Riot Riot Riot

“Riot Riot Riot” was shown in Paris in October 2001, one month after September 11th. The timing was coincidental — Raf Simons had been developing the collection for months — but the resonance was inescapable. The clothes vibrated with a collective anxiety that had suddenly become everyone’s, not just the disaffected Belgian teenagers who had always been Simons’s primary constituency. Oversized hoodies swallowed the models’ frames. Military-inspired parkas were layered over slim trousers. The proportions were deliberately wrong — tops too large, pants too tight — creating silhouettes that suggested bodies trying to disappear inside their own clothing.

The show was staged in a raw, industrial space, and the models moved through it with the hunched, purposeful gait of people walking through a city that no longer felt safe. Simons cast young, non-professional models — boys pulled from the streets and clubs of Antwerp and Brussels — and their visible discomfort in front of the audience became part of the collection’s emotional texture. This was not the polished alienation of a fashion editorial. It was the real thing: young men who looked like they had been wearing these clothes already, who looked like they needed to.

The collection produced several pieces that would become foundational to the emerging archive market, most notably a bomber jacket featuring Peter Saville’s graphic work — a piece that would eventually command extraordinary prices on the secondary market. But the significance of “Riot Riot Riot” extends beyond any individual garment. It was the moment at which Simons proved that menswear could function as cultural seismography — that a collection of clothes could register the emotional temperature of a historical moment with a precision and immediacy that other cultural forms struggled to achieve. Everything that followed in his career, from Jil Sander to Dior to Prada, builds on the foundation laid in that industrial space in October 2001.