C.P. Company’s Urban Protection: Anxiety, Technology, and Revelation

Adapted from my chapter Palliative Prototypes or Therapeutic Functionality? Examining C.P. Company’s Urban Protection Collection (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).

Download the full chapter

Towards the end of the 1990s, both fashion and art became preoccupied with the damaged body. Designers such as Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan, and Comme des Garçons mobilised dystopian aesthetics of decay and disintegration, imagining futures in which the human form was no longer stable or secure. At the same time, as anxiety over pollution, ecological collapse, and digital dependence intensified, others began to imagine clothing itself as a form of protection, a technological skin that might soothe the pressures of an increasingly hostile world.

The C.P. Company Urban Protection range, 1997–2001, showing the core jacket variants across Air, Sound, and Motion.

The Urban Protection range, designed by Moreno Ferrari for C.P. Company between 1997 and 2001, emerged from this climate of unease. The late 1990s were defined by instability — terrorism, new diseases, and collapsing certainties about identity — while fashion itself was being reshaped by global conglomerates and the relentless acceleration of production. Some designers turned to the imagery of death and decay; others, like Ferrari, sought refuge in technology.

Each Urban Protection garment embedded wearable technology into black nylon outerwear intended to shield its wearer from the toxicity of modern life. At the time, these pieces were heralded as pragmatic responses to collective anxiety, their functionality aligned with the late-century faith that technology could protect and improve the human condition. Yet as their circuits corroded and their batteries failed, what remained was not failure but metamorphosis. Stripped of utility, the garments revealed a metaphysical core. It is this spiritual and symbolic dimension, not their original technology, that continues to endure.

C.P. Company and Moreno Ferrari

When Ferrari became creative director in 1997, he broke decisively with C.P. Company’s tradition of natural fibres and outdoor romanticism. Linen and wool were replaced by Dynafil TS-70, an industrial nylon used in safety workwear, resistant to oil, water, and abrasion. Ferrari reimagined the brand for an age of pollution and surveillance, abandoning the natural in favour of the synthetic.

His innovation lay as much in meaning as in material. Attached to every garment was a clear plastic holder containing an identification card printed with short, poetic lines: No noise, for inner life, a new womb to listen to silence. Freedom of thought, poetry for the soul.

Identification cards issued with each Urban Protection garment, framing the range as conceptual propositions rather than conventional outerwear.

These cards were far more than branding. They borrowed the visual language of the art gallery to frame each piece as both object and artwork, function and metaphor. By listing a title, material, and conceptual phrase, Ferrari repositioned C.P. Company within a lineage that included not only design and fashion but also conceptual art. The garments became propositions rather than products, wearable thought experiments about protection, consciousness, and belief.

Air

The first garments in the series — Metropolis, LED, and Atlas — explored air as both medium and metaphor.

The Metropolis jacket, released in 1997, came with a detachable anti-smog mask and the promise of “a shell for consciousness.” Its industrial nylon surface and security-guard silhouette declared a new relationship between body and environment.

The Metropolis jacket, 1997, with its detachable anti-smog mask and identification card that defined the Urban Protection series.

The LED jacket contained a gas sensor that flashed red as air quality deteriorated, a small, visible pulse of anxiety. When new, it embodied the optimism of wearable technology; now, inert, it stands as an artefact of misplaced faith.

Atlas concealed an inflatable pillow within its collar, offering both comfort and allegory, a burden borne and briefly relieved.

The Atlas inflatable collar above Jeff Koons’s Aqualung (1985), a bronze diving rig from the Equilibrium series.

Ferrari’s fascination with air echoed Jeff Koons’s Equilibrium sculptures of the mid-1980s, in which diving tanks, snorkel vests, and lifeboats, all originally designed to preserve life, were recast in bronze. In Koons’s hands, objects of safety became monuments to futility: their materiality rendered them beautiful but useless, even deadly. They could no longer save; they could only signify.

