99% Invisible - Punk Style: Articles of Interest #6

Episode Date: October 12, 2018

There is this myth that it’s frivolous or unproductive to care about how you look. Clothing and fashion get trivialized a lot. But think about who, culturally, gets associated with clothing and fashion: young people, women, queers, and people of color. Groups of people who historically haven’t had a voice, have expressed themselves on their bodies. Through their style, their hair, their tattoos, their piercings, and what they wear. Articles of Interest is a show about what we wear; a six-part series within 99% Invisible, looking at clothing. It is produced and hosted by Avery Trufelman. Episodes will be released on Tuesdays and Fridays from September 25th through October 12th. Punk Style: Articles of Interest #6

Just a warning, this episode contains mature language. I remember the first day I got to college. I was in line at some bakery in the town. It's a woman pulled me out and said, I just want to talk to you because I'm a Christian woman and I worry about people like you and your relationship with Satan. My boss, Roman Mars, what were you wearing that day? I was, I think it was, I must have been a band T-shirt and a flannel or something.

I was nothing. Like a band T- shirt, one particular shirt. So if you met me from the age of 5th, 14 to 19, I was probably wearing this one who's gonna do t-shirt. That by the time I stopped wearing it, you know, went from basically white to gray to almost kind of clear. Yeah.

Oh, I'm so close. Oh, so. And so to keep it all together, I put little safety pins across the top to keep it to keep it all together. So is that because you saw other people doing that? No, so I remember in high school, there was, there was very little punk presence. You would call this skater if you wore weird clothes or listen to the bands I listened to. This is going to sound so weird.

This quizzical look on your face. It's just but in Central Ohio, in the late 80s, there wasn't a concept of what a hardcore punk was. There was no, I always call a skater and rocks were thrown at me. You know, I'd never run a skateboard before. People threw rocks at you. Oh shit. Yeah. This is different. Sharks. Yeah. Skaters were hated by everybody. So why bother to stand out, especially if people are like actively throwing rocks at you, like why bother? Yeah. It's weird because I don't know. I don't know why I want to have that fight all the time, but I had to.

Articles of interest. A show about what we wear. And so maybe the idea is about clothes. You can attach ideas about clothes. An idea of home to a piece of cloth. These are glass for a market, cloth. These are special items. I'm not a kid. Any fork and wear clothes, but if you haven't got the attitude and style to carry it off,

then you're just the closed walls. There's this myth that it's frivolous or unproductive to care about how you look. Clothing and fashion get trivialized a lot. But think about who culturally gets associated with clothing and fashion. Young people, women, queers, and people of color. Groups of people who historically haven't been listened to

have expressed themselves on their bodies through their style, their hair, their tattoos, their piercings, and what they wear. You got to understand, black working class kid, that's all the only way we had to express ourselves with through the music we listened to and the clothes we wore. This is Don Letz, a legendary DJ and filmmaker and creator of the documentary, Punk Attitude. I've always engaged with the look, know in black culture we've been forced to express ourselves in a very punk rock way and what is a very white world we've only been left

the fringes to operate within to understand so that's forced us to do weird things like come up with reggae for instance which is actually formed by a lack of technology not because you've got it you know the minutes or a definition of punk hip hop to turntables and a microphone. I mean, if that ain't a form of black punk rock, what is? Punk rock, in the classic sense, in the way it sounds, in the way it looks, emerged from a place of disenchantment and dissolution.

I already was pretty alienated being black, but by the mid-70s, it's interesting, because society had managed to alienate own white youth. For talking specifically London society. You've got to set the scene a little bit. You know, we're doing that mid-70s. The times were tough. We were talking about more social crisis, economic, political.

You can't find jobs, accommodation. The housing problem of course is terrific. And financial, you know, we're doing about three-day weeks. We're very concerned about unemployment. With no room, with no job. Power cuts and strikes, and all this of massive unemployment. We do not have sufficient houses, jobs and schools for our own people, let alone immigrants. There are far too many immigrants in this country.

The rise in the national front. We can't go into the locals anymore. They're full of with noisy foreigners, and we don't like it. We don't like it. We like it. Oh, no, no, whatever, it's widely agreed that punk music came from somewhere in the United States. Everybody thinks England invented punk. Rubbish, but they were smart enough to give it a look.

