Raf Simons Redux / Lust For Paper

For the first instalment of the column Lust for Paper, we’ve decided to start with an anonymous image that inhabits the final pages of the cult publication Raf Simons Redux. Buried among lists of collections and art interventions by the Belgian designer, six black-and-white frames depict two adolescent boys enclosed inside a mock apartment. This article begins with that image, a fragment that has left very little information about itself, and depicts its missing narrative. Drawing on Francesco Bonami’s words from one of the chapters of the book and lyrics from an early Suede track, a band that has had influence on Simons’ early work, the text builds an enduring tension that might lead to the unexpected. The Raf Simons boys are the real Drowners.

In their mutual avoidance of eye contact had converged the greatest arrogance and the most delicate shyness ever witnessed. They had accepted that kind of arrangement lightly, without particular expectations and without troubling themselves with too many questions. The idea of a roof overhead, meals provided, and nothing required of them except to exist in their own nature had seemed an especially seductive vision. It mattered little if they came across as zoo-like specimens: the comfort surrounding them was far too generous to prompt any hesitation. They had been entrusted with a single task during their stay: to remain entirely themselves. To listen to records in the way only they would, to eat with the specific ease known only to their habits, to open and close the fridge and drink milk from the carton with that kind of languid, androgynous grace that had long defined their presence. There was too much beauty in that theatrical setting, three rooms left uncovered on four sides, so much so that it had sparked an unspoken competition between the two teenagers, as if one had to stand out under the gaze of onlookers whose understanding of their presence was as limited as the small, laboratory-like space they were forced to inhabit.

Won’t someone give me a gun?
Oh, well, it’s for my brother

The bed, used one at a time in rotation for the brief rests that interrupted stretches of idle stillness, had taken the place of the two sofas made available, one of which served only in those moments of self-lobotomization in front of the television. Every instant they felt the absence of the gutters in which they would hear their friends playing. Their bodies had memorized the effect of the speaker’s vibration and they were kept alive by that memory. Even when they remained inert on that simulation of a floor, they were traversed by the souvenir of that energy. The only solace to that thirst of chaos was given when they drifted through the stack of records made available, and listened without emitting a word with their backs pressed into the juncture where the wall met the floor. Movement, let alone dancing, felt absurd in that context. Nevertheless, they drifted through that self-imposed exile with something close to deadly delight. Like remaining underwater just long enough to tease the edge of breathlessness, that exquisite discomfort, the thrill of almost breaking. It was a rehearsal for vanishing, a yearning to feel the edge of disappearance. To them, without that faint pulse of danger, even the smallest gesture felt without meaning. To the occasional beholder, they must have seemed disinterested, mechanical. But this state had never been unfamiliar to them: they knew what isolation meant, they enjoyed that exquisite pleasure that came in concealing themselves.

So slow down, slow down
You’re taking me over
And so we drown, sir, we drown

In those heavy-lidded glances they cast on one another while bringing their limbs through the rooms, there lingered a hush of longing that, hour by hour, had thickened the air between them. It was as if they summoned each other wordlessly. Even the bed, whose mattress still bore the scent of its packaging, seemed to murmur invitations. That muted superiority born of distance. They had grown so accomplished at being unreadable to others that they had crossed a threshold, becoming obscure even to themselves. Under constant surveillance, they had paradoxically loosened their ties.

He had once sworn that, in the deep of night, he had felt a fingertip glide along his spine, carrying a static breath of electricity, causing brief surges in the wake of its touch. At the beginning it had barely grazed him, a presence more sensed than felt, and to which he had wished only to yield.

They had been lying on the floor, exhausted by the comforts of the bed, seeking the cool reprieve of tile against the staleness of the summer air. A single glow from the kitchenette softened the dark around them. An itch at the base of his skull, combined with the eerie certainty of being watched, had roused him. As the finger moved lower, he had felt the nail, just longer than the skin it emerged from, scrape him faintly, releasing a ripple of sensation across his back. Where the pad of the finger passed, his spine had unfastened, vertebra by vertebra, undone by the quiet insistence of that contact.

Well, he writes the line, wrote right down my spine
It says, “Oh, do you believe in love there?”

Then light. A flash. And once again, he had found himself in that sterilised room, surrounded by spectators approaching with hushed awe, breaking their contemplation only with the faint click of a camera. Again. It had only been a lucid dream, a thought his mind returned to compulsively. He didn’t know whether it should ever come to life, or even if it could. Yet he could think of nothing else but that white light capturing the image he was projecting in his head, preserving that moment in which two solitudes had entered in wordless communion.

As the skin flies all around us
We kiss in his room to a popular tune
Oh, real drowners

Some contextual notes
The text was shaped by an image glimpsed while leafing through the closing pages of Raf Simons Redux. Divided into ten chapters, the book retraces a decade of the designer’s activity, blending artistic collaborations, photographic projects, and musical influences that have shaped his work. Published in 2005, it marked a necessary moment of pause, a line drawn between all Simons had accomplished and the new direction he was about to take as creative director of Jil Sander. In this sense, Redux captures the first wave of rebellious youth that has always underpinned his vision, an energy that would resurface with renewed force after his minimalist interlude at Jil Sander and the highly scrutinised tenure at Dior. Upon the release of Redux, before allowing his elongated teenage-boy figure to shed the grime of basement band parties and step into the white light of gallery spaces, Simons chose to celebrate all the dirt and rust that had forged his aesthetic from the start.

Among the closing pages, nestled within the chronological listing of his shows and collaborations, a black-and-white photograph caught my eye, divided into six frames, it documented a performance featuring two adolescent boys confined within the artificial intimacy of a life-size mock apartment. The setting, constructed inside Florence’s Stazione Leopolda for the 1998 Biennale della Moda, stood in visual dialogue with the exhibition (-3) 2001, curated by Terry Jones. What struck me was the context: this performance had taken place under the auspices of Pitti Discovery, whose committee included Francesco Bonami, the same curator with whom Simons would later create the much-discussed publication The Fourth Sex (2004). Perhaps this was the moment their intellectual connection first ignited. Bonami, too, contributed a brief text to Redux, meditating on the ambiguous terrain Simons often explores, what he calls “that interzone called solitude.” Beyond the image itself, I found no further documentation. No names, no programme notes. Just those frozen frames: fragments of staged interiors and adolescent withdrawal. And so, I imagined a way to bring that image and Bonami’s words together, binding them through the lyrics of an early Suede song, a band Simons himself credits in Redux as formative during his early creative years. One of those boys, I thought. One of those real drowners.