PUNK SOIGNEE

Hearing In the Hammersmith Palais on the radio last week sent me sifting through old photographs of The Clash online, which made me understand how terrifically glamorous they were. Punk valued the damaged, the distorted,and the broken-down, and The Clash, at first glance, fit the bill. Their sound was aggressive, their posture trenchant. They dressed in zippered jackets and combat boots, and had bad teeth and madman haircuts. But, even in the early days, they were always put-together, brilliantly dressed and coiffed. They achieved a kind of punk soignée.

Paul Simonon, the band’s bassist, was a painter working at Vivienne Westwood’s boutique Sex when guitarist Mick Jones recruited him, largely because of his style. Simonon played a key role in outfitting the band, and guiding photo and stage set designs. At first the musicians sported skinny jackets and ties, and shirts with hand-stenciled slogans and Pollock-style paint splatters. Later they wore police and military uniforms, zoot suits, ranger hats, gasoline attendant shirts, neckerchiefs, and string ties. Much of the boldness and detail in their dress is lost in photographs and video, which are shot mostly in grainy black and white, and in shadowy tour buses, dressing rooms, and concert halls.

The band hit a sartorial peak when they opened for The Who at Shea Stadium in 1982. Simonon wore camouflage pants, a camel topcoat, and a Mets cap, with walnut-sized silver rings across his knuckles. Jones wore a cherry red parachute jumpsuit with a green Che Guevara beret. Frontman Joe Strummer wore contrasting camouflage prints and a coonskin cap. All of them sported shining eight-hole Doc Martens and, in some photographs, carried baseball bats like walking sticks. They don’t look like a punk band, and they don’t look like newly-minted rock stars either. They look like art students dressed for Halloween.

Photograph by Neal Preston. The Clash backstage at Shea Stadium, October 13, 1982.

November 15, 2015 by Nalina Moses

Punk fashion is hard to do. Fashion exists to make boys and girls look pretty, and punk requires a fundamental not-wanting-to-be-pretty. No figure illustrates this better than singer Siouxsie Sioux. In black-and-white photographs of her from the 1970’s and 80’s, before she started working with professional stylists and makeup artists, it's clear that she’s a classic English beauty, slender-hipped and fine-boned, and also that she’s willing to throw that beauty, and the privilege it confers, away. She dyes her hair ink black, then shears it close to her skull or teases it freakishly high. She paints her eyes with great black bat wings. She wears trashy slip dresses that expose her breasts, and slim leather trousers and squarish t-shirts that make her look like an adolescent boy. There’s something about her willingness during these years to make herself conventionally unattractive in order to make a statement (I’m not like you, I’m not a lady, I’m pissed-off) that is punk.

Because womens’ identities are, traditionally, so wound up in their looks, punk fashion might be harder for women to do than for men. Courtney Love did it, thrillingly, in the beginning, with bad skin, bad makeup, bad dye jobs, and bad clothes. Debbie Harry never did it but has always carried herself with an artsy disdain, an unattainability, that is, if not punk, impressively defiant. Madonna has wanted to do it all along, very badly, but has, really, never done it. At this year's Costume Institute gala, the night before Punk opened to the public, Madge walked the red carpet pantless, in a studded plaid jacket over fishnets, with black leather gloves, a bobbed black wig, and silent movie star makeup. She was trying to be punk but she was, still, pretty.

Siouxsie Sioux, 1976. By Sheila Rock.

June 04, 2013 by Nalina Moses

Punk: Chaos to Couture is smaller sized and scaled than previous Met Costume Institute exhibits like Anglomania and Savage Beauty, and also less richly contextualized than those shows, which positioned punk as an eruption of eccentric personal vision through the elaborate stratifications of British culture. Instead Chaos to Couture shows us exactly what it promises, how fashion rises in the street and works its way onto the runways. The first gallery holds racks of t-shirts and trousers from Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s legendary 1970’s London boutique Sex, all obliterated (“deconstructed” is too gentle a word) with rips, cuts, safety pins, and comically tasteless sexual and anti-royalist graphics. The following galleries show proper fashion, including a tweed Chanel suit embellished with hand-trimmed holes, a Versace gown whose whiplash panels are held together by over-sized gold safety pins, and a sagging, striped, open-weave, knit dress from Rodarte. The “chaos” to “couture” comparison doesn’t serve the couture well. Next to the real things – unwashed, ill-fitting, falling-to-threads, off-the-rack clothing – the legitimate fashions feel lifeless.

Part of this might be the displays, which show all the clothes on the Met’s standard, white, Cristy-Turlington-faced mannequins, in ladylike poses lifted high on platforms. One of the galleries is decorated to resemble the bowels of a Lower East Side club, with simulated cracked cement block walls painted matte black. Why didn’t the curators blow holes through the walls? Or dismember the mannequins? Or pump stale cigarette smoke through the rooms? Another part of it is curatorial. Most of high fashions have been selected for punk motifs rather than aesthetic kinship. Of the "couture" on display, only the Junya Watanabe and Commes des Garcons garments feel authentically punk, undoing the body’s natural graces with monstrous appendages and asymmetries that are just as arresting and convulsive as multiple piercings, black-and-white face makeup, gravity-defying hairdos, and all-over tattoos. The trio of black Alexander McQueen dresses on display, tailored, exquisitely, from synthetics that emulate bubble wrap and garbage bags, are not punk; they are classical in their proportions and repose. Why didn’t the Met include dresses from McQueen’s Highland Rape collection, which obscured the face with feathers and veils while uncovering the stomach, breast and thigh, giving the women wearing them a disfiguring, disquieting power? It’s this unease that’s deeply punk.

May 29, 2013 by Nalina Moses