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Fashion Editor: Grace Coddington
Ripped-up, deconstructed, reimagined: Punk fashion, celebrated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this month and previewed here, has never lost its charge. Jonathan Van Meter looks back.
If punk were just a kind of music or just a look, just a political statement or just a word that described a time and a moment in just New York or just London—if it didn’t mean so much to so many people in so many disparate places around the world—then it wouldn’t be so alive and kicking. It would simply be nostalgia. And one measure of punk’s relevancy—one of the reasons that it still feels so true—is that it continues to exert such a gravitational pull on the imaginations of different generations of fashion designers, from Yohji Yamamoto and Marc Jacobs to Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte and Christopher Kane. Back to the well they go, again and again, and for some unknowable reason, it always feels modern.
All of this is made visible in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s exhibition “Punk: Chaos to Couture” (May 9 through August 14). As Andrew Bolton, its curator, says, “No other countercultural movement has had a greater influence on fashion.” Indeed, there are more than 30 designers represented in the show, a testament itself to punk’s universal power. “I think there’s still a need to own it by everybody who was involved in one form or another,” says Bolton. “I think people have such an emotional response to punk because it was this complete exorcism of everything that went on before. It was like a brave new world.” Microcosms of that brave new world have been re-created in seven galleries for the exhibition, including the seminal New York City rock club CBGB and Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s King’s Road boutique Seditionaries, in London. Through juxtaposition of original, do-it-yourself-style punk garments from the seventies with haute couture from more recent years, the show lays bare just how literally, how lovingly, punk has been reinterpreted for the runway again and again.
See the red carpet arrivals at the 2013 Met Gala.
Punk, like fashion, has always felt a bit like a competitive sport. No matter how outrageous or offensive or grotesque or radical you or your friends thought you were being, with your torn or splattered whatever, your shaved or spiked something or other, there was always someone more shocking, more mesmerizingly weird than you. There was always that one person who was more committed.
My stomping ground was early-eighties Philadelphia: the Zipperhead boutique on South Street; the Kennel Club on Walnut; Dead Kennedys shows at the TLA. The pecking order went something like this: gawking tourists at the very bottom; then the fashion kids, who were just below all those art students (there are so many art students in Philly); who were followed by the musicians who had actually started a band. And at the tippy top were the truly dedicated superfreaks. Invariably, they were the ones who couldn’t be bothered with trying to look normal, nine to five, because they were unemployable. There was this one guy named Michael Moffa who turned up every Saturday night at the Kennel Club, and I couldn’t wait to get a load of him: He was so tall and terrifying—so incomprehensibly crazy-looking with his layers and layers of black tattered clothing covered in tiny safety pins—that he could clear a room. He had a kind of Edward Scissorhands aspect, minus the gentle demeanor; but his makeup and hair were the work of a true artist, and you could not not stare at this beautiful monster, which, of course, is exactly what he wanted, but which also made him want to stub a cigarette out on your forehead. And wherever Michael Moffa went, “the Death Dolls” followed. That is what my friends and I called these three women whose skin was as powdered white as their dresses were lacy and black and who drifted by us everywhere we went, looking like they had just dug themselves out of a shallow grave. But beautiful! And fabulous!
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By sophomore year of college, I began to take on the coloration of the tribe I was spending so much time with on weekends in Philly. I would drive back to my dorm in the suburbs (with wheat-pasted posters for shows at Love Club that I had carefully peeled off the walls of abandoned buildings), and see how far I could push things on campus: I shaved the left side of my head and shoved a safety pin through my ear; stole a biker jacket off a bar stool at a local pub and made it my own (still have it); nabbed the perfect pair of tartan pants at the Bring and Buy; ripped my clothing to shreds. The result was bittersweet: The alienation (and bullying) my new look inspired was genuinely painful; the handful of people who recognized me as one of them, however, became the best kind of friends—to this day.
After Philly, I wound up in Atlantic City for a few years. Nothing punk about that place, you say? Untrue! The whole city was punk. The glamorous decrepitude! The urban blight! The horror of it all! There was a shock to the system on every street corner, a daily jolt—paddles, clear!—that made you feel electric and alive. And then I met Mortimer. The phrase club kid had not yet been coined to describe a guy like him, but that is what he would have been called had he lived in early-nineties New York. He crossed my path in 1985 in a nightclub on New York Avenue in some cockamamie getup, and I just knew we’d become friends. He did me one better and became my roommate; we lived together for a year in a creaky old brick row house in the Back Bay neighborhood, a place that often looked—on rainy days, from certain angles—like Liverpool.
