Fashion’s missing player joins Prada as label’s co-creative director

Raf Simons will be joining Prada as co-creative director alongside Miuccia Prada starting April 2, the Italian luxury label announced Sunday.

The spring and summer 2021 women’s ready-to-wear collection — presented in Milan this September — will be the first to bear Simon’s creative input. Prada showed its women’s fall and winter 2020 collection on Thursday during Milan Fashion Week.

“This partnership, encompassing all creative facets of the Prada label, is born from a deep reciprocal respect and from an open conversation — it is a mutual decision, proposed and determined by both parties,” the Prada label said in its announcement. “It opens a new dialogue, between designers widely acknowledged as two of the most important and influential of today.”

Fashion designer Raf Simons walks the runway for Calvin Klein 205W39NYC during New York Fashion Week at the American Stock Exchange Building in New York on Feb. 13, 2018.

(Angela Weiss / AFP/Getty Images)

The move, which combines the talent of two high-profile powerhouse designers, answers the months-long speculation of just where the critically acclaimed, celebrity-beloved Belgian designer might land after parting ways with the PVH-owned Calvin Klein label in December 2018.

Prior to taking the helm as chief creative at Calvin Klein (where his efforts earned him the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s Menswear and Womenswear Designer of the Year awards in 2017 and the CFDA’s Womenswear Award again in 2018), Simons had stints at Jil Sander and Dior in addition to designing his eponymous label.