The Death Instinct

Punk was about fashion from the beginning. The story goes like this. A British man named Malcolm McLaren was interested in music, fashion, and art. He met a girl named Vivienne Westwood at art school. They opened up a clothing shop in London. One day, members of a band called The New York Dolls walked into the store. McLaren was fascinated by the look and style of the band. The Dolls played angry and aggressive songs, but they did so in tights and high heels. McLaren followed The Dolls to New York. In New York City, McLaren bumped into a man named Richard Hell: poet, singer, scumbag. McLaren loved something about Hell. “Here was a guy,” McLaren said, “all deconstructed, torn down, looking like he'd just crawled out of a drain hole, covered in slime, looking like he hