SHY VIOLET.(The Talk of the Town)

At a dinner held for Raf Simons, the reclusive Belgian designer, in New York the other day, the guest of honor was seated across from a human butterfly. The butterfly--actually a mannequin wearing a messy white wig and Technicolor wings--was supposed to be Andy Warhol. Simons was supposed to be the life of the party. It was a role he assumed reluctantly: for the past ten years, Simons, who designs for his own labels and was hired last year to be the designer for Jil Sander, has avoided public appearances.

The dinner was held at a Barneys warehouse, on Ninth Avenue, amid a jumble of giant blinking props that were being assembled for the store's Christmas window displays. The windows' theme was Happy Warhol-idays, chosen by Simon Doonan, Barneys' longtime creative director. Doonan eyed the decorations--illuminated Campbell's-soup labels, silk screens of Liza Minnelli, and an enormous head (of Warhol) stuffed with flashing lights and china. "I admire Raf enormously, but I don't relate to his aesthetic," Doonan said. "He has this restraint--when I'm around it, I feel like Coney Island. It's like Liberace meeting Jean-Paul Sartre. It's like Joan Collins meeting Simone de Beauvoir." He went on, "As a display person, I relate more to Warhol than to Raf. He was a gigantic populist. He wanted to be on TV. Raf is very self-effacing. He is a designer for the cognoscenti. He's not, like, about to get a license at Wal-Mart. But they're both fairly sphinxlike. Truman Capote said that Andy is a sphinx without a secret. Raf is a sphinx with a secret. He's a mysterious figure, and I think that's worked very much in his favor."

It had taken Barneys' fashion director, Julie Gilhart, more than a year to persuade Simons, who lives in Antwerp, to come to New York. "The idea was to do an intimate dinner and then afterward open up the doors to his cult followers--he has a lot of street kids who are into him," she said. "Raf is part of a movement that is about quality ...