See our Met Gala after-party slideshow.
Mortimer was that unemployable sort. He availed himself of all the DIY tools of the trade: tartan, trash bags, sleeveless mesh, torn thrift-shop sweaters, black leather—all held together with safety pins. With a can of Aqua Net and a blow-dryer, he would blast his long red curls straight up into what looked like an anvil sitting atop his head. He had the palest, most porcelain skin I have ever seen, and he wore combat boots every day. One time, he turned up at some club dressed as a priest, carrying a Bible, just to fuck with everyone. On another occasion, he went out carrying a hand mirror, which he stared into all night—even while talking to his friends. We started throwing the most insane parties at that crappy house on that spooky bay. One was around the holidays. Mortimer wrapped himself in Christmas lights and remained plugged in to an outlet in the living room, attached to a very long extension cord, greeting people at the door, offering to take coats, fetching cocktails. It was brilliant.
After another long, late party, I woke around noon surrounded by empty beer cans and cigarette butts to find that he had spent hours while I was asleep gluing tiny plastic ants in a long trail that went across the floor of the dining room, into the kitchen, up the side of the cabinets, and across the counter to the drain. There must have been thousands of them. My reaction? Incomprehension, followed by stunned amazement, followed by shrieking delight. That he had spent all night doing this to get precisely the reaction he got goes a long way toward explaining why I admired him. I was always in awe of his total dedication to—his absolute belief in—making a spectacle. There was just something heroic about it.
Punk is like porn: You know it when you see it. Courtney Love appearing high on Letterman, pulling up her shirt and heckling people in the audience, for example. At its best (worst?) it wants to offend your bourgeois sensibilities. It wants to rub your face in something unpleasant. It wants to spit on you. It is infantile and bratty and obscene and totally rude and inappropriate. Punk is a dare: Try to look away.
Click here to see our 2013 Met Gala Best Dressed list.
It doesn’t matter how far away in years or miles you are from the late-seventies big-bang moment of punk in Vivienne Westwood’s London or Patti Smith’s New York; all that matters is context. Mortimer read as punk a decade after that because he chose to dress and behave as he did in Atlantic City, a barrier-island dump that may as well have been Cuba: the land that time forgot, living under the repressive regime of Donald Trump. Either you worked in one of those preposterous casinos or you were impoverished and angry. Today, the realest of punk scenes thrive mostly in places where the young people would probably leave—if only they could: Havana, Baghdad, Yangon. Indeed, one of the most genuinely punk-rock things that’s happened recently is Pussy Riot, the feminist rock collective that formed in Russia in 2011 as a challenge to the legitimacy of Vladimir Putin. Its members stage protest performances in neon-colored balaclavas. Last winter, three of them were arrested while performing on the altar of a church, and charged with “hooliganism”— just an old-fashioned word for punk, really. Two of them remain in prison camps to this day and have become international heroines whose cause has been taken up by no less than that little punk-disco diva herself, the woman otherwise known as Madonna.
What Madonna admires, obviously, is their bravery. But punk does not require polemics—or politics of any kind—to be meaningful. Sometimes it’s just about wearing a dress with a swan on it to the Oscars while pretending to lay an egg on the red carpet. Iconoclasts like Björk, or Marilyn Manson or Leigh Bowery or Lady Gaga, are brave. They are (or were) interested in presenting themselves as animals or monsters to show that there is always another way to look at things. Like punk, they change your eye. And although Gaga’s Little Monsters shtick may strike some as a bit too Care Bears to ever be punk, the fact that she worked herself literally to the bone—her obsession with wheelchairs now all too real—proves that she isn’t kidding about suffering for her art. Actually hurting yourself onstage, after all, is the ne plus ultra of punk.
Take a look at the best 2013 Met Gala beauty moments.
Every now and then I hear myself mutter under my breath, “That is so punk rock.” And it’s not always a compliment. Sometimes it’s an acknowledgment of heroism, sometimes nihilism. Sometimes it’s just me quietly relishing someone’s outlandishly amazing outfit or a reaction to some staggeringly inappropriate public behavior. For example, I have been trying to understand the whole Rihanna/Chris Brown pas de deux these last few years—with no success. But when I looked at them through the lens of punk, their relationship suddenly made perfect sense. They are the Sid and Nancy of our time, intentionally rubbing our faces in something unpleasant, with their tattoos and Twitter feeds. Just to get a rise out of us . . . maybe. Oh, do they offend your bourgeois sensibilities? Well, then, the joke’s on you.