Calvin Klein’s Raf Simons re-creates an American landscape with a bed of popcorn at NY Fashion Week
CK’s Belgian-born chief creative officer put the world of fashion on a bed of popcorn – quite literally – as he sought to re-examine the USA he first encountered when he arrived
A year after arriving in New York to take the creative reins of Calvin Klein, designer Raf Simons continues to shake new life into the fashion world.
In fact, on Tuesday evening it felt like Simons had put the whole fashion community into a popcorn popper. That’s because he literally filled the cavernous former American Stock Exchange building with a massive bed of popcorn. Trudging through the stuff on the way to your seat, you could only be grateful that he’d left out the melted butter.
But there was a lot more to Simons’ show than a tasty gimmick. On top of all those puffy kernels, Simons had built what he called an American landscape – including a huge barnhouse – which was his stage to re-examine the America he encountered when he first arrived.
His new view is “now wider, universal”, he said in notes explaining the show. “It’s an allegory for a meeting of old worlds and new worlds, relating to the discovery of America, the 1960s space race, and the 21st century information age.”
As if that wasn’t enough food for thought, Simons went even further, coming up with a list of 50 words to go with the 50 states of the union. They began with “America” and ended with “world”, but in between, they offered hints to the show’s content. The word “firefighter” came right before “heroes”, and when the first few models came out, they were wearing big firefighter-style jackets.
The androgynous ensembles had a much more dystopian feel than your average firefighter’s get-up, though; they included knit balaclavas and huge gloves – similar perhaps to those of an astronaut. Several models also had what looked like bits of Mylar flowing off their otherwise normal garments, as if they’d flown in from another planet but forgotten to remove all their space clothes.
The soundtrack offered clues, too. The very first song was Simon & Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence, but at the very end, the music reverted back to a line from David Bowie’s This Is Not America – the song Simons had used a year ago to signal his feelings about the nation’s political situation.
