Looking back at the Raf Simons SS23 show in October, signs that it would be the designer’s last might have been flashing right in our face—as aggressively as an onslaught of strobe lights. Considering the collection’s countless references to rave culture (not to mention, the venue being legendary London factory-turned-nightclub Printworks), it’s hard not to see the show as some sort of techno-tracked farewell party.
 

With a bar serving as the show’s runway—from which Raf Simons himself would later stage dive onto a cheering crowd—the label managed to go out with a boozy bang. A toast to three decades giving youth and its myriad subcultures a dance floor through its clothing. 
 

Revelry on the fringes was most apparent in SS23, where the designer let underground movements mosh unified and euphoric across ensembles. Stripped technical tailoring in mesh tops and leggings offered greater movement; the better to lunge and high-kick into a raucous night of abandon. 

Pops of punk, shocks of neon, and prints that recall drunken scribbles behind a dive bar’s bathroom stall (“Kill them all and dance”) give the collection a second wind for boundless bacchanalia—the kind that stumbles, mascara-smeared but triumphant, into a gray London morning. 
 

Perhaps the same can be said of the label following its announcement of closure. Be it in intergalactic letterman jackets emblazoned with the word “UFO” (AW2022) or its signature statement knits that cozy both to dystopian fantasies and a future of possibility, its collections have let youth run festive through every fist pump, eyeroll, or rebel yell expressed through fabric. 
 

It’s all made for one prolonged party, constituting countless highs across 27 years. But every party, no matter how epic, has to end somehow.