Thriving- Jaylynn Gomez

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PUNK FASHION

Table of contents

1970s

Vivienne Westwood, Body Piercing

What was punk fashion in the early days of the 1970’s? by admin December 2022

Grunges Influence on Fashion

Punk, Grunge and Goth

Everything you need in your closet

Fashion that will reinvent you

Today everyone knows what punk fashion is, but in 1970 it didn’t exist.  Punk first emerged in the mid-1970s in London as an anarchic and aggressive movement.  About 200 young people defined themselves as an anti-fashion urban youth street culture.  Closely aligned was a music movement that took the name punk.

Anti Fashion -Torn Fashion Becomes Punk Fashion

The clothes suited the lifestyle of those with limited cash due to unemployment and the general low-income school leavers or students often experience. Punks cut up

old clothes from charity and thrift shops, destroyed the fabric, and refashioned outfits in a manner then thought of a crude construction technique, making garments designed to attract attention. It deconstructed garments into new forms. Whilst torn fabrics, frayed edges and defaced prints are now considered normal in the 21st century, in the 1970s it shocked many people, because it had never been seen before. Until then fabric had been treated as a material to keep as pristine, new looking and beautiful as possible. Trousers were deliberately torn to reveal laddered tights and dirty legs.  They were worn with heavy Doc Martens footwear, a utilitarian, practical traffic meter maid type of footwear in that era, not seen on many young women until then.  Safety pins and chains held bits of fabric together.  Neck chains were made from padlocks and chain and even razor blades were used as pendants. The

latter emerged as a mainstream fashion status symbols a few years later when worked in gold.

Punks Fashion History

Vivienne Westwood and the Postmodern Legacy of Punk Style

Self Mutilation and Body Piercings

Body piercing was done in parts other than the usual accepted placement in the ear lobe. The placement of studs and pins in facial body parts such as eyebrows and cheeks, noses or lips for the masses was then quite unusual even after the freedom of the 1960s. Although it is known that Edwardian ladies used to have rings inserted into their nipples to make their breasts stand up more pertly, this was not a usual practice among the

masses of the 1960s and 70s.  Self-mutilation, rejection of prettiness, and body piercing were not a norm then.  The chosen placement of body jewelry and tattoos of the new punks was deliberately intended to offend the more conventional members of society.  Punk fashion was also unisex and men began to spot facial jewelry.  What we take as a normal strand of fashion today was all quite unusual back then. body piercing in 1970s punk fashion. Body piercing seems every day now in the 21st century. It entered mainstream fash-

ion quite rapidly, beginning with the three stud earlobe, progressing to the whole ear outline embedded with ear studs. This was followed by Goths sporting nose studs in the early 80s.  Then in the 1990s belly, tongue and genital piercings all gathered a following among the masses. Twenty-five or thirty years ago it was true anti-fashion and anti-establishment, but now it is so every day that not even great grandmothers titter. Thirty years after Punk emerged as a rebellious youth-oriented fashion many grandmothers and great grandmothers sport a tattoo or piercing somewhere on their body.

Bondage in Early Punk Fashion

Black leather, studs, chains, mufti fabrics, greyed sweated out black T-shirts, bondage animal print bum flaps and leg straps epitomize some of the looks that immediately spring to mind when thinking of the early punks.  What was then thought to be blatant and obvious sexual references in written form, on dyed and destroyed vests

Nana from Nana by Ai Yazawa

have again become a norm and the masses happily don Tshirts emblazoned with fcuk or crave a graffiti print covered Louis Vuitton bag, both fashions very much accepted because of the path set by the early punk movement.

Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren Open Seditionaries Shop

Punk as a style succeeded even more when Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren formerly Malcolm Edwards, publicized the ideas through their joint design ventures.  McLaren launched the ‘Sex Pistols’ Punk music group. The punk group wore clothes from a shop called ‘Sex’ that Vivienne Westwood and her partner Malcolm McLaren opened on the Kings Road, London.  They sold leather and rubber fetish goods, especially bondage trousers.  Later the shop was renamed Seditionaries. Not long after, Westwood launched alone renaming the same shop as ‘World’s End’.  Westwood was soon translating her ideas into the fresher Pirate and Romantic looks. The collections were innovative, but were spoken of as unwearable, yet so often oth-

er designers picked up on ideas she had instigated and soon started another new trend. In later years as her talent developed, her moods and methods changed.  She mastered tailoring techniques combined with flair, frivolity and sexuality creating new looks that others copied.  With a long stream of firsts behind her, Vivienne Westwood is now considered to be one of the most innovative designers of the 20th century.