The look of punk. That started in London. It wasn't invented here. They just gave it a style, which is not to be sniffed out. Because that music and style combination is a deadly combination. And the look of punk, like traditional 70s British punk, is so iconic. Think the green mohawk, the safety pins, the leather jacket, the plaid mini skirt. And look that iconic. That specific.

It doesn't just happen by accident. Someone designed it. Hi, are you open? Yeah, thanks. On 430 Kings Road in London, there is a little shop. It looks like a little shack, it's tiny. Don Letz remembers the first time he went in there. I found myself wandering up and down the King's Road Chelsea, which back in the

day in the early 70s, which was like the major fashion high street in the UK in London. And I wandered into this store called, it was either called Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die or Let It Rock, because He kept changing the name of the store. And I walked into what was kind of a laddins cave of subculture. And Malcolm was there and Vivian was there. Vivian Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, the couple that owned the shop in the 70s. They had started out selling records and then moved into clothing. But I struck up a relationship with these guys and it was probably one of the

most fort two-at-a-tus meetings I've ever had. Vivian Westwood was in her early 30s, a primary schoolteacher and mother of two who sowed all the clothes in her living room. She had no formal training, but she had grown up sowing her own clothes out of necessity. Malcolm McLaren was in his mid-20s and lived in this kind of world of ideas. The countercultural riot in 68 Paris, Grovener Square, you know Kent State, all that stuff. Those are the situationists movement in France. This stuff I would never fucking heard about. The situationists were really important to Vivian and Malcolm.

As early as the 1950s, situationists theorist declared that artists and thinkers were morally obligated to break down the divides between art and life. To fuse art with everyday existence, so that art could not be cleaved away and etharized and put into galleries and academies. And the way to do this, the situation is said. To fuse art and life is for artists and activists to be provocateurs, to create dramatic, outlandish interruptions on the everyday, to expose the absurdity of the status quo. Art and protest were to be on the streets with no barriers for everyone in their faces.

Whether they wanted it or not. Yeah, the whole idea of being subversive, thinking out of the box, being punk. But the look of punk still wasn't quite born yet. In their pursuit of testing limits, of merging art and life, Vivian Westwood and Malcolm McLaren were constantly changing the shop, and the

style of clothing sold within it. They'd close it down, rename it and reopen it again. And it's not like they were closing the stores down because they were failures. They were changing the face of 430 Kings Road because they wanted to. Malcolm McLaren got bored, and he wanted to move on, and so did Vivian. This is Claire Wilcox, senior curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum. By the way, Vivien Westwood herself declined to be a part of this story. But Claire Wilcox has interviewed Westwood and curated an incredible exhibit of the many

phases of her work. A society of always outrunning their audiences, they always one step ahead. They never rested on their laurels, They kept moving, changing, gathering momentum. They were kind of like anthropologists. They get really intrigued by a certain subculture and they build the shop around it. 430 Kings Road had an iteration where it sold dandy rocker clothes

and another making more leather, biker-inspired stuff. And then in 1974, Vivian and Malcolm turned 430 Kings Road into a shop called Sex. It was called Sex. One word, all caps. What Vivian said about being interested and closing used in the sex industry. The late text, the rubber, was that she appreciated it for its strength, kind of beauty. The sign just said Sex in big pink plush letters.

The clothes inside were leather and rubber and covered with straps, skin tight and endrogenous. And she said that you had a mixed cloned tail coming to the shop when it was called sex range from as she's had people with a perverse interest in these types of garments. And then kids off the street just wanting to be fashionable. So it was a sort of hybrid moment.

Malcolm Invivian knew how to shock. No one had stuff like theirs. No, in the mohair tops and some of the t-shirts. It's fucking cool. I nearly died trying to put on a rubber t-shirt once. Seriously, that's not a joke. I didn't put the towel-compiled thing on. Nobody told me me about that shit and nearly died with this thing wrapped around my neck trying to get it off. On trips to New York, Malcolm and Vivian discovered the burgeoning American punk music scene,

which was blooming in interesting new ways. And so, upon his return to London, Malcolm decided that he would like to manage a band of his very own. He and Vivian gathered some kids who worked at and hung out around 430 Kings Road and formed them into a group, named the Sex Pistols. But it's not like the Sex Pistols were just like a clever roost to sell clothes. No, I mean, listen, it was a fortuitous combination for those things to work together. But that wasn't anything weird. I mean, the style of music in this country is just like it's so important. So I don't think that there was any shame in that.

