He appears in
Black Palms, Simons’ Spring/Summer 1998 collection, and the stars, alas, are painted. Franky Claeys, the artist behind the collection’s graphics, flagged
Apocalypse Now as an influence for the show’s torched aesthetic, but to me, its red-and-black palette recalls the 1981 USA print of Christiane F’s autobiography (which Simons has since paid direct homage to). For the show, Simons rented out this enormous echoing vault of a garage in the Bastille quarter of Paris and assembled a gang of beautiful young men to model his clothes – men, not models. They were mostly skaters, raver types Simons found through ads circulated on the radio, and the looks were dark, gothic, undone, in some cases literally bare, bones flashing beneath flimsy shirts unbuttoned and blowing wide open. Down the ramp they come: skulking, scowling, pale and scrawny, their movements slow and eyelids heavy as if still shrugging off last night’s lazy sex. Some of them are topless with billo