Kvadrat Helia 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.