“Slow and steady will get you to the top,” is both a source of inspiration for life and the 3.1 Phillip Lim A/W ’15 Collection. The nod to mountaineering is Phillip Lim’s way of celebrating his eponymous label’s 10th year anniversary. With alpine style at the heart of the new season, blue and green earth tones dominate the collection and utilitarian hardware is seen in the details. Jacket straps, carabineer clips, and toggle drawstrings add a rough edge to Phillip Lim’s otherwise polished silhouettes we know and love.
After putting his namesake label on hold last season for a collaboration with contemporary artist Ruby Sterling, Raf Simons makes a smooth transition back with his S/S ’15 collection. Looking to the art of scrapbooking, Simons puts forth collages of both real memories and imagined ones. Simons’ signature silhouettes are pinned with photos of his parents courting fifty-five years ago, a passport photo of him as a teenager wearing a Superman t-shirt, the roller coaster is the very one he rode with his close friends and colleagues, stylist Olivier Rizzo and fashion photographer Willy Vanderperre decades ago, the Japanese influence was an homage to the first retailers who ever supported him, the shark was for Jaws and Simons’ love of horror movies, the swimmer in peril stands for danger, while the astronaut stands for isolation. Simons is known to take cues from youth culture and adolescent angst as inspiration for his collections, so it’s refreshing to see him embrace his own youth all while giving us a better understanding of the man who is Raf Simons.