Loads of Hair or No Hair

Punk hair is worthy of mention - A focal point of the punk look was the hair which was spiked as high as possible into a Mohican hairstyle by a variety of means including sugar and water solutions, soaping, gelatine, PVA glue, hair sprays, and hair gel. It was big hair before the 80s big hair became everyday.  Often it was colored pink or green with food dyes. It was intended to startle the onlooker and attract attention.  Over bleaching was common and also became deliberate as home methods were initially employed to achieve hitherto unknown effects.

An alternative look was to shave areas of the scalp.  Both sexes did this. They intended to make themselves look intimidating.  Hair was sometimes dyed jet black or bleached white blonde.  Eyes were emphasized with black and sometimes cat- eye makeup and vampire-like lips drew more attention to the face.

Punk Gets Refined - Punk Chic From

Zandra Rhodes

Around 1977, Zandra Rhodes the British dress designer took elements of the punk style and used it in her collections making refined and more elegant versions in bright colors which were more acceptable to the rich and famous.

Westwood (born 1941) and the Postmodern Legacy of Punk Style

By Shannon Price

October 2004

Vivienne Westwood is often cited as punk’s creator, but the complex genesis of punk is also found in England’s depressed economic and sociopolitical conditions of the mid-1970s. Punk was as much a youthful reaction against older generations, considered oppressive and outdated, as a product of the newly recognized and influential youth culture. Creative and entrepreneurial people, such as Westwood, often contribute to an aesthetic that brings a subcultural style to the forefront of fashion. However, it would be simplistic to claim, as many have, that Westwood and her one-time partner Malcolm McLaren were uniquely responsible for the visual construction of punk in the mid-1970s, though much of their work captured and commodified the energy and iconoclastic tendencies of the movement.

The New York Effect

In the early 1970s, the socioeconomics of New York City were no better than London’s. Local rock groups were reinventing music and style in protest against what had become perceived as the star-centered, showy, and elitist mentality of ’60s super-groups such as the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. These local bands, such as the

VIVIENNE WESTWOOD WESTWOOD

New York Dolls and performer Richard Hell, were breaking down barriers at the infamous proto-punk club, Max’s. Hell was well known for his nihilistic lyrics and wearing of selfstyled ripped T-shirts bearing slogans like “Please Kill Me.” The original fanzine of the era, PUNK, was published in New York City and is credited with the first use of the term. Malcolm McLaren, Westwood’s boyfriend and “partner in crime,” was living in New York during this time and briefly managed the New York Dolls. According to punk lore, McLaren took this radical New York aesthetic back to London,

where he opened the SEX clothing shop with Westwood and managed the Sex Pistols, creating a media frenzy and a prosperous symbiotic relationship between music and fashion that effectively set the tone of popular culture for decades to come.

Anarchy in the U.K.

VIVIENNE WESTWOOD

Westwood, a former schoolteacher, was the seamstress in the SEX shop partnership with McLaren and made manifest their combined punk vision through her creations. Westwood designed both her and McLaren’s clothing before they opened their first store, Let It Rock, in 1971. Let It Rock catered to the “Teddy Boy” subculture, which was a 1950s

revival look. In 1972, they renamed the store Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, and changed the focus to emphasize the emergence of the Marlon Brando-influenced rocker/biker style that was popular at the time. In 1974, they again changed the name of the shop to reflect McLaren’s new shock tactics, this time to SEX, where they sold S&M (sado-masochistic) inspired clothing, met the Sex Pistols, and added their punk line, Seditionaries,4 in 1976.5 SEX was the center of the punk fashion scene and many young punks hung out, worked, or bought clothes there when they could afford them. Shrewd entrepreneurs, Westwood and McLaren were instrumental in defining and marketing the punk look at the precise moment that it was taking the streets of London by storm.

VIVIENNE WESTWOOD VIVIENNE WESTWOOD

VIVIENNE WESTWOOD

Rotten, Vicious Fashion

Childhood friends Johnny Rotte n and Sid Vicious claim names that evoke the true essence of punk. The Sex Pistols, their short-lived and infamous band, changed the face of music and gave voice to a disenfranchised generation. The Sex Pistols were working-class, antagonistic, innovative teenagers turned “punk” before it had a name. The clothing popularized by the Sex Pistols could be seen as a reaction

against, as well as the culmination of, a long line of proscribed postwar British subcultural styles, including mods, skinheads, rastas, and rudies. The Sex Pistols needed a manager to guide them and McLaren and Westwood needed an outlet for their ideas, both fashionable and political. To this day, there is much debate about whether McLaren was the architect of punk ideology. A known Situationist,7 McLaren supposedly created the Sex Pistols solely as a marketing tool for the SEX shop, but singer Johnny Rotten disputes this, emphasizing that the band existed prior to the collaboration with Westwood and McLaren but were used as models for the ideal punk look through their stage clothes often supplied by SEX.

