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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Twin Peaks fashion: Why David Lynch's TV show is back in style

Audrey Horne

Twin Peaks, David Lynch’s iconic TV series, is returning to our screens after it went missing for almost three decades. First broadcast in 1990, the show became a cult classic and is celebrated by fans and TV scholars alike. One of the reasons for this is its extraordinary use of costume. The original series’ strikingly distinctive style anticipated the way we dress now, making its revival especially timely.

The show’s original costume designer was Patricia Norris, who won an Emmy for her work on the pilot episode. Sara Markowitz took over for the series’ two-season run and adapted Norris’s ideas, taking them in directions.

Norris and Markowitz combined classic Americana (1950s style leather jackets, plaid workwear, cheerleader uniforms) with the often tonally jarring looks of the late 1980s (oversized patterned knits and scrunchies).

The look they created was simultaneously timeless, indicating the universality of American small-town life, and highly specific, conveying the distinctiveness of David Lynch’s vision. Twin Peaks’ style is both very recognisable and intensely strange, mapping on to coordinates of what we think we know, yet at the same time upsetting them.

Clues are everywhere

Part of the cult appeal of Twin Peaks is in the way it encourages its viewers to look for clues and to participate in the detective process, which gives rise to endless speculation. It is the original water-cooler television. Clothes are no exception to this process. Why does the character of Audrey Horne change from sensible black and white saddle shoes to red kitten heels when she gets to school? The obvious answer is out of adolescent rebellion. However, the repeated close-ups on the shoes throughout the pilot episode draw attention to them and encourage the viewer to speculate on their meaning.

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Why Twin Peaks is still on every fashion designer's mood board today

Audrey Horne

When Showtime and Sky Atlantic announced back in January 2016 that a new series of Twin Peaks was in production, fans of the original series rejoiced. Over 600,000 images from the Nineties original have now been shared and relived on Instagram, meaning that the cult following of the David Lynch-directed drama series is still very much alive in the social media age.

But what was so special about a TV show that was cancelled after just two seasons? It turns out that Twin Peaks mania was as much about the costumes, and the distinct visual world that Lynch and costume designers Patricia Norris and Sara Markowitz created, as about the plot - and the series has since gone down in the fashion history books thanks to its influence.

“Twin Peaks was a weird world and weird is cool,” says Christopher Laverty, the costume historian and editor of Clothes on Film. “If you look at television of the time we were ingesting endless variations on Jessica Fletcher and her patterned silk neck scarves in Murder She Wrote; TV needed to break some boundaries.”

Compared to anything else on the box in 1990, the activities in this surreal logging town and the inquest into the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer offered total escapism; a dreamland filled with oddball characters that were simultaneously abstract and relatable.

From the Log Lady and her kooky specs and ratty cardigans, to high school coquette Audrey Horne in her kilts and twinsets, the figures presented were cool because of their uniqueness.

Bay Garnett, contributing fashion editor at British Vogue says it’s no wonder that fashion designers still riff off of the costumes, when the entire industry is built on celebrating distinct characters and their personal looks

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