Former Dior designer Raf Simons is transforming men’s fashion

The Belgian fashion designer Raf Simons lives, at least part of the year, above a flower shop in one of the fancier arrondissements of Paris. 

His apartment is one of those expected parquet-floored affairs with carved boiseries painted chalk-white, filled with contemporary art.

There’s a George Condo painting that makes the sitter look like Beaker from ‘‘The Muppet Show,’’ hung in a space once occupied, perhaps, by a 19th-century academic oil.