Malcolm Invivian wrote some of the lyrics for the Sex Pistols, which were about, you know, NRK in the UK and bad mouthing the Queen. It was not your mother's rock and roll. It was the anti band,, the anti-music built to shock kind of for politics, but also kind of just to shock people like a situation is happening. Although maybe that's giving Malcolm too much credit. I don't know how planned out this was. Malcolm wanted to create Malcolm world.

What is endgame was I have no fucking idea. I think Malcolm did, to be honest, he did make up a lot of shit as he went along and a lot of things that kind of ended up in chaos. He pretended that he orchestrated, but that's okay. What was your question? This new movement demanded a new look, a new store. So in 1977, 430 Kings Road was reincarnated again. This time, it was called Seditionaries. And this is the iteration of the store in which punk fashion would truly emerge. In a way, Seditionaries was a line in the sand because here you had the true emerging of music and fashion, the occurrence, two main labs. The chapters of 430 Kings Road all compounded on each other.

Elements of Edwardian Dandy and rocker and biker and sex worker all combined and catalyzed with hard, fast music and political imagery. It's a ripped up union jacked, held together with saved to pins. This is Style icon Michael Kostiff, a long time neighbor of 430 Kings Road. Over the years, Michael and his wife, Galinda, bought so many Westwood clothes, their collection was acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum. Yeah, and they're sort of set. They've got a big wide belt. They're a little bit hipster almost. Michael is showing me a pair of his old bondage trousers, which look like a straight jacket for your legs.

They're loaded down with zippers and chains and straps hanging off them. And there's even a strap that ties your knees together, which Michael assures me was less limiting than you'd think. The legs are connected with the strap. Yeah, yeah, so he's strapped them through. yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah and some had killed so that you could clip on the front and back or little towels and other things that would hang off them. The last time I had a conversation with Bob Marley, we had an argument about the bodied trousers that I was wearing. What, what did you say about them?

He didn't like them. He thought they looked like mountaineer trousers. Vivian's clothes turned people into strange sculptures. She played with the human form, binding the legs together or extending sleeves down to the floor and pushing the body into new angles. All the things were sort of cut differently, you know, with one sleeve higher than with a neck hold to one side and it sort of pulled the fabric in different ways. It was all rather fabulous. As a sartorial movement, it was resolved. It was well crafted.

It was not cheap. It wasn't cheap. it wasn't cheap. Ah, the clothes were not cheap. In other words, fucking expensive. But it was clothes as art though, without a doubt. Those first punk clothes weren't dirty grungy sloppy. They were fabulous and strange.

I mean, the thing about Vivian's clothes is they were clothes as arts. You got to understand that. Vivian has always taken great pride in crafting her clothes very carefully. You get this extraordinary sort of marriage of craft and care and you know, downright outrageousness. So outrageous that other shop started to copy Vivian's designs. Lots of people copied those looks. Once the junior was out of the bottle, then the whole of King's Road

was selling variations upon a theme. There was loads to go with the punk loop. You know, you've got studying and wristbands and leather harness, you know, loads of ephemera that could add on to it. So it gave loads of people a chance to have a business. Punk was easy to rip off. Michael showed me some imitation bondage trousers that used to belong to his wife. They were made by another shop called Boy. These were copies, Boy copied all Vivian's things

and did the much cheaper fabrics. Further down the King's Road, yeah. Which was kind of cool because it gave more people a chance to wear the clothes, Vivian's hated boy. And she said, oh, maybe I should set my shop on fire because they'd have to do the same. But the other side of this coin was that individuals could imitate these looks very easily as well and sort of elaborate on them.

You know tape and bandages and God knows what. Vivian had created a style lexicon that anyone could play around with. Lavatry chain, safe to pin, you know, it was a very do-it-yourself ethic. I mean, you could go into your own wardrobe right now, and rip stuff up and put it back together and make it punk. And that DIY part, that Vivian love. It gave a chance for the kids with no money to develop a do-it-yourself version of that. Vivian Westwood, after all, didn't have any training as a seamstress.

She just figured out how to do these things. So anyone could and should follow her lead. It was part of this shared movement of rebellion that these clothes could be adopted and customized and adapted by anybody wherever you came from. However, ritual poor you are, however old you were, whatever sexual you could take these clothes on and perhaps you might save up to buy a pair of

bondage trousers but you'd customise your own t-shirt. Punk became grassroots. As Vivian herself has said, it wasn't invented from the streets. It was the other way around. It turned into a movement. So I think in a way it was quite a sort of joyful explosion of taking possession of your own identity.

