New Order Bomber

The New Order Bomber is the single garment most responsible for the existence of the archive fashion market. A nylon MA-1 flight jacket bearing Peter Saville’s iconic graphic design work for New Order — specifically the color-blocked pattern from the “Technique” album — it was produced as part of Raf Simons’s Fall/Winter 2001 “Riot Riot Riot” collection and its Spring/Summer 2002 successor, though the piece’s reputation was built not on the runway but on the secondary market in the years that followed. By the mid-2000s, the bomber was selling for thousands of dollars on eBay and Japanese resale platforms, and a new category of fashion collecting — one focused on specific, culturally significant pieces rather than brand loyalty — had been born. That this market now sustains platforms, publications, and entire careers in curation is a consequence the jacket set in motion without intending to.

The collaboration between Simons and Saville carried a weight that transcended the garments it produced. Peter Saville — the British graphic designer who co-founded Factory Records and created the visual identity for Joy Division, New Order, OMD, and Roxy Music — had never granted a fashion designer access to his personal archive. Simons, who had admired Saville’s work since his youth in suburban Belgium, was the first. The Autumn/Winter 2003 collection, titled “Closer” after the Joy Division album, was the formal culmination of their relationship, but the Saville graphics had appeared in Simons’s work as early as 2001. What Saville gave Simons was not merely imagery but lineage — a visual connection to the post-punk culture that had shaped Simons’s aesthetic sensibility and that he believed fashion had the capacity to carry forward. The collaboration has continued across multiple collections and extensions, including Raf Simons x Fred Perry, but the early pieces remain the ones that matter most, because they were made before anyone knew they would matter at all.

The jacket itself is deceptively simple in silhouette but complex in execution. The most celebrated version — often called the PCL Parka, after the “Power, Corruption & Lies” album whose artwork it bears — is technically a fishtail parka rather than a bomber, cut from soft but substantial cotton canvas with a detachable polyester fleece interior lining. The Saville artwork was hand-painted onto each jacket, making every piece unique. This detail matters and frequently overlooked in discussions that treat the piece as a graphic tee writ large. The hand-painting meant that production quantities were inherently limited, that no two parkas were identical, and that each one carried the literal trace of a human hand applying Saville’s designs to canvas. Some versions featured collage or patchwork backs combining multiple Saville designs — Dazzle Ships for OMD, Technique for New Order, assorted Factory Records graphics — creating garments that functioned as portable exhibitions of post-punk visual culture.

What Simons and Saville did was treat the MA-1 silhouette and the fishtail parka — two of the most familiar forms in menswear — as canvases, applying Saville’s graphic work with the same precision and intentionality that Saville had brought to Factory Records’ sleeve designs. The result was a garment that carried the full weight of post-punk visual culture on its back — literally. Wearing it was a declaration of cultural literacy, a way of signaling that you understood the lineage that connected Joy Division to Raf Simons and that you believed fashion belonged in that conversation. The jacket proposed that a piece of clothing could do the work of a poster, a record sleeve, and a manifesto simultaneously, and that wearing it constituted a form of criticism — a public argument about what culture was and where it lived.

The bomber’s afterlife has been extraordinary. It appears in museum exhibitions, commands prices ranging from eight thousand to nearly eighteen thousand dollars on platforms like Grailed and 1stDibs, and has been referenced — directly and indirectly — by dozens of subsequent designer-musician collaborations, from Supreme’s own Peter Saville partnership beginning in 2013 to the broader proliferation of graphic-driven luxury outerwear. The pieces circulate through a secondary market that treats them less as clothing than as cultural artifacts, objects whose value derives not from their materials — cotton canvas, polyester fleece, hand-applied paint — but from their position in a narrative that connects Manchester’s post-industrial music scene to the galleries and runways of continental Europe. Collectors track the individual variations with forensic attention, cataloguing the specific Saville designs that appear on each parka, the condition of the hand-painted surfaces, the presence or absence of the detachable lining. The rigor is indistinguishable from connoisseurship in any other collecting field, which is precisely what Simons’s work made possible. But the bomber’s most significant legacy is conceptual. Before the New Order Bomber, fashion’s relationship with its own past was nostalgic and diffuse. After it, specific pieces from specific collections became objects of obsessive desire, studied and catalogued with the rigor previously reserved for vintage guitars or first-edition books. Grailed, the platform that has done more than any other to institutionalize archive fashion culture, owes its conceptual foundation to the market that formed around these jackets. Simons did not intend to create a market. He intended to make a jacket. The market built itself around the jacket’s gravity, and it has not stopped expanding since.