Raf Simons' hats inspired by Flemish art When Bruegel's paintings meet latex

Raf Simons' latest FW22 show, staged yesterday through a digital presentation, marked a change of gear for the Belgian designer's brand that, after the gloomy and minimalist spring show last September in Paris, returned with a new creative exuberance that was expressed, on yesterday's catwalk, through an eclectic use of materials,  of Gothic silhouettes but, above all, through a new inspiration that did not come, this time, from the youth subcultures but from a painting by Pieter Brugel, the Netherlandish Proverbs.

Many other looks have been minimalist – composed of individual deconstructions of the classic trench coat or men's coat replicated in leather, vinyl and shiny synthetic materials. A series of women's dresses halfway between the prairie dress, the ghost of Victorian London and the spage age dresses of Pierre Cardin – the shortest of which also become a proposal of genderless dress as, in the last two years, the oversized shirts had been. Other and various looks seem to continue the Gothic moodboard, with black hoods, long hoods, those hats that you do not understand if they refer to the feluccas and helmets of the knights or the helmets of The Day the Earth Stood Still or the robots of exploitation science fiction.  The most conventional parts of the collection, to which Simons had already accustomed us in the latest collections, such as the printed suits, are decorated with a headset that seems to have come out of the Middle Ages while a series of memento mori, skeleton-jewels that kiss or dangle covered with gems, indifferently decorate lapels of jackets and earlobes.