Looking back at it, Raf Simons’s spring 2002 collection was eerily prescient. Presented on January 7, 2001, the show featured wrapped and masked models holding torches. A gesture of terror, fear, and even cult mentality, it pre-dated the September 11 terrorist attacks by nine months and the G8 protests that led to a civilian death by six, but offers a startling parallel in hindsight. It’s that ability to take the temperature of the world—even of things that have not yet happened, and filter it through fashion that is Simons’s strength.
The clothing mimics the swaddling of the models’ faces: large, bulbous white jackets and trousers, with aggressive interjections of red, yellow, and black. Models walked barefoot through a 6th arrondissement lycée in Paris, while Fuse and The Fall played on the sound system. Peter de Potters’s graphics, always a bit uncanny, featured aggressive slogans like “Be pure, be vigilant, behave” and the word revolution, its letter I dripping into a cross with tree roots. The most famous piece 20 years later is Simons and Potters’s Kollaps hoodie. “We are ready and willing to ignite, just born too late,” it reads. By July 2001, Simons had directed a video with Willy Vanderperre called “Safe” depicting models wearing the white pieces—but a whiff of un-safeness was in the air. Simons titled this collection, “Woe Unto Those Who Spit on the Fear Generation…The Wind Will Blow It Back.” The bitter pill to swallow is that every generation has something to fear.
