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.

The jacket itself is deceptively simple. The MA-1 silhouette — a standard military bomber with ribbed cuffs, a snap-front collar, and a cropped body — is one of the most familiar forms in menswear. What Simons and Saville did was treat it as a canvas, 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 not just a fashion statement but 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 bomber’s afterlife has been extraordinary. It appears in museum exhibitions, commands five-figure prices at auction, and has been referenced — directly and indirectly — by dozens of subsequent designer-musician collaborations. But its 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. Simons did not intend to create a market. He intended to make a jacket. The market built itself around the jacket’s gravity.