PUNK

What Was Punk Fashion in the Early Days of the 1970s?

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 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.

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 stands up more pertly, this was
not a usual practice among the masses of the 1960s and 70s. Selfmutilation, rejection of prettiness and body piercing was not a norm

then. The chosen placement of body jewellery and tattoos of the new
punks was deliberately intended to offend the more conventional
members of society. The fashion was also unisex and men began to sport
facial jewellery. What we take as a normal strand of fashion today was all
quite unusual then.
Body piercing seems everyday now in the 21st century. It entered
mainstream fashion 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 everyday 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 epitomise 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 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 other 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 80s big hair became everyday. Often it was
coloured 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 emphasised with
black and sometimes cat like eye make up 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 colours which were more acceptable to the rich
and famous. She used gold safety pins and gold chains to connect and
decorate uneven hems and slashed holes. The carefully placed holes
were edged with gold thread and the hems adorned with exquisite
embroidery. She had always coloured her hair with exotic colours and
worn it as a form of plumage.

Watered down punk chic worked its way to the top end of the market.
Versace too, also decorated dresses with large safety pins, most notably a
black dress that Liz Hurley wore to accompany Hugh Grant at the
premiere of the film 'Four Weddings And A Funeral' in about 1992.
Now every fashion shop has torn and distressed clothing items. Many are
similar in concept to those originally sported by the first punks of the
1970s.

HIPPIES
A number of middle-class young people growing up in the late 1950s felt that they did not fit into
accepted society. Not only did their futures seem planned out for them, with office jobs for the
men and motherhood and housework for the women, but those futures also seemed boring and
suffocating. In addition, there was an expanding war in Vietnam, and young men were being
drafted into the army. By the late 1960s young people who wanted peace and personal freedom
began to gather together to express their views. In 1967 people gathered at events likeNew York's
Central Park Be-In and San Francisco's Summer of Love. In October 1967 over fifty thousand
hippies gathered in Washington, D.C., to make a statement against the war by trying to levitate
the Pentagon building, headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense, with their collective
mind power.
Hippies bonded around their antiwar feelings, but they also broke away from the restrictions of
society by practicing "free love" or casual sex, and using drugs, especially marijuana and the
hallucinatory drug LSD, both for fun and to open their minds to new ways of seeing the world.
Hippies, or freaks, as they often called themselves, also connected around the music of the time,
a mixture of protest folk and rock. The 1969 Woodstock Festival and Concert was an important
event in hippie culture. Planned for an audience of 150,000, the rock festival in up-state New
York attracted 500,000 fans and was a celebration of love, peace, and music.
Hippie style included long, flowing hair for both men and women, and often beards for men.
Since hippies rejected the modern American mainstream, ethnic clothes were popular, as were
old-fashioned styles. Both men and women commonly wore headbands, floppy hats, flowing
scarves, and beads with blue jeans or bell-bottoms and tie-dyed T-shirts. Rebelling against
corporate culture meant making clothes or buying cheaply at thrift shops and military surplus
stores, so clothes were often ragged and patched or embroidered. Flowered clothing and
embroidery were popular, and flowers became an important hippie symbol because hippies
revered and felt connected to nature. "Flower power" was a term used to describe the hippie
movement, and it was not uncommon for hippies at antiwar demonstrations to give flowers to
police and soldiers, even placing flowers in the muzzles of their guns.

Though the hippies grew older and styles changed, people continued to feel nostalgic about
hippie style and values. The 1980s and 1990s saw occasional revivals of hippie fashions and
music, if not hippie values.

GRUNGE
The term "grunge" is used to define a specific moment in twentiethcentury 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 Fashion
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 Tshirts 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 buttondown 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 loggingindustry 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.

(Sub)Cultural Context
The youth movements most often associated and compared to grungehippie 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, disenchantment,
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 generationGeneration X.

GOTH

For girls, some common Goth looks are:

Fishnet tights
Pointy toed shoes, combat boots, high heels, heeled boots
Piercing or tattoos
Cleavage-enhancing corset top with long flowing skirts
Crushed velvet dress with heels or boots
Bondage Gear, spikes or studs
Ratted up Hair, red or black lipstick, black makeup for the eyes,
pointed angles
Lingerie that shows
Dracula Influence/ Death Angel Influence
For guys, some common Goth looks are:
Anything black
Dyed hair, black and white make-up
Spikes, studs, chains and leather jackets or black vinyl or trench
coats
Bondage or Fetish Fashion
Ankh (Egyptian Symbol for every lasting life) or Pentacle (Pagan
Symbol)
Dracula Influence/ Death Angel Influence
White shirts, black pants, black vest and combat boots
Some guys wear make-up, dresses, corsets and heels although
they are not trying to look like women they like to show they are
open mined or challenge gender social barriers.