Today Supreme released its capsule collection in collaboration with Aeon Flux, an animated television series created by Peter Chung. The collection consists of a Varsity Jacket, a sweater, a hoodie, a soccer jersey, T-shirts and shorts, all featuring the evocative graphics from the series.
I decided to take the ball and try to tell a little bit about what Aeon Flux is and why it was a product that defined an incredible aesthetic as well as being a unique experimentation.
Aeon Flux is an American animated series of avant-garde, scientific and adventure aired for the first time as a series of short films within the broadcast of MTV Liquid Television on November 30, 1991. Originally aired at night and conceived exclusively for an adult audience, it was a sort of agglomeration of short experimental animations (6 to be exact) that were immediately received as an absolute innovation, not only from a narrative and visual point of view but also for its subversive approach to the very concept of serial animation. In 1992 the first 5 stand-alone episodes were created, followed in 1995 by a full season of 10 episodes. The plot of each episode had as its characteristic elements science fiction sociology, biopunk, allegory, dystopia, espionage, psychology, visual postmodernism, psychedelic imagery and gnostic symbolism.
Set in the year 7698, Aeon Flux chronicles a bizarre dystopian future populated by mutant creatures, clones, and robots in the aftermath of an environmental disaster that has nearly wiped out the global population except for two border towns Monica and Bregna separated by a wall in what was once Eastern Europe. This is where the adventures of a young Monica secret agent named Aeon Flux take place: beautiful, super sexy, skilled in espionage, a trained assassin and extremely agile. Her main mission is to infiltrate and destroy the strongholds of Bregna, dominated by her arch enemy and nemesis, as well as occasional lover, Trevor Goodchild, the technocratic dictator of Bregna.
The two cities are constantly engaged in a futile war for ideological supremacy and, while the city of Monica represents a dynamic, anarchic and nihilistic society where rules do not exist, Bregna is the ultimate expression of an Orwellian centralized and scientifically planned police state.
Aeon Flux subverts in an extreme way all the conventions related to the heroic act, exasperating its ambiguities. The representations of violence, sex, domination, fetishism and death are evident and unrestrained, within the series: ”Working in Hollywood, things tend to get polarized into either being pure escapism or something didactic. I’m not interested in doing either one of those. ’m interested in getting the viewer to shift his mind into thinking in a new way. That’s really what this show is about.”, Chung said.
A full-blown celebration by Supreme, for what remains an absolute cult animated series that vividly marked the imagination of all who were lucky enough to see it.