And before the internet, this look was cross-pollinated between New York and London by touring bands like the Sex Pistols and the Ramones. And so there started to be this back-and-forth dialogue a little bit between the two scenes, but they were visually really different. Monica Sklar, fashion historian and author of the book, Punk Style. She says the New York look was based in functionality. With New York being jeans, t-shirts, using safety pins for functional purposes.

But the London look, thanks to Vivian Westwood, was rooted in art aesthetic. As bands toward and cultures mix, spheres of influence spread across the US. And then it would go around the country and around the globe. Other scenes would come to fruition and take on their own bed of influence. Depending on bands, on the weather, on the local culture, punk became reinterpreted.

Whether it's San Diego, whether it's T.C., whether it's Detroit, London, New York, Minneapolis, had a large series of bands and style leaders. And then as those individuals and their stuff, whether it's them personally traveling around or as their zine makes those individuals, and their stuff, whether it's them personally traveling around or as their Z-makes that are around, or their music, they'll get to the next place. The style goes with them. Note how Monica's Glouare said their style went with them. Not their fashion.

This goes way beyond punk or subculture, but especially in the United States, fashion is associated with entire groups of people that are often relegated as secondary. Women, queers people of color and youth. Fashion is the realm of the historically powerless. And so people don't want to talk about things that are associated with them,

but they do have this huge awareness of style and how important style is. Style, according to sociologist Michael Breake, is a combination of three elements. Image. Image. So what are we looking at? Demeter.

What's our attitude when we're wearing it? And this concept called Argo. Argo, this French concept of sling and secret language and secret coding. Kind of like jargon, special words or phrases that only insiders in a group would know. Altogether, it's that embodiment. And so being able to have image demeanor and Argo with authenticity is true punk style. In other words, it's part of what makes you authentic or a poser. If you have the right style.

And for punks, it was this ceaseless hunt to sniff out true punk style. It was a lot of looking for little clues, hints of authenticity, trying to figure out who was on your side and who was a sell-out. It was constant, and it was exhausting. In fact, only shortly after its editionaries opened in the late 70s, Vivian Westwood herself got tired of it. In hindsight, she said, I got tired of looking at clothes from this point of view of rebellion. I found it exhausting. After a while, I wasn't sure if I was right. I'm sure that if there is such a thing as the anti-establishment, it feeds the establishment.

And if you give something a label, then that's all it can be. And the whole thing about punk is it ever-evolving. And for some people, they got stuck on this early definition. It's about fast guitars. It's about Mohawk, say to me, and leather jackets. No man, that was just like one screaming shout that got you through the door. You weren't supposed to get stuck there. You know, you get on this ladder. You're smart. You keep climbing. Into the 80s, a lot of London punks kept climbing. Members of punk bands peeled off to learn how do you actually play their instruments and experiment experiment with like synthesizers. And interesting about post punk is all of a sudden people are kind of honest about what they really liked. And Vivian Westwood taught herself how to tailor, like gave herself a real formal training. So she embarked on this mission to self-educate

herself through looking at 17th, 18th, 19th century dress. And this is not DIY, these are not garments that anyone could copy. Subsequent lines of Vivians played with corsetry, ball gowns, suits, even in clothes, using nicer materials and toying with elements of history, and even nostalgia. Stuff that was not punk. Punk closing was too dimensional. It could be laid flat. However, when she learns how to tailor, and this is a very difficult process that she taught herself, her clothes become more and more three-dimensional.

As her views of authority and establishment became multi-dimensional, her garments gained dimension as well. You see the development of her skill running alongside the development of her interest in history and also her not rejection of punk because I think it would always be part of her, but her moving on from always being on the defense, always being involved in some kind of conflict, political, sartorial conflict with the world. Do you sell things on Instagram, though? Yeah.

I was already... Oh, really? I've had... Instagram is like the wild west. It is very active. That store on 430 Kings Road. It still belongs to Westwood. Ever since 1980, it's been called World's End,

and it has a giant clock on the front with its arm spinning backwards. And if you go there today, it's not really a band of misfits that hang out there anymore. But there are a lot of Japanese tourists who come to pilgrimage. Vivian Westwood is one of the most famous clothing designers in the world now. I mean, she's huge. She doesn't have the time to speak to me for this podcast. But she is the reason why I wanted to talk about clothing. Because in 2009, I heard her say this thing to the New York Times, and I haven't been

able to stop thinking about it since. The paradox is that people think that if they wear something simple and non-saying, that somehow they themselves will emerge all the more stunning and beautiful from it, it's not true, it might be true. No, not even true of Christi Tirlington. You know, no, no. I don't want to seek Christi Tirlington and her t-shirt and jeans. She can, why not if you're born, you know, somebody, a freak of beauty? Why not? You know, look like a goddess. Why not? I think everyone knows that feeling when you're dressed in an outfit you really like, and you look good, and you feel good.

That is an essential power of clothing, aside from covering your body or keeping you warm. It has the power to give you confidence. It's why Roman dresses up when he goes to do a live performance. I have lots of options and ties, and I have lots of options and pocket squares and stuff like that. And I have fun with that to perform and to actually show respect that I care about these things to an audience. That's what that signals to me. And I also like it, I think I look good. And the thing Punk did was push the boundaries of what looks good.

It's not about looking perfect or clean or rich. It incorporated people of all ages and bodies and backgrounds and ideas and gave them that confidence. It pushed our ideas of beauty. And Professor Monica Sklar knows this first hand. Beauty standards were pushed and pushed and pushed. I was fired from a record store. A record store is a use for having an eyebrow piercing. And now I'm a professor and curator and vice president

of the National Society of my profession. And I have it. And really, this is the power of what fashion designers can do. Something that appears strange or scary or expensive at first can trickle down through the cycle of trends, and maybe, in time, come to expand notions of what's acceptable, so that more people can feel comfortable expressing their own style, their own cocktail of image, demeanor, and argo, however it manifests. And this myth that it's frivolous or unproductive to care about how you look or what you wear

is completely bunk. To not have to think about how you present, or to assume that you can somehow dress in a way that is neutral or non-saying. That is a massive, massive privilege. Whether we like it or not, we are all speaking with our clothes. And we might as well give a good, hard think about what we want to say. The pocket, the piece of paper Words from yesterday There's a portrait painted on the things we love

A ring called with a hidden story Ring cold on this flight A spider like an ancient vessel, a language stolen by There's a picture printed on the face, we're alive A pocket, a piece of paper The pencil paper Words run yesterday There's a portrait painted on the things that we love Articles of Interest is made by myself, Avery Treffleman, with editing from Katie Mingle and Joe Rosenberg. Music by Rebecca Redmond, Shannon Bedroghe, Jenna Marx, and Maya Ossetto of the band Sore.

The theme songs for Articles of Interest are by Tzassami Ashworth. Fact check by Graham Haysha, mixed by Sheree Fusef, and Roman Mars is the Ian McKay of this whole series. Special thanks to Sonnet Stanfell, Ella Ravennalist, Brendan Cormier, and the online library Bloomsbury Fashion Central. Thanks as well to Marion McEun, Delaney Hall, Vivian Lee, Sean Rial, Kurt Colstet, and the whole 99PI team. There's a portrait of painting the things we love. The history of clothing is not a linear one.

It circles back around and around on itself. Styles weave in and out through the decades. Each time reincarnated in new materials with new associations. The history of clothing is a history of subversion, whether it's bringing bondage wear into the light of day, or jeans into the workplace, or pockets into women's wear. It's a dynamic that puts our bodies in conversation with all the many, many political, societal,

and economic forces that have determined the fashions before us as the cycle of trends goes around, and around, and around. And that's it. That concludes articles of of Interest. Thank you for listening! And by the way, this gorgeous music box theme that you're listening to was composed by the great Sean Rial, our 99PI staff composer.

And we're back to regular 99% invisible programming after this, and all these episodes will be archived on a separate feed. We're thinking about whether or not we want to do a second season of this. So let me know your thoughts. I'm on Twitter at Truffleman, 1F, and at Articles of Interest on Instagram. Oh, and a final thought. We're celebrating this podcast with a big clothing swap. And if you've never been to one of these before,

it's where a bunch of people gather somewhere and everyone brings their clothes that they don't want anymore, and then trade them all up with each other for free. I find it's the most sustainable and most interesting way to dress. Consider throwing a clothing swap of your own sometime, because you have to wear clothes anyway, right? Radio Topeon from PRX.