A brief history of Raf Simons's David Lynch obsession

The invite was the colour of blue velvet and depicted a crying Laura Dern. Following hot on the heels of Raf Simons’s departure from his post at Calvin Klein, it seemed less like an invite than a statement of intent. The show, heavily inspired by the films of David Lynch, was at times lit like The Slow Club or Silenco. Greatcoats, so large as to look borderline-insane, were appliqued with stills from Lynch films, or appended with D-rings and dangling cherries. The idea was to have significant totems “you could hang on yourself so you create your own aesthetic,” Simons told the press backstage after the show. At first, I read this as suggesting that you “hang yourself so you create your own aesthetic.” How uncanny and extreme, I thought; then noticing my error, how Lynch. Look twice, and what was at first seen to be violent proves to be banal: a thing unsettling because it looks like, or almost like, something else.

To date, Raf Simons has made reference to three of the director’s projects, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, and Wild at Heart, and each time what has remained of their influence is something like a primal scream. For autumn/winter 19, he appropriates the scene from Wild at Heart where Diane Ladd, psychotic beyond reason, paints her face with lipstick, and the moment in Blue Velvet where her real-life daughter Laura Dern -- faced with the prospect of a cheating boyfriend, and the rather more alarming reality of a naked Isabella Rossellini -- pulls the familiar, memetic crying face made popular by social media, and made terrifying by Lynch’s last, best film, Inland Empire. For his autumn/winter 16 menswear show, he raided Twin Peaks for its all-American sweaters and varsity knits, and its rotten-ketchup-grimy-mustard colour palette, making the resulting clothes outsized, surreal -- like something tailored for The Fireman. He claimed he did not know the show date happened to be Lynch’s birthday, although given his fastidiousness, this seems unlikely. Like Lynch, who once banned blue-coloured props from Twin Peaks, despite blue being his favourite colour, it is difficult to picture Simons ever losing his control.

Raf Simons AW/19

“She’s dead,” Pete Martell says when he finds the shrouded corpse of Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks. “Wrapped in plastic.” Wrapping male and female bodies up in plastic with some regularity, Raf Simons is most interested in highlighting his models’ cool aliveness, their imperviousness to mess or surface damage. He is one of our greatest living designers, and perhaps the industry’s best and most rigorous interpreter of an especially stately, cinematic brand of horror. Often, he makes clothes that are voluminous, slick, wipe-clean, and cut into silhouettes as sharp as huntsman’s knives, which is to say that he makes perfect clothes for serial killers. For spring/summer 18, in a collection for Calvin Klein at least partly inspired by various women from iconic horror films, he nodded to a fictional murderess: Asami Yamazaki from Takashi Miike’s glorious and sick Audition, whose elbow-length rubber gloves were recreated in hot pink, and whose murderousness is itself another primal scream, aimed at the expectations of traditional heterosexuality. He’s dead; she’s wrapped in plastic. That collection, Simons said, was meant to be critique aimed at “the dream factory of Hollywood and its depictions of both an American nightmare, and the all-powerful American dream.”

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