Raf Simons first met Sterling Ruby around 2005, when Simons chanced upon the American artist’s ceramics and became fascinated by his wider practice spanning painting, sculpture, collage and textiles. He later visited Ruby’s LA studio, began collecting his work and the rest was history. Together, they talked about everything, including the differences between their respective worlds, and discovered overlapping interests in music, youth culture, punk, uniforms, textiles and the way people construct identities through clothing.
Both had spent their teenage years physically altering their own clothes: Simons remembered sewing band patches onto his garments, while Ruby similarly associated patching and reconstruction with his youth. Ruby believes that this process remained relevant even in the digital age, whether sewing pieces of fabric together or layering photographs and references online, as people continually assemble their identities from fragments of their interests. This would become central to AW14. Before we talk about their hit joint collection, let’s first cover what led up to this legendary season.
Their first major public collaboration came in 2007, when Ruby was tasked with conceptualizing Simons’ Aoyama flagship in Tokyo. Ruby threw bleach across approximately 650M of canvas before photographing the material in three-metre sections. These photographs were turned into negatives and enlarged into wallpaper that covered the walls and ceilings of the store, while the original bleached canvas was then used to construct fixtures on which the clothing was displayed. Simons described the result as an 'architectonic disorientation,' in which positive and negative versions of the same material surrounded the customer.
Around the same time, Ruby was developing WORK WEAR from leftover studio textiles, constructing basic shirts and trousers from heavyweight denim and canvas used in his sculptures and quilts. The garments inherited the same bleaching, dyeing, painting, enzyme washing and physical treatments as his artworks. This led to their co-developed 2009 RSSR denim project, followed by a Spring Summer 2010 denim capsule documented separately in Ruby’s professional archive. In 2012, their collaboration entered Dior, when Simons translated Ruby’s spray paintings into textiles for his debut Haute Couture collection.
By late 2013, the pair had already worked across architecture, clothing and couture, but AW14 was designed to remove the distinction between designer and artist entirely. Simons declared that for one season the brand 'Raf Simons' would effectively cease to exist. The label would instead read RAF SIMONS/STERLING RUBY. Simons was adamant that the project should not be understood through the conventional fashion model of a designer commissioning an artist to create a few graphics. According to him, there was not "one shirt, one shoe, one sock" that had not emerged from their mutual thinking process. The collection was developed between Antwerp and Los Angeles. Ruby said all the bleaching, fabric treatments and demarcation were done in LA, with scraps FedExed back and forth constantly. For both, the collaboration also offered a way out of their usual systems: Simons spoke of wanting to escape the fashion system, while Ruby described the search for autonomy within the creative systems they each worked inside.
Soundtracked by Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon, the collection was revealed in Paris in January 2014, bringing Simons’ familiar proportions together with Ruby’s far more physical approach to materials. Oversized coats, narrow trousers, bombers, knits and elongated tops were collaged, bleached, painted and covered with patches, while Ruby’s monumental American flag sculptures hung above the runway.
Beyond their punk origins, the patches and graphics were loaded with ideas about masculinity and consumption. FATHER dealt with responsibility and in Ruby’s words, the "indoctrination of the man," while ABUS LANG stood for “abusive language” and reflected how abstract modern masculinity had become. Elsewhere, a shark’s open maw and a grasping hand with painted nails were described by Ruby as "icons of consumption".
Seen in Look 3 and 5, these extremely rare elongated long sleeves feature assemblages of different textures, prints and patches across the front.
Both tagged XS. One is brand new with tags!