Abstract
Former editor of Elle magazine
I managed to escape the aggressors - I was little and nippy - many of my friends didn’t, but it wasn’t just thugs who were on our case for how we dressed, as I discovered when I was arrested on London’s Clapham High Street, thrown into a police car and charged with obscenity, and later hauled up in front of lay judges at Lavender Hill Magistrates Court, just for wearing a particular T-shirt.
The garment in question was from designer Vivienne Westwood’s shop Seditionaries and featured an illustration by Tom of Finland (a mid-20th century gay artist) featuring two untrousered and marvellously well-endowed cowboys, chatting. I still have it.
That was what you risked for sartorially expressing your identity as a punk rocker, but even regular citizens were subject to stringent and limiting dress codes. Women over the age of 40 were expected to dress in a way which was “age appropriate” (dull) and even post-1960s flower power, men could put themselves at risk of jeers, or even a beating, by wearing colours deemed “effeminate”. You didn’t see any pink shirts in the City of London then. Now, it’s awash with them.
Even beyond conventions, repression and social mores, there was another major restriction on most people expressing themselves creatively through fashion. Money. If you couldn’t afford to shop in the luxury department store Harrods, or on Bond Street, where designers still have their boutiques, there really wasn’t much fashion to buy. There were clothes for the masses - but not high fashion, the latest ideas and styles. That was an elite pursuit.
The few chain stores in existence were dismal places - as anyone who can remember the communal changing rooms of the high street shop Miss Selfridge will tell you. If you weren’t having your handbag nicked, you were being asphyxiated by the smell of other people’s feet, all in pursuit of poorly made clothing, in limited styles and horrible fabrics.
Basia Szkutnicka, formerly a lecturer at the London College of Fashion, and shortly to become professor of fashion design at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, remembers what it was like when she was a student at St Martins School of Art in the mid-1980s.
A group of young punks in London during the 1980s
CREDIT: Photofusion/Getty
“We didn’t have Primark, a shop you could go to and get five pairs of socks for a £1. We had to shop at jumble sales and in charity shops, buy stuff and customise it,” she said.
Compare that with the British high street of today, bursting with shops where you can get brilliant versions of the latest looks from the Paris and Milan catwalks, within a couple of weeks of the fashion shows taking place -much cheaper (relatively) than it was in the 1970s and 1980s and great quality too.
Indeed, so good are these chain store “tributes” now, that some major fashion houses – Burberry and Tom Ford, to name but two – have started selling their new styles from the moment the fashion show is over, rather than waiting six months as they used to.
So, in terms of what you can wear without risk of physical attack or social exclusion and what you can buy very cheaply, people in the UK have never had it so good.
And yet, while we didn’t have chain store high fashion in the early 1980s, we did have the ground-breaking street-style magazine iD, which featured photographs of real people, recruited on the street and at nightclubs, with captions listing what they were wearing, where they got it and how much they’d paid for it. There was prestige in how little your outfit cost.
Three highly styled friends talk outside Afro Punk festival 2016 in Alexandra Palace, London
CREDIT: (left) Wayne Tippetts/REX/Shutterstock; (right) Mark Lewis
Compare that, says Szkutnicka, to current British magazines, which aren’t much more than shopping lists, bossily instructing readers what they “need” to buy, with articles seriously headlined: “12 things you must buy this autumn”.
One I just found on Grazia’s website promotes: “The Rise of The Affordable ‘It’ Bag – The 21 Best Designer Bags Under £500”. I took an average and it came to £480 a bag. Affordable?
Adding to this message of style through spending are the legions of covertly sponsored fashion bloggers and Instagrammers, whose every garment has been supplied free in return for a glowing online mention.
“I teach all over the world,” said Szkut-nicka. “And while young people in the UK probably have the most freedom for fashion self-expression, they don’t feel free in financial terms. They genuinely believe you need to have a lot of money, to buy a lot of things. Magazines tell them to be consumers and they believe it.”
Iain R Webb, professor of fashion and design at Kingston School of Art and former magazine fashion director, knows more about self-expression through fashion than most: he was one of the legendary Blitz kids, the supercool gang who congregated at a small London weekly club night in 1979, where entrance was allowed only according to the outlandish creativity of your get-up. Boy George, Stephen Jones, John Galliano and Spandau Ballet were some of the other regulars.
“Back in the Blitz days, we had nothing,” said Webb. “So it meant we had nothing to lose by doing anything. We were pushing boundaries in every direction and trying things on whether it was to shock or make people stare, or shout things at us.”
His own students, he is surprised and disturbed to find, increasingly don’t feel so free to push the limits, not for fear of personal injury, but of causing offence to others.
Webb cites the outcry that happened in September, when US fashion designer Marc Jacobs had the models’ hair styled in brightly coloured dreadlocks for his fashion show, which he says was inspired by the hairdo Webb’s contemporary Boy George sported when he ascended to pop fame in the early 1980s. But the women on his catwalk were mostly white and Jacobs was accused of cultural appropriation. He subsequently issued a formal apology.
Photo styled by Iain R Webb and originally published in Blitz magazine in 1986
“Where does that stop?” asked Webb. “That’s a form of censorship. Kids in colleges are worrying about everything now - it limits what they feel they can do. Everything is tempered by ‘I don’t want to offend anybody…’ when the whole point in art school is that you’re pushing the boundaries, you want to be challenging and provoking.
“Self-censoring is not a good thing for any of the creative arts, which includes fashion.”
So, four decades on from my experiences of being physically threatened and arrested for what I wore, British youth are now fully at liberty to express themselves through fashion, free from constraints of gender appropriateness and tribal dress codes, with a wealth of choice of affordable clothes on every high street.
Yet, within this new world of fashion freedom, new limiting factors have come to bear, the difference being that they seem to come more from within than from outside forces. Could it be that creativity needs restriction to burgeon forth? And so where it no longer exists, the hive mind will contrive it.
Short History of Punk