“Fashion has lost its edge,” said curator Andrew Bolton at a preview of the Met’s upcoming 2013 Punk: Chaos to Couture exhibition yesterday morning. The statement was in response to a query about why the Met chose to explore the rebellious seventies subculture at this particular time. “Punks were so brave and noble. I just think fashion needs an injection of that at the moment,” the curator told Style.com. If the garments that joined Bolton on the podium during his introduction to the exhibition (looks from McQueen, Chanel, and Rodarte among them) were any indication, punk has been fighting its way into fashion for quite some time—since Zandra Rhodes’s slash- and safety-pin-infused 1977 “Conceptual Chic” collection, to be exact. The new show, explained Bolton, is a prequel to the Met’s 2006 Anglomania and will examine punk as an aesthetic, rather than an attitude. “Punk smashed every convention,” he said. “It prized originality, authenticity, and individualism.” While counterintuitive, these qualities, he said, put punk on the same, or at least a very similar, plane as couture.
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