“Riot Riot Riot” marked Raf Simons’s return to fashion after a one-season sabbatical. What he reemerged with was wholly incongruous with what had predated it, as Raf repudiated the ultra-slim look he had formally lived and died by, in favor of an enmeshing of layers borrowed from the style of teens at the Vienna flea market, who stumbled organically into the silhouette due to the sheer necessity of the biting cold. However, aesthetics aside, perhaps the most striking shift was a move away from explorations of the upper class and their well-disguised depravities, to a more working class style, in which the subtext was secondary to the immediate, as opposed to the inverse in his pre-2000s output. This thematic change would reverberate throughout his forthcoming seasons, growing more extreme until a culmination with “Consumed”, in which the lack of subtext was in fact the entire message.

The patches affixed across this Afghan style shawl reference numerous musicians Raf siphoned literal and metaphoric from, including David Bowie, Bauhaus’s Peter Murphy, The Cure’s Robert Smith, and the Manic Street Preachers. It was featured prominently on the runway, where it was the defining accessory of the season. 

Condition: 9/10. No significant flaws.

Dimensions: 41” x 41”