kathryn simon / culture & couture
England Is Dreaming
(images and video's follow)
Do I start
where it ends in a courtroom at 100 Center Street in lower Manhattan? Its early morning; in moments the courtroom
is packed with reporters and people lots of them, Sid Viscous is being arraigned
for the death, the murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. The Queen is dead.
Long live the Queen.
It started
with a rumble, things going awry on purpose. Boredom, dissatisfaction, heroin,
and anarchy, Vivienne Westwood meets Malcolm McLaren in London. It’s the
beginning of a truly explosive and creative union. SEX, the store is born, after several
incarnations (Too young To Die Too Fast To Live, etc.). Taking its initial
fashion cues from 'Teddy Boy' clothing, the politics of the Situationists and eventually
materials, ideas stolen from sex trade clothing and what was left of the
Dadaists concepts and happenings in World's End on the dying Kings Road.
(Situationists: look at chapter in ‘Postmodern Turn’ on Guy Debord & the
Situationists, SI International which describes various art & political
movements that aggravated and supported the Punk movement)
First it’s
only the Teds who get it. They need a place to buy their clothes, which until
now had all to be all hand tailored not available off the rack. Malcolm
smelling an opportunity to make some money and have his fun set about copying
the clothing and stocking the store until he had the whole lot of them coming
down there to get their gear, get dressed with a few girlie magazines in the
display cases.
Then they
switched fashion ideologies for more political ones and Malcolm launched the
Sex Pistols. There were nearly riots at the store.
Eventually
as Vivienne and Malcolm came into their own creatively and were seeking the
next step. Malcolm's fascinations became their starting point. The fetishes of
the sex trade, rubber clothes, bondage, etc. became that inspiration as well as
some nostalgic leftist habits. Its
glaring position on the 'cultured' food chain (not) and its tattooed life
carried the mantle for the whole underside of society luring him and Vivienne
onward. They began experimenting with rubber and safety pins, chains and other
materials to create clothing you were meant to wear on the streets, liberating
materials, a culture to the outside world.
The store
was reborn again this time christened SEX. Backed by the same political
manifesto's that had started Malcolm off, those of anarchy and revolution. A
group of people, young kids sensing something was happening had begun hanging
out in the store.
Malcolm
had been in New York. He had seen and hung out with Lenny Kaye, The New York
Dolls, and The Ramones. Let’s just say he knew his way around the Chelsea Hotel
and New York’s music scene. He saw a great opportunity in inventing a band to promote
the clothing. Johnny Rotten's persistence about backing him, started Malcolm
off, he began interviewing for a band that would be the vehicle to fit his
profile, look and attitude…a band that wouldn't be afraid of the pranks he had
in store for them...the road to total anarchy is paved with the greatest
intentions and PRANKS. The Sex Pistols, Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, Bow Wow Wow
were a few of his inventions. In New York, Malcolm put himself into the energy
he saw and what he felt from these bands.
He wanted to mainline this passion, this performance of destruction and
rupture, like drugs, the speed, and the look.
At the same time Blondie and Patti Smith were hitting the scene in New
York at Max’s Kansas City and at CBGB’s.
Things
start to heat up, and finally out of the lethargy of the dead 70’s, failed 60's
dreams, Punk explodes on the scene. It was finally everything that was
marginal, rejected, thrown away, because it didn’t fit, wasn’t pretty, was an
outcast. This was a vital source of what Punk was about. To be a punk was a
word for someone who was a misfit. The Punk thing was about not fitting and not
feeling comfortable in your skin, and anger at all the lies that a complacent
culture breeds to ensure its continuance. A rage against the standards that
were excluding and outmoded.
It
happened quickly and by 1979 Sid was dead and Punk was undeniably everywhere.
Jean Paul
Gaultier’s first show was everything that was marginal, ugly, and purposefully
ungainly. It reflected the mood in the air. It took years for Gaultier to move
away from this strong influence in his fashion design (has he?). It was amusing
to watch the bigger designer houses like Anne Klein try to use what was
happening (Punk) as a design influence. In their hands, it got even uglier, and
clumsier as the meaning was further separated from its intention. Really
foreign. Not understanding the concept of what was going on within this ‘anti
aesthetic’ they attempted unsuccessfully to make this into another market
‘trend’ (comodification) without even attempting to understand the drum beat.
In the US
the scene on St. Marks started again after years of being all but forgotten,
like skid row, to become again the focus of the clubs and bars. The whole club
scene in New York opened up again The Pyramid, The Mudd, St. Marks Bar, Orlin,
Kiev, CBGB’s, etc. Clubs would open overnight for a weekend or within a club at
a designated hour; Berlin (with more locations than you could keep up with),
The Continental, A.M./P.M., The Peppermint Lounge. Rudolf ruled the night with
his various clubs including Danceateria, his constant companion Diane Brill and
all the people on the scene with Annie Flanders headed over to St. Marks Place
because she felt the stirrings of something beginning to awaken. Details
magazine (it’s first incarnation) the brainchild of Annie Flanders (formally of
the SoHo News) was born. The Bowlmor Bowling lanes opened, New York sprang to
life again.
The following list are all links some are embedded:
The following list are all links some are embedded:
Sex Pistolshttp://youtu.be/RLdd6CxtNQo
New Wave: Mugler/Montana
Danceteriahttp://youtu.be/jGHWNvNiAqc
Richard Hell / Jim Carroll / MaryAnn Faithful GANG OF SOULS
Patti Smith Tom Verlaine
VERSACE 1991
Richard Hell Poet
Jennifer Smith/ CODE MESA 1987 You were here when the world began
Punk Without the Down and Dirty
Julie Glassberg for International Herald Tribune
Punk styles of the 1970s at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Punk: Chaos to Couture" exhibit. More Photos »
By SUZY MENKES
Published: May 6, 2013
NEW YORK — Ah! Sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll. Where would the anarchic world of punk be without them?
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In much the same state as the sanitized and bloodless version of punk’s origins and influence delivered by the Costume Institute at theMetropolitan Museum of Art in the name of fashion.
The blasting music catches the pounding energy that ought to be at the heart of “Punk: Chaos to Couture,” which opens to the public Thursday and runs through Aug. 14. But the only moment the show gets faintly down and dirty is in the re-creation of grimy and gritty toilets of the 1970s East Village club CBGB. Even that comes minus any tawdry signs of vomiting or drug-taking (or any reference to Marcel Duchamp).
The entire exhibition ignores any negative aspects of punk like swastikas or drugs — unless you count the Ramones singing “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue.”
Even the hair — that leitmotif of the period as a rejection of hanging hippie tresses — comes through as identical frizzy wigs, like uninspired Afros.
How could Andrew Bolton, the brilliant and cerebral museum curator, whose blockbuster shows have included the Alexander McQueen retrospective and last year’s fusion of Elsa Schiaparelli with Miuccia Prada, have made punk seem so dull?
Mr. Bolton said that he did not want to “parody” the spikes and mohawks, and gave those directions to the exhibition’s hairstylist Guido Palau. Yet the fantastical hairdos and extraordinary makeup, requiring hours of artistic imagination, were emblematic of defiant, anarchic, rebellious individuals kicking against the boredom of being no-hopers. The hair was as significant as the do-it-yourself clothing.
And why wouldn’t Mr. Bolton, given his intelligent and intellectual foreword to the accompanying book, have linked that nihilistic spirit of London’s political and social crisis in the 1970s to other 20th-century movements like Dada?
“Everyone has an opinion about punk,” said Mr. Bolton as he prepared for the opening gala on Monday night. “It was difficult to keep my thoughts and my focus when it means so much to so many different people who respond to it emotionally.”
He also emphasized that the focus of the exhibition is the enduring influence of the low-down punk on high fashion.
The show opens with Richard Hell, the American luminary of punk, backed up by others including Blondie (New Wave) and Patti Smith. The latter might be seen rather as the end of the hippie era when compared with the British punks whom Johnny Rotten (John Lydon) of the Sex Pistols described as “utterly fearless.”
Then there is Vivienne Westwood, who, driven by Malcolm McLaren, her partner, offered a sense of rowdy revolution. Her vibrant plaid bondage pants, furry sweaters and anarchic T-shirts make a striking display, interspersed with pieces in a similar spirit, like torn dresses and hose from Rodarte.
The rebel-yell T-shirts include the infamous punk Queen Elizabeth. And an outrageous Westwood commentary from the designer can be heard on a 1970s film, played on a period television set, placed in a re-created version of the couple’s store on King’s Road in London. Its name was changed from “Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die,” to “Sex” and then to “Seditionaries” as their ideas evolved, says Ms. Westwood, claiming that she did not see herself as a fashion designer “but as someone who wished to confront the rotten status quo through the way I dressed.”
That is more or less it for examples of original 1970s punk. The next four rooms, their grandiose high ceilings suggesting salons of haute couture, are filled with four decades of punk inspirations, right up to Burberry’s current silver studs.
The ranks of high-fashion outfits, shown with no context, start with punk’s first appropriation as wedding and evening dresses by Zandra Rhodes in 1975. That faces off the flesh-exposing black dress, held together with gilded safety pins down the side, that shot Elizabeth Hurley into paparazzi heaven in 1994 at the London premiere of “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”
Some of the clothes — the recent collection made by Gareth Pugh from garbage bags or the shredded complexity of Comme des Garçons — absolutely deserve their place as imaginative bricolage. Yet the exhibition is static, neglectful of digital opportunities to show the runways and to bring clothes to life, as the Victoria & Albert Museum in London does with its current dramatic screen-filled study of David Bowie.
To take John Galliano’s recycled shreds and threads for Dior haute couture entirely out of context is to lose the detailed intricacy of broken beauty; and to fail to explain why bringing Dior down to the level of punky do-it-yourself seemed so scandalous.
Having attended every single collection that brought these stationary clothes to life, I can remember the impact of Martin Margiela’s models, dressed in transparent dry-cleaning bags, walking the suburbs of Paris followed by gawping multicultural kids.
I watched the designer Katharine Hamnett, wearing a T-shirt declaring war on nuclear missiles, encounter British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1984. But how many museum visitors will know it as the source of the famous image? And how would they understand its relationship as “graffiti and agitprop” to splash-paint ball dresses from Dolce & Gabbana or the colorful work of Stephen Sprouse?
The final room, focusing on destroy and deconstruction, creates a valid place in fashion history, even if the museum was unable to get the piece that started it all: the famous “gruyère cheese” sweater with deliberate holes from Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons.
The premise of the exhibition is worthwhile. But the Metropolitan Museum is facing a quandary. Its much-anticipated, celebrity-fueled, fundraising galas risk overwhelming the museum shows themselves.
However intelligent and intellectual Mr. Bolton’s commentary in the catalog, the imaginative and often exceedingly expensive concoctions walking the red-carpeted steps on Monday night may well outshine the exhibition.
The true punks — those who lived and survived that moment — should find an exquisite irony in the idea that their no-future kick at a dead-end society should, 40 years on, have moved from a defiant statement from society’s impoverished and self-proclaimed social outcasts to a display of clothes for global celebrities and the super-rich having a ball.
Punk: Chaos to Couture. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Thursday through Aug. 14.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 6, 2013
An earlier version of this article misspelled Malcolm McLaren’s last name. It also misstated the title of the movie “Four Weddings and a Funeral.” An earlier version of this article misspelled Guido Palau’s surname. It is Palau, not Paulo.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 6, 2013
An earlier version of a slideshow photo caption associated with this article misstated the designer who created a safety-pin skirt shown at the Metropolitan Museum’s new Costume Institute exhibit. The designer is Balmain, not Vivienne Westwood.