Deconstructing Punk

Punk was trash culture gone avant-garde and/or the avant-garde gone trash, and just as Dada had tried to destroy the institution of art, so the punks seemed bent on destroying the very institution of fashion. Philosopher Jacques Derrida’s concept of “deconstruction,” a term used to describe the process of uncovering the multiplicity of meanings in text, has been used to analyze everything from modern art to architecture. As applied to fashion, deconstruction has come to imply a decoding of both meaning and designer intent, as well as a descriptive term for certain structural characteristics.

Grunge’s Influence on Fashion

By Shannon Bell Price

The term “grunge” is used to define a specific moment in twentieth-century music and fashion. Hailing from the northwest United States in the 1980s, grunge went on to have global implications for alternative bands and do-it-yourself (DIY) dressing. While grunge music and style were absorbed by a large youth following, its status as a self-conscious subculture is debatable. People who listened to grunge music did not refer to themselves as “grungers” in the same way as “punks” or “hippies.” However, like these subcultures, grunge was co-opted by the music and fashion industries through its promotion by the media.

Grunge Music

The word “grunge” dates from 1972, but did

not enter popular terminology until the birth of the Seattle sound, a mix of heavy-metal, punk, and good old-fashioned rock and roll, in the late 1980s. Many musicians associated with grunge credit their exposure to early punk bands as one of their most important influences.Like San Francisco in the 1960s, Seattle in the 1980s was a breeding ground for music that spoke to its youth. The independent record label Sub Pop recorded many of the Seattle bands inexpensively and was partly responsible for their garage sound. Many of these bands went on to receive international acclaim and major record label representation, most notably The Melvins, Mudhoney, Green River, Soundgarden, Malfunkshun, TAD, and

ment, disconnectedness, loneliness, frustration-and perhaps was an unintentional movement of sorts. There does not appear to have been a common grunge goal, such as punk’s “anarchy” or the hippies’ “peace.” Despite this lack of unifying intentionality, grunge gave voice to a bored, lost, emotionally neglected, post-punk generation-Generation X.

Grunge Fashion

Nirvana. Nirvana’s second album, Never-mind, was released in 1991, making Nirvana the first of this growing scene to go multiplatinum and Kurt Cobain, Nirvana’s lead singer, the reluctant voice of his generation.

(Sub)Cultural Context

The youth movements most often associated and compared to grunge-hippie and punk-were driven both by music and politics. Punks and hippies used music and fashion to make strong statements about the world and are often referred to as “movements” due to this political component. While the youth of 1980s Seattle were aware of politics, grunge was fueled more by self-expression-sadness, disenchant-

If punk’s antifashion stance can be interpreted as “against fashion,” then that of grunge can be seen as “nonfashion.” The grunge youth, born of hippies and raised on punk, reinterpreted these components through their own post-hippie, post-punk,

West Coast aesthetic. Grunge was essentially a slovenly, thoughtless, uncoordinated look, but with an edge. Iconic items for men and women were ripped and faded jeans, flannel shirts or wool Pendletons layered over dirty T-shirts with outdated logos, and black combat-style boots such as Dr. Martens. Because the temperature in Seattle can swing by 20 degrees in the same day, it is convenient to have a wool long-sleeved button-down shirt that can be easily removed and tied around one’s waist. The style for plaid flannel shirts and wool Pendletons is regional, having been a longtime staple for local lumberjacks and logging-industry employees-it was less a

fashion choice than a utilitarian necessity. The low-budget antimaterialist philosophy brought on by the recession made shopping at thrift stores and army surplus outlets common, adding various elements to the grunge sartorial lexicon, including beanies for warmth and unkempt hair, long underwear worn under shorts (in defiance of the changeable weather), and cargo pants. Thrift-store finds, such as vintage floral-print dresses and baby-doll nightgowns, were worn with over-sized sweaters and holey cardigans. Grunge was dressing down at its most extreme, taking casualness and comfort dressing to an entirely new level.

Grunge Chic

The first mention of grunge in the fashion industry was in Women’s Wear Daily on 17 August 1992: “Three hot looks-Rave, Hip Hop and Grunge-have hit the street and stores here, each spawned by the music that’s popular among the under-21 set.” The style that had begun on the streets of Seattle had finally hit New York and was heading across the Atlantic. Later that same year, Grace Coddington (editor) and Steven Meisel (fashion photographer) did an eight-page article and layout for Vogue with the help of a Sub Pop cofounder and owner Jonathan Poneman: