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The Belgian designer Raf Simons was named late on Monday as the next artistic director of Christian Dior — a post that had been empty for more than a year since the dramatic departure of John Galliano in March 2011.
The Belgian designer Raf Simons acknowledged the audience at the end of Jil Sander Spring-Summer 2012 ready-to-wear collection last September in Milan.
By SUZY MENKES
Published: April 9, 2012
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Times Topics: Raf Simons | Christian Dior S.A. | John Galliano
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"I feel fantastic," Mr. Simons said by telephone from his studio in Antwerp. "It is one of the ultimate challenges, and a dream to go to a place like Dior, which stands for absolute elegance, incredible femininity and utter luxury."
Mr. Simons, 44, began his career in men's wear in 1995 and went on to revitalize men's and women's lines at Jil Sander 10 years later.
Now he has been chosen by Bernard Arnault, chairman and chief executive of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton to modernize Dior, the most classic of Parisian couture houses. In a statement, LVMH said that "Raf Simons' journey with the house of Dior will propel its iconic style into the 21st century."
Mr. Simons will be in charge of haute couture, women's ready-to-wear and accessories, starting with the couture show in July, while keeping his eponymous men's line.
Mr. Arnault and Sidney Toledano, Dior's chief executive, began searching for a new designer after Mr. Galliano was removed from the post because he had made anti-Semitic slurs in a bar in Paris.
Several designers said they had turned down the house, apparently seeing a post-Galliano role as a poisoned chalice.
The front runner, the American-born Marc Jacobs, design director of Louis Vuitton, decided to stay where he was. In the meantime, design direction at Dior was in the hands of Bill Gaytten, Mr. Galliano's former assistant. LVMH's financial figures for 2011 show that Dior's results were not affected.
Mr. Simons's name had been bandied about with other supposed contestants in recent months, particularly after his on-off courtship by the house of Yves Saint Laurent ended. The Dior appointment is being made as the designer Hedi Slimane, once a men's wear rival of Mr. Simons's, takes on the top job at Saint Laurent, the fashion house owned by PPR, a major LVMH rival.
The Christian Dior heritage began with the romantic Mr. Dior himself, a man who brought femininity to the postwar 1950s, building the tiny waists and sweeping skirts of his voluptuous "flower women" on his obsession with the Edwardian elegance of his early memories of his mother. He died suddenly in 1957 after only 10 years at the helm, to be followed by a young unknown, Yves Saint Laurent.
Mr. Simons's style could not be more different from that of the founder: He has a modernist vision and a spare, linear style based on fine tailoring. "My aim is a very modern Dior, but at the end of the day, I also look back," he said, referring to what he calls "mid-century modernism."
"I find that period between 1947 and 1957 extremely attractive, and there was a lot of modernity," Mr. Simons said of Christian Dior's designs. "There was the romantic appeal looking back to his mother and the belle époque, but there was also a constant evolution in shape, changing proportions and the ideas connected to the World War were revolutionary."
Mr. Simons comes from the Flemish town of Neerpelt, the only son of a modest family. His mother worked as a house cleaner and his father was on military night watch. Some of that uniform severity may have been worked into the spare lines of early men's collections, where the obsessive focus was the angst and tension of youth culture and the beat of the Belgian music movement.
"But my father was not a strict man, it was a warm nest," Mr. Simons said, adding that his interest in fashion was more about escaping from a Catholic background and a rigorous college full of students aspiring to become lawyers or doctors.
While Christian Dior embraced flower gardens and the decorative stage sets of his artist friend Christian Bérard, Mr. Simons trained as an industrial designer in Genk before trying men's fashion. His world was defined by one of his earliest shows for autumn winter 1996-97. In "We Only Come Out at Night," youths with skinny bodies, sculpted faces and sensual lips dragged on cigarettes and reveled in their adult-free world.
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This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 9, 2012
An earlier version of this article misstated the town where Raf Simons trained as an industrial designer. The town is not Ghent, it is Genk.
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