This brief essay was originally written to supplement a for-sale listing on Grailed and Facebook for a "Bloodwound" button-up shirt from Dior Homme's Spring/Summer 2002 collection. Click or tap an image to enlarge.¹
Possibly the most beloved and recognizable garment of Hedi Slimane’s career, this shirt was the centerpiece of Dior Homme’s Spring / Summer 2002 collection, “Boys Don’t Cry.” Officially produced as a white button-up only in this sleeveless version, the 'bloodwound' has been the inspiration for countless knock-offs and later designs by Dior and Hedi himself.²
Spring/Summer 2002 begins the Dior Homme narrative from which elongated skinny jeans, embellished military garb, and high-heeled boots follow. Bridging the gap from Slimane's early work at Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche, SS02 builds upon and perfects Hedi’s reimagining of men’s formalwear. Suiting has always been the essence of all things Hedi; his blazers pioneered the slim-shouldered, high armhole cut that is ubiquitous today. Spring ’02 presents Hedi’s immaculate new approach to menswear tailoring in its most distilled form. Unlike the more complex and evolved Dior Homme collections that would follow, the season focuses on this now canonized suit silhouette, showcasing it in full glory, look after look, with bright white light beaming onto the runway. Arguably the tightest Hedi collection in focus, SS02 employs a strict color palette and doesn’t attempt any form of streetwear, allowing for only one peculiar design motif: the bloodwound.
With the bloodwound motif, repeated across many of the runway looks, Hedi cues the greater significance of his style and design. Suddenly the tight shoulders, lanky models, and perfectly messed hairstyles all make sense. SS02’s models wear a bleeding heart, one rendered with complexity and all but hidden by the conventions of formalwear. Hedi is clothing the young, emotional male, the slender figure fashion has always tried to mask or ignore. Gone is the traditional style of padding shoulders and aggrandizing masculinity; for the first time on the runway, the skinny punk boy’s form is being celebrated. "Boys Don’t Cry” tears down the conventional image of a strong, powerful, broad-shouldered man and invokes the beauty in male vulnerably.
The design itself was, like much of Hedi’s work, inspired by punk music. The blood wound concept can be traced to a photo of punk band Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers, which depicts the bandmembers in white button-up shirts with blood stains over their hearts. Slimane’s Dior adaptation was exhibited alongside the photo in the Metropolitan Museum’s successful spring 2013 exhibition “Punk: Chaos to Couture,” which doubled as 2013’s Met Gala theme.³
In order to create the iconic blood stain embroidery, Dior employed Maison Lesage, a french atelier which has specialized in couture embroidery for almost 100 years. Using almost exactly the same methods as when the house was founded in 1924, Lesage artisans stitch all designs by hand. Lesage’s employees are trained for five to ten years before joining the workshop’s team of master embroiderers.⁴ Generally reserved for grand runway dresses for houses such as Chanel and Dior, Lesage embroidery is rare on a production piece.
Production numbers for this shirt were obviously very, very low, and Hedi Slimane fans have been creating knock-offs since the shirt’s release over a decade ago. A quick google search reveals almost entirely photos of replicas - few know that the blood wound was done on a military-style cotton thicker than standard Dior shirts, with a narrow, rigid collar intended to be paired with SS02’s signature skinny black ties. The white button-up version was never made with sleeves.²
This authentic example is in very good condition... the essay goes on into description of my particular example listed up for sale.
The shirt sold within minutes of posting.
¹ Unfortunately, due to copyright battles, the full SS02 runway show is no longer easily accessible online, but you can view additional stills of the shirt here .
² Exactly how many variations of the bloodwound exist is heavily contested. Collectors who purchased from the Dior flagship in 2002 have told me that only the white sleeveless and black long/three-quarter sleeve versions of the red embroidered button-up were available for purchase at retail. These are the only versions I have seen, in photos or in person. But since writing this, other collectors have come to me claiming there were many variations available, and that a white button-up with sleeves - the silhouette most common with replicas and fakes, not shown on the runway - was indeed made by Dior in extremely small numbers. This may be true, but I am yet to see even a photo of an authentic example; all matching these characteristics in Google searches and across marketplaces and Pinterest are clearly fake.
⁴ Click here to see inside Lesage, courtesy of The Business of Fashion.