Safety Suit
“Judging by the number of homicides, we Westerners now live in the safest time in history. But people don’t feel that way. We live in peace but we somehow feel at war,” says Mies Loogman. To raise awareness of the discrepancy between real and perceived safety, and the effect of the measures we take to protect ourselves, she has created the Safety Suit. Designed to highlight the actual highest risk in 2017, that of extreme weather events, the suit also acts as a sobering counter message to the current dominance of terrorist threats in our newsfeed. It makes us reconsider what being “safe” means in our world.
We live in a society that tries to gain 100% safety by precluding risks as much as possible, but somehow we don’t always invest the most in precluding the actual highest risk. If we invest so much in safety from violence, then why not as much or more in environmental safety that is a higher risk with a bigger impact? The Safety Suit brings the message across in a playful way by balancing the design on the border of realistic. It functions as a gimmick but could be a want-to-wear item at the same time. Reality is mixed with a touch of humour to communicate with the spectators.
