Kvadrat Balder 3 Fabric

Raf Simons, the Belgian designer long regarded as one of fashion’s most restlessly inventive figures, did not begin in clothes at all. Trained in industrial and furniture design in Genk, he turned to fashion only after an internship with Walter Van Beirendonck opened another door. In 1995, he unveiled his own menswear line—lean, razor-sharp, and youth-obsessed—an aesthetic that rewrote the codes of men’s tailoring and reverberated far beyond its Antwerp beginnings.

What followed was a sequence of appointments that read like a map of contemporary fashion itself: Jil Sander, Dior, Calvin Klein, and, most recently, Prada, where he now shares the role of co-creative director. Simons has made a career of recasting established houses in his own image, marrying provocation with polish, and insisting that elegance need not be static.

Since 2014, he has also extended his eye into textiles through a collaboration with the Danish fabric house Kvadrat. What began as a series of experiments at Calvin Klein evolved into a collection of home textiles, each a negotiation between Simons’s stark modernism and Kvadrat’s long tradition of craftsmanship. It is this ability to move across disciplines—fashion, furniture, fabric—without losing the singularity of his voice that has made Simons not only influential but indispensable to the language of design today.

Fanny Aronsen was a Swedish textile and product designer known for her luxurious and sophisticated contemporary fabrics. Her work was distinguished by sumptuous colors, rich textures, and intriguing tactile materials.

Having worked in Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam, Aronsen returned to Sweden in 1998 to establish her own design studio. Alongside her creative practice, she was a professor of textile design at the University of Stockholm, where she lectured at the renowned Konstfack College of Arts, Crafts, and Design.

Her textiles often reflected Nordic history and culture, yet they were also infused with a sophisticated mix of global influences. This unique blend of tradition and modernity made her designs timeless and widely celebrated in the world of contemporary textiles.