Ferrari’s garments work in the same register. Their industrial nylon and sealed seams were once meant to protect the body, but as their embedded electronics decayed, that promise of salvation collapsed. What remains is the same paradox Koons exposed, the transformation of protection into permanence, of survival into symbol. When the mechanism fails, belief is all that survives.

Sound

A second group of garments — R.E.M., Life, YO, and Munch — translated psychological states into sound.

R.E.M. concealed a voice recorder in the sleeve; Life integrated industrial ear defenders to create what Ferrari called “a new womb to listen to silence”; YO contained a Discman to feed music directly into solitude. These were not gadgets for convenience but meditations on isolation, each attempting to tune the wearer to a different frequency of the self.

The Munch jacket, fitted with a hidden alarm that emitted a piercing scream when triggered, articulated Ferrari’s idea most directly. Its identification card read: “No panic, a cry as a bridge for a better future.” The title invoked Edvard Munch’s The Scream, a painting rooted in a precise geography — the bridge overlooking the Oslo fjord, flanked by the city on one side and, nearby, the asylum where Munch’s sister Laura was hospitalised. Behind the figure, the slaughterhouse and the cries of the animals merge with the distant screams of the insane.

Munch’s bridge is therefore a threshold between two forms of noise, the mechanical violence of the modern city and the psychic distress it produces. Ferrari’s Munch jacket carries that same tension. The scream it emitted was both warning and confession, a mechanical echo of human panic. Now that the device no longer works, its silence feels deliberate, as if the cry has been internalised.

The bridge in Munch’s painting and the circuitry within Ferrari’s garment occupy the same symbolic ground: both connect body and environment; both turn anxiety into architecture. And both reveal that the desire to control fear, whether through paint, metal, or technology, only exposes its persistence.

Motion

If Air dealt with the body’s environment and Sound with its inner voice, the final group of garments — Move, Rest, and Amaca — turned towards stillness.

Move combined a coat and waistcoat capable of carrying a foldable scooter, designed for swift passage through the city. Rest merged rucksack and stool, offering the possibility of pause, a brief withdrawal from movement. Amaca unfolded into a hammock that could also be read as a shroud or body bag. These garments blurred the line between object, body, and environment. Their concern was no longer survival but surrender: how to exist within the city’s machinery without being consumed by it.

The Amaca garment, designed to unfurl into a hammock, blurring the line between mobility, rest, and enclosure.

Amaca captures this shift most clearly. In its suspended form it suggests both refuge and mortality — a space between activity and stillness, life and death. The garment’s resemblance to a body bag also reminds us that protection can shade easily into enclosure, that the desire for safety can culminate in immobility.

Across Air, Sound, and Motion, Ferrari mapped a transformation: from the technological to the psychological, and finally to the metaphysical. Each stage moves further from the practical towards the poetic, from protecting the body to preparing it for release.

The Future Past

Seen today, the Urban Protection range no longer feels futuristic. Its technology has failed and its devices have fallen silent, yet the garments themselves remain pristine; their nylon surfaces untouched, their seams unbroken. What once promised to shield the body now stands as a meditation on the passage of time.

Ferrari’s work exposes a paradox: the very materials that made these garments protective have also preserved them beyond their intended life. Their electronics were temporary, but their shells endure, mocking the fragility of the human they were meant to defend. Like Koons’s bronzed life vests, they have outlived their function to become relics of belief; objects that speak less about innovation than about the faith placed in it.

As we move further into a transhuman era — one in which technology is implanted, ingested, and embedded within us — clothing no longer functions as a boundary between the internal self and the external world. If our threats now come from within, our garments can no longer protect us; they can only serve as symbolic talismans, impotent to ward off harm or danger.

Today, as our bodies have become increasingly politicised, regulated, and folded into systems of surveillance and control, the dream of protection has turned inwards. The tools that once promised security now measure, track, and expose us. In this climate, Ferrari’s Urban Protection garments feel prophetic; relics from a time when faith in technology still seemed capable of redemption. Now they invite reflection on what remains when that faith collapses: the realisation that protection was always metaphysical, that only spiritual salvation endures.