WILLY VANDERPERRE – Raf Simons 1995-2015

032c Workshop / Joerg Koch is pleased to present an anti-retrospective by photographer WILLY VANDERPERRE that activates 20 years of Raf Simons collections. Using archival pieces from across all of the label’s collections, Vanderperre channels the energy of Simons’ design practice through a series of archetypes drawn from youth subcultures. Organized to appear as a schoolhouse locker, the installation unravels a collaboration between designer and photographer that feeds from the iconography and dissonance of adolescence in provincial Belgium.

It has been rumored that youth is dead—that it has become a marketing demographic, or a disembodied wash of colliding newsfeeds. But, for RAF SIMONS and WILLY VANDERPERRE, youth is a practice. A methodology. An environment. Youth is always becoming. Teeming with questions. Envisioning futures. Together with the Raf Simons atelier, Willy Vanderperre has become an oracle for a pre-Internet notion of beauty and freedom. It is rooted in the site specificity of IRL subculture and the melodramatic landscape of suburban isolation.