Woe Unto Those Who Spit on the Fear Generation

The title alone was a provocation — a line that read like graffiti on a council estate wall, a warning from a generation that felt dismissed. Raf Simons’s Spring/Summer 2002 collection extended the emotional territory of the previous season’s “Riot Riot Riot” but shifted the register from anxiety to defiance. The key difference was the collaboration with Peter Saville, the legendary graphic designer whose work for Factory Records had defined the visual language of Joy Division, New Order, and an entire era of post-punk culture. Saville’s graphics — the frequency pulses, the color-blocked geometries, the typographic precision — were screen-printed onto bombers, parkas, and oversized shirts, creating garments that functioned simultaneously as clothing and as cultural artifacts.

The collection was a thesis on the relationship between fashion and music — not the superficial relationship of celebrity endorsement and front-row seating, but a deeper structural affinity. Simons understood that post-punk and fashion shared a commitment to the idea that surface is not superficial: that the way something looks is inseparable from what it means. The New Order Bomber — a nylon flight jacket bearing Saville’s design for the “Technique” album — became the collection’s defining piece and, eventually, the single garment most responsible for creating the archive fashion market as it exists today. When that jacket began selling for thousands of dollars in the mid-2000s, it proved that fashion could generate the same collector’s obsession as limited-edition vinyl or rare sneakers.

The models were, again, Simons’s boys — young, angular, uneasy in their beauty. They wore the Saville graphics like armor, like band T-shirts, like declarations of allegiance to a cultural moment that mainstream fashion didn’t yet understand. The collection’s influence has been enormous and ongoing: the Supreme-Louis Vuitton collaboration, the entire streetwear-luxury convergence of the 2010s, the current fashion industry’s obsession with “archive” — all of it traces back, in some meaningful way, to the moment Simons put a Peter Saville graphic on a bomber jacket and treated it as seriously as a Savile Row suit.