When punk emerged New York and London its influence was felt far beyond the music scene, especially in Art and Fashion. A new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art looks at how the twentieth century’s lords of anarchy took the creative world in fresh directions that are still being explored.
Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art
[dropcap size=small]I[/dropcap]n February this year RiccardoTisci, the creative director of Givenchy, attended the early morning launch of Punk: Chaos to Couture, which opened on May 9th at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
A heavily studded jacket and trousers from his ready-to-wear collection for autumn/winter 2007 was featured on a mannequin, alongside Zandra Rhodes’s safety-pin dress from 1977, Moschino’s 1994 ballgown made from a bin bag, a ripped and shredded Chanel suit designed by Karl Lagerfeld in 2011, and the barely-there safety-pin dress from 1994 by Gianni Versace made famous by Liz Hurley.
“For me to be next to one of the most iconic dresses, the one with the safety pins of Elizabeth Hurley, I was like, wow, that’s a big moment,” Tisci said. “I sent a picture to my mum.”
Let’s be clear from the start – this exhibition is about far something more interesting than the brainless choices made by so many of the dim wit celebrities who attended the annual Met Costume Institute’s fundraising gala ball, which this year opted to have punk as its dress code – I mean really, Kim Kardashian as a sofa? Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw on crack and hair gel? Beyonce (Beyond Sense?) as a Gianni Versace light fitting? No wonder Anna Wintour chose to dress like a Mississippi Sunday school teacher from 1958. Enough of that. The true message of this exhibition is to remind Art and Fashion that they were once a force for creative innovation, rather than the commercial colonization of the Chinese middle class. So for the past eight months Tisci (who was sadly responsible for some of the Met Gala’s biggest fashion misses) has been assisting Andrew Bolton, the curator of the Costume Institute at the Met, with some of his research for the forthcoming exhibition. Bolton has made a selection of about 100 pieces of clothing that represent an astonishing antrhpological statement.
“We have a tale of two cities between New York and London, which looks at the cross pollination of ideas between the two cities, and how Malcolm [McLaren] and Vivienne [Westwood] codified it to create what became know as a classic sort of punk look,” Bolton said. “Punk was already happening in New York musically. You had Richard Hell who was wearing T-shirts with rips in them and safety pins. Malcolm met Richard through the punk scene in New York and he brought that scene back to London.”
The exhibition begins its journey with the New York nightclub CBGB, where Hell was performing with his band Television in 1974. This is followed by a gallery inspired by McLaren and Westwood’s Seditionaries boutique on King’s Road in London, and four galleries: DIY Hardware (the use of studs, razor blades and safety pins); Bricolage (customisation and the use of recycled materials and rubbish); Graffiti and Agitprop (exploring punk’s tradition of provocation and confrontation); and Destroy (where clothes are ripped and shredded).
“I’ve really focused on designers who have continued to engage with that aesthetic since the 1970s or designers who have stand-alone collections, like Zandra Rhodes’s Conceptual Chic, which was like a landmark in the history of fashion and punk,” Bolton said. “It was 1977, the heart of punk, and it [the Zandra Rhodes safety-pin dress] was actually punk in a way. As soon as it became defined, it sort of lost its edge a little bit.” He takes his cue from a quote by Mick Jones from the Clash, which says that punk only lasted for 100 days at the Roxy club in London in its purest form before the media really got behind it and created something that was different from what it was originally. Bolton says,
“Punk changed everything, it broke all the rules, It merged creativity with a really strong political voice.”
Andrew Bolton sat down with Riccardo Tisci after the designer’s autumn/winter 2013 show in Paris at Givenchy’s haute couture headquarters on avenue George V. It was less than 48 hours after the show. Tisci hadn’t slept for two days before the show because there were ‘technical hitches’, and he confessed to feeling slightly jet-lagged. He took a seat, lit the first of a long chain of American Spirit Light cigarettes, and took a sip from a large mug of strong coffee. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with Nike trainers.
“Doing this collaboration with Andrew completely opened my mind to many things,” Tisci said. As well as looking at a lot of Westwood and McLaren, along with what Bolton describes as the designers who engage with punk on a more conceptual level, such as the Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, Tisci revisited his own archive and discovered a substantial body of work from the past eight years at Givenchy. His latest collection was a collage of pieces from that archive, mixing biker jackets with sheer lace skirts reaching to the floor, heavy zips and sweatshirts with images of Bambi, but there was a certain DIY, mismatched devil-may-care attitude about the collection that owes something to the spirit of punk.
While many designers could be culpable of simply making pastiche punk – a few studs and strategically placed zips do not a punk make – Tisci certainly has a raw energy and an irreverent restlessness that makes you feel he is very capable of subverting the establishment. Most notably, he used his transgender friend the Brazilian model Lea T to model in his autumn/winter 2010 advertising campaign; a bold move for an haute bourgeois French fashion house. “I did it with everyone on my back, thinking I was making the biggest mistake of my life, but I believed in it. And then it became such an amazing thing because a lot of people started to support me, like Oprah Winfrey, who invited Lea T to her show,” he said. “Sometimes to be rebellious in that way can bring positive feelings. I’m not scared to be judged.”
Both Bolton and Tisci hope the ideas in the exhibition as well as the look of punk – and of course, the music – will inspire a whole new generation.
“Things have got quite safe,” Bolton said. He was nine in 1975, a preppy schoolboy growing up in Lancashire, with a big sister who was dressing like Patti Smith. “I was a bit too young to experience [punk] but I remember reading about it in Sounds and NME; I remember watching TV and seeing these punks walking down the King’s Road.
You had these old ladies with their shopping bags and little head scarves and they couldn’t believe what they’d seen because nothing had happened like this before, or since really. You still look at the T-shirts Malcolm did and they’re so shocking – the upside-down crucifix with the swastika and the little boy from the paedophile magazine – and they’re so big and powerful; really harrowing images.”
Tisci, 39, was still a baby when the Sex Pistols played at St Martin’s School of Art in London on November 6 1975. “When punk came out [in Italy] it was a big thing,” Tisci says.
“Punk had such an influence for everything and everyone… It’s a subject that still inspires people today.”
The current economic, political and social situation in Italy is not so far removed from the recession-racked Britain in the 1970s that led to punks picking up rubbish from the piles of uncollected refuse and wearing bin bags. “I am so proud to be Italian, but it is the most ******-up country in the world. It is so destroyed as a country, politically, religiously… I mean everything is gone.”
Maybe the economic crisis might be a breeding ground for a new movement of extreme creativity, but Tisci is not so sure. “People should be exploding, blown away by creativity… It seems like people, I hope it’s wrong, but it seems like the young generation are so scared, I don’t understand why. I think today, for me, punk is an attitude and today people are so scared to be punk because there is so much money involved in society, there is so much selfishness. In the last two decades it is all about business.”
Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Instead, punk continues to be referenced and commodified: A collection of punk-inspired pieces by designers including Vivienne Westwood, Rodarte, Dolce & Gabbana and Givenchy went on sale at Moda Operandi to coincide with the opening of exhibition. At the same time, some of the early, most guttural pieces from Malcolm McLaren and
Vivienne Westwood are being auctioned by the New York vintage clothing dealers Resurrection, with prices estimated at $2,200 for a Seditionaries Destroy T-shirt, and $6,500 for a Westwood McLaren parachute jacket. Designers continue to appropriate punk for their collections. Donatella Versace called her glossy collection for autumn/winter 2013 ‘Vunk’, dressing her models in spiky dog collars, shiny vinyl bondage straps, tartan and leather with studs. There are punk references everywhere for both men and women, from the New York menswear designer Thom Browne’s studded tailoring to London-based nouveau punk Louise Gray’s collection for autumn/winter, which was accessorised with toilet rolls for jewellery and BacoFoil basting tins as belts.
“It depends which designers,” Tisci said when asked if the use of punk as a trend is not simply superficial. “For me the ones that are most punk are the ones that don’t use the classic punk icon images, but really they are punk inside. Like Rei Kawakubo or Miuccia Prada. She is very bourgeois, but she is punk in her own way. Punk is really about the attitude for me.”
Bolton draws a link between haute couture and punk. “I wanted Givenchy to represent the punk couture section; we did a show in 2005 called Anglomania that touched on punk as an attitude. This show is more about punk as an aesthetic… I’ve always felt there is such a strong similarity between haute couture and punk; punk was about creating one-off pieces. You might buy a jacket from a store and customise it; you’re the only one in the world with that jacket. I love the idea of DIY, the idea of handcraftsmanship. So with Riccardo’s work, I looked at pieces that, instead of using traditional haute couture embroidery or feathers or lacework or leather, are using punk materials and hardware.”
At the press launch in February, Bolton had said that what Versace had done for the safety pin, Tisci had done for the stud, which he had made ‘grandiose and gargantuan’. Bolton had also picked two haute couture dresses made from chiffon with zips. He liked the idea of “fluidity and subtleness of the couture but with punk hardware”.
Ultimately, however, for Tisci punk is not simply studs, zips and rips. Punk is about an attitude, a certain rebelliousness. It is something he shares with some of his rebel heroes, who include Gianni Versace, Azzedine Alaia, Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto and Helmut Lang, all of whom are represented in the exhibition. “These people were very punk because they didn’t care what people were thinking about them,’ he said. ‘They were just going for it to create something new, and that is very important for me.”
By Daniel Jeffreys and Tamsin Blanchard.
Punk: Chaos to Couture runs at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, until August 14 (metmuseum.org)
