When Garments Betray Us:What the Vexed Generation Saw Coming

In the mid-1990s, two men stood on a Soho street corner watching CCTV cameras swivel overhead. Adam Thorpe and Joe Hunter had just founded Vexed Generation, a label built for a city learning to live under surveillance. Their garments, zipped masks, mesh panels, and layered shells looked less like fashion and more like countermeasures. They weren’t dressing men for attention; they were teaching them how to disappear.

London was changing fast. CCTV cameras were spreading across streets and stations, sold to the public as safety. For Thorpe and Hunter, that new visibility turned the promise of protection into a practice of control. In response, they started to imagine clothes as urban armour: waterproof, breathable, defensive. The Vexed Parka, with its concealed mesh face covering, made a political statement without a slogan. To wear it was to understand that anonymity was rapidly turning into a luxury.

Vexed made that tension literal. One of their garments featured an attached face covering printed with Section 37 of the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, introduced amid moral panic over youth and protest, the legislation granting police the power to remove or seize any garment worn to conceal identity.

The Information Terrorist

Their designs articulated a new grammar of resistance — technical, site-specific, grounded in daily negotiation with the city’s emerging surveillance network. Rather than courting the market, Vexed engaged directly with the city as both medium and threat.

Yet even as their clothes mapped the politics of the street, Vexed were already interrogating a wider system of control: the digital architecture that would soon begin to organise everyday life. Long before social media or online retail became routine, they recognised that the digital space would reproduce the same structures of surveillance. In 1996, their website vexed.co.uk included a pop-up called The Information Terrorist that appeared whenever visitors tried to go straight to the retail page. It warned about data capture and online monitoring, locking users out for twenty-four hours if they ignored its message. What looked like provocation was really a live demonstration of how systems watch, record, and regulate behaviour.

Crucially, that web address appeared on their labels, turning each garment into an access point to that critique. At a time when few fashion brands even had a website, this wasn’t marketing. It was systems design, exposing how the infrastructures of commerce and surveillance were already merging. The mesh vents and pop-up windows carried the same message: visibility is never neutral, and participation always comes at a cost.

The System Takes Shape

In hindsight, Vexed were the first to see that the physical and digital would merge into a single architecture of control. Their garments and their website signalled the same warning: once bodies and data occupy the same system, surveillance no longer needs a camera to see you. Over time, what began as a network became an infrastructure: phones, sensors, labels, each binding the digital more tightly to the physical world.

Now, twenty-five years later, the technologies have changed, but the logic hasn’t. The EU’s proposed Digital Product Passport will make every garment traceable—officially for transparency, unofficially it introduces a system where clothes carry identity, where data clings to the body as tightly as the cloth. Vexed saw this coming: infrastructures built for safety often end up disciplining those they claim to protect. The Digital Product Passport may claim transparency, not surveillance as its goal, yet every system that identifies also records.

The End of Anonymity

The real foresight of the Vexed Generation wasn’t aesthetic but moral: how much exposure should any citizen accept? In their world, the garment was a means to disappear; in ours, it may be the very thing that betrays us.

Their answer was simple: opacity is protection. They weren’t refusing visibility itself, but the assumption that visibility equals safety. Their work reintroduced risk, reminding wearers that anonymity still has value.

That warning now feels unavoidable. We are moving toward a world where anonymity is no longer a possibility but a problem to be solved — where every object, garment, and movement demands identification. The clothes once designed to conceal the wearer may soon expose them completely. We are no longer watched by cameras but by systems we cannot see. The right to move unseen is quietly vanishing.