Raf Simons FW18 Moodboard

New York as Berlin.

2018 as the second half of the 70s.

A poorly lit industrial space of the Westside as the German capital's station.

"Youth in Motion" as "Christiane F. - Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo".

Raf Simons as Christiane F..

The Belgian designer closes the latest menswear fashion with a collection heavily inspired by the cult German film, based on the equally famous biography of Christiane Vera Felscherinow, a story that the man has known as a teenager and it has set indelible in his mind.

The harsh personal story of a thirteen year old who falls in heroin addiction becomes the perfect vehicle to remember that a creative animal needs to work, to think without fear. And without fear, without prejudice and moralizing, talk about society, its darker sides, even drugs.

The faces, beautiful and fragile, of Natja Brunckhorst and Thomas Haustein aka Christiane and Detlef of the film and words written in bold like "LSD", "XTC", "GHB" and "2C-B", printed on clothes to open a window on the world, open wide through the reference to the book "DRUGS" by Cookie Mueller and Glenn O'Brien.

“Ultimately, ‘Youth In Motion’ seeks to neither glorify nor condone the culture(s) of drugs” - explains a Simons official note - “seeks instead to consider the persistent, almost ubiquitous presence of narcotics (prescribed or otherwise) within our society and acknowledge our often conflicted relationships with them; in turn opening up a more nuanced dialogue around the implications for a society where addiction and the causes of addiction remain largely taboo subjects, with – as both Christiane F. and the current opioid crisis demonstrate – often untold human consequences.”

Drugs, Youth, but also tradition, past reinterpreted with a contemporary twist.

The past understood as the naive European decadence of the '70s, the alternative NY of the' 80s and as the past collections of Simons.