of modern menswear. Tailoring, school uniforms, graphic images and subcultural references are used to describe collective identity and private alienation, often by shifting scale or placing raw emotional material inside exact construction.
His industrial-design training is visible in the control of proportion, systems and presentation. Across his own label and the houses he has led, he has treated casting, sound, graphic direction and spatial framing as part of a collection’s argument rather than as decoration added after the clothes.
At Prada, that method enters a joint authorship built on discussion and disagreement. Simons’s interest in youth, clarity and visual systems meets Miuccia Prada’s interrogation of taste and social convention without assigning either designer a fixed gender category or product domain.
Disclaimer
Career history
2022
Raf Simons closed his label in November, retroactively casting the Spring/Summer 2023 collection as its final runway statement.
2020
Raf Simons became Prada Co-Creative Director on 2 April 2020, sharing equal responsibility with Miuccia Prada for creative input and decision-making across the Prada brand. The role was announced as neither a consultancy nor succession, and it did not include Miu Miu or divide authority by womenswear and menswear.
2020
On 2 April 2020 Miuccia Prada entered an equal co-creative structure with Raf Simons across the Prada brand. The appointment changed public authorship from one principal designer to two without ending her authority, assigning category boundaries or extending Simons’s role to Miu Miu.
2015
Dior announced Raf Simons’s departure on 22 October 2015, twenty days after his final Spring/Summer 2016 ready-to-wear show. The exit began a studio-led interval lasting until July 2016.
2012
Raf Simons was appointed to women’s haute couture, ready-to-wear and accessories in April 2012. He used couture construction to streamline Dior’s archive and left after his Spring/Summer 2016 ready-to-wear collection.
2012
Raf Simons’s departure took effect on 27 February 2012 after his final womenswear presentation two days earlier. The announcement and farewell were followed immediately by the founder’s appointment under Onward.
2005
Raf Simons became creative director on 1 July 2005 with responsibility across women’s and men’s collections. Over seven years he expanded the house vocabulary through altered proportion, technical colour, sculptural material and a three-season couture-scale womenswear sequence.
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