Top 35 Raf Simons Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I’m not so rock and roll. I’m more techno.”

— Raf Simons

2. “I’m usually very attracted to things that I can’t define. If something’s too clear, it’s very often not inspiring to me anymore.”

— Raf Simons

3. “I’m not an isolated person. The more I connect to people, the more I have the feeling that things work.”

— Raf Simons

4. “Fashion is such an octopus. You’re connected to so many people: suppliers, pattern makers, production teams, marketing teams, vendors.”

— Raf Simons

5. “I’m a designer, and for me, things are always evolving, and such evolution is necessary.”

— Raf Simons

6. “I’m shy, but not on a one-to-one basis. Over the years, I have become acclimatised to a bit of publicity.”

— Raf Simons

7. “The future, for me, is romantic, I don’t understand people who say the past is romantic. Romantic, for me, is something you don’t know yet, something you can dream about, something unknown and mystical. That I find fascinating.”

— Raf Simons

8. “I’m very attracted to things that I can’t define.”

— Raf Simons

9. “Becoming a fashion designer is agreeing with the fact that what you experience or what you see as free is also connected to a system. Does that mean giving up your freedom? I still don’t know the answer. There’s a very different kind of psychology going on in the fashion scene than in art.”

— Raf Simons

10. “The fashion world doesn’t know the word stop, so you have to make sure there are sublime moments every day.”

— Raf Simons

11. “I don’t see Dior as something that could become mine. I see it as a dialogue with the women who wear it. I want to stay connected to them rather than to an abstract brand.”

— Raf Simons

12. “I see my position in that whole Dior construction very differently from my own brand. My own brand will stand or fall because of me. Dior won’t fall if I fall. It will also still stand if I’m not there. I’m coming in there and it’s like a – I don’t know the English word – like a passage.”

— Raf Simons

13. “When it’s only clothes, that is not satisfying enough for me. I don’t think I could do this for 10, 20 years if that was all. It also has to be about a psychology or a mentality or a concept.”

— Raf Simons

14. “We are very excited to re-launch the collaboration with Fred Perry. We have great appreciation for the heritage of the brand as well as their dynamism in guiding the brand towards the future. Their openness to create synergies between both our brands will bring interesting, creative results.”

— Raf Simons

15. “My mother was a cleaning lady all her life.”

— Raf Simons

16. “I’ve always seen myself as a small entity, and it will always stay like that. I’m not changing. But I think the big challenge for me taking on the Dior thing is to see how I can connect that to such a huge institution.”

— Raf Simons

17. “Robert Gober, for example. He doesn’t seem like somebody who is just going to show in a gallery that asks him to show. He’s just making his work, and when he’s ready, he’s going to show it.”

— Raf Simons

18. “I wanted an idea of the future, a new femininity. I wanted you to feel that you wouldn’t quite know where these women were coming from and where they were going to.”

— Raf Simons

19. “For me, Warhol made so much sense.”

— Raf Simons

20. “I find it fascinating to see the fact that women want to buy things that they see on men.”

— Raf Simons

21. “But overall I want to make sure people fall in love with the clothes and that they are satisfied.”

— Raf Simons

22. “My ideas for the next collection always happen a couple of months before the show. I have learned to shut up and not bother my assistants with it.”

— Raf Simons

23. “I know this independence is what people like most about my brand.”

— Raf Simons

24. “I like very much to put on fashion shows.”

— Raf Simons

25. “In my opinion, Christian Dior was never, ever theatre.”

— Raf Simons

26. “Sometimes it’s more a matter of collaboration which matters in a collection.”

— Raf Simons

27. “I never really have to sit at a desk thinking, “What should I do now?” It doesn’t work like that for me, and it never has. My thinking process is constant. The difference is that once I was in Antwerp only doing two men’s shows a year. And the weird thing is I thought I was busy then.”

— Raf Simons

28. “Fashion has a long interest in collaborative situations.”

— Raf Simons

29. “You do what you do. Or you do what you have to do. I don’t know how to explain it better. I think that in the moment, you can’t see connections, but sometimes afterwards you do.”

— Raf Simons

30. “Collage – SS13 offers a very controlled and pure do-it-yourself attitude. The collection shows a juxtaposition of very different materials, prints and colours, therefore giving the wearer a possibility to combine the garments in different ways.”

— Raf Simons

31. “My dad only ever talked about two things: bicycles and Mercedes.”

— Raf Simons

32. “My whole life, I’ve always had to be surrounded by creative things. I find it relaxing to be in touch with creations by other people.”

— Raf Simons

33. “I would prefer to use the word free. I think the Dior thing is so much freer. There was not so much free about Jil’s way of working.”

— Raf Simons

34. “It felt wrong for me to stay totally connected to that very strict way of approaching the heritage – what it can be, what it cannot be. That was also the period where I really thought, “No, let’s open it up.””

— Raf Simons

35. “Well, my own men’s collection always felt very free back in the days before Jil. Once you make it this kind of dialogue with other people, with a fashion show and clients and whatever, it becomes something else. Free meets not so free.”

— Raf Simons

36. “If I see a fashion show with literal influences, it doesn’t make me think any more. It doesn’t make me dream.”

— Raf Simons

37. “I always try to connect with what’s happening in the world-reality, modernity, the 21st century, all that – and with Jil it started to feel very disconnected from the outside and how women were looking at fashion, experiencing fashion, interpreting fashion.”

— Raf Simons

38. “Unlike fashion, art isn’t applied. It doesn’t have to serve anybody. It doesn’t have to be there for any other reason than to give an impression of what the world is about.”

— Raf Simons

39. “It was a challenge for me to see how I could deal with that at Jil, and I had a lot of doubt about it. I wondered if maybe it was just better to do your own thing in the long run, like an artist.”

— Raf Simons