Rebel Yell: Celebrating Punk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
FASHION IS MAGIC
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.
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.
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!
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!
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,,
"DESIRE WITHOUT END" from Liz Parsons on Vimeo.
