Punk Fashion – You’re Not Going Out Looking Like That!

Below are some quotes from books and magazines of the time that accurately describe the punk fashion look. Most of it is the DIY look of your average punk foot soldier in the street as opposed to the more well-known faces that are so often trotted out and that’s the selection of pictures I’ve grabbed to illustrate. So if you want more on McLaren & Westwood’s fashion and designs look at the features on SEX and Seditionaries that go into more detail. It’s also a look that if you wanted to copy today you could very easily. That was its beauty. Anyone could create a punk look.

BOY shop KIngs Road London from 1977 – nice footage showing a range of punk fashion

Let’s start off with a surprising description

Punk apparel is kinky, slinky, bondage-chic, para-military, a touch of sharp Sixties mod and Fifties bike boy. Accessories are important: dark glasses, chains, studs, spiked leather dog collars, armbands, safety pins (though they’re now considered passe) thin ties-worn – sometimes without shirts-badges, string vests. Hair is worn short and spikey. Colour is bright; pea green, raspberry ink, peroxide blonde, flaming orange. Eye make-up is bold-Cat Woman style.

Trousers are drainpipe, shoes pointy-toe stilettos, or flat plastic sandals, skirts short, stockings black or fishnet.

An essential part of the cult is the clothes; some spend hours in the mirror transforming themselves into Punk Princesses. The neo-Nazi nubile with a swastika cheek is not pro-National Front – It’s just part of the fashion. Punks as it happens are nonpolitical.

It comes from Woman’s Own dated 15th October 1977 and a surprisingly positive and informative feature called Punks And Mothers but was about all punk. The impetus for the feature was that one of their first jobber staff, called Claudia Ellison, was a committed punk out 2 or 3 times a week.

Here’s an excerpt from Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill’s book The Boy Looked At Johnny. The pair were journalists at the NME at the time of the punk. They then wrote a book crucifying punk bands and the people in them. That said the description of punks at the time is pretty spot on!

As opposed to the alluringly lurid press hand-outs featuring fishnet stockings, spiked heels and bondage, these kiddies looked nothing if not nastily neuter in the cold, clammy flesh beneath their revulsion-conscious efforts. Their clothes were elaborately contrived to make the wearer appear as terrifyingly repugnant as possible, alluding to anything that would induce immediate outrage in the eye of the beholder – sore points like sado-masochism, fascism and gender confusion. Hair shorn close to the skull and dyed any colour so long as it didn’t look natural, spiked up with Vaseline; noses, ears, cheeks, lips and other extremities pierced with a plethora of safety-pins, chains and dangling insignia; ripped and torn jumble sale shirts, strangled with a thin tie and mutilated with a predictable graffiti of song titles, perversions or Social Observations; black leather wristbands and dog-collars studded with silver spikes, sometimes with leashes attached; trouser legs tied together; zips, buckles and various scrap metal embellishing leather, vinyl, rubberwear and plastic bin-liners.

And on top, like just another personalised aberration – A Face. black or red glossy man-hole mouth, set in a face of death pallor artifice below eyes of black and white, Frankenstein and Vampirella maquillage.

Their blood, however, flowed not from a perforated neck but from a speed-scorched sinus. For the first time since the Renaissance, amphetamine was being used as a cosmetic in much the same way as certain fourteenth century girls ate the fatal stimulant Belladonna, to make the pupils dilate and give their eyes the fashionable appearance of huge black saucers. The look of amphetamine psychosis became desirable when the mass of new wave disciples fell In love with their mirror-image Innovators The Sex Pistols (amphetamine cognoscenti long before their early celebration of the drug in “Seventeen”), making it necessary for the less adventurous at least to simulate the appearance of sulphate-snorters; cold, piercing stares, exaggerated black and white doe-eyes, blanched make-up, rapid speech and an aura of a capacity for ultra-violent aggression. Julie Burchill & Tony Parsons, The Boy Looked At Johnny

The below comes from one of the first of sociological youth subculture books and published in 1979. The book is Subculture: The Meaning Of Style by Dick Hebdige, and though I have a dislike of these intellectual books that suck all the joy and love from their subject, Dick’s book is actually pretty good. I think that’s because it’s close in time frame to its subject as opposed to a more revisionist view. Good description of punk fashion.

Although it was often directly offensive (T-shirts covered in swear words) and threatening (terrorist/guerilla outfits) punk style was defined principally through the violence of its ‘cut ups’. Like Duchamp’s ‘ready mades’ — manufactured objects which qualified as art because he chose to call them such, the most unremarkable and inappropriate items — a pin, a plastic clothes peg, a television component, a razor blade, a tampon — could be brought within the province of punk (un)fashion. Anything within or without reason could be turned into part of what Vivien Westwood called ‘confrontation dressing’ so long as the rupture be-tween ‘natural’ and constructed context was clearly visible (i.e. the rule would seem to be: if the cap doesn’t fit, wear it).

Objects borrowed from the most sordid of contexts found a place in the punks’ ensembles: lavatory chains were draped in graceful arcs across chests encased in plastic bin-liners. Safety pins were taken out of their domestic ‘utility’ con-text and worn as gruesome ornaments through the cheek, ear or lip. ‘Cheap’ trashy fabrics (PVC, plastic, lurex, etc.) in vulgar designs (e.g. mock leopard skin) and ‘nasty’ colours, long discarded by the quality end of the fashion industry as obsolete kitsch, were salvaged by the punks and turned into garments (fly boy drainpipes, ‘common’ mini-skirts) which offered self-conscious commentaries on the notions of modernity and taste.

Conventional ideas of prettiness were jettisoned along with the traditional feminine lore of cosmetics. Contrary to the advice of every woman’s magazine, make-up for both boys and girls was worn to be seen. Faces became abstract portraits: sharply observed and meticulously executed studies in alienation. Hair was obviously dyed (hay yellow, jet black, or bright orange with tufts of green or bleached in question marks), and T-shirts and trousers told the story of their own construction with multiple zips and outside scams clearly dis-played. Similarly, fragments of school uniform (white bri-nylon shirts, school ties) were symbolically defiled (the shirts covered in graffiti, or fake blood; the ties left undone) and juxtaposed against leather drains or shocking pink mohair tops.

The perverse and the abnormal were valued intrinsically. In particular, the illicit iconography of sexual fetishism was used to predictable effect. Rapist masks and rubber wear, leather bodices and fishnet stockings, implausibly pointed stiletto heeled shoes, the whole paraphernalia of bondage — the belts, straps and chains — were exhumed from the boudoir, closet and the pornographic film and placed on the street where they retained their for-bidden connotations. Some young punks even donned the dirty raincoat — that most prosaic symbol of sexual ‘kinkiness’ — and hence expressed their deviance in suitably proletarian terms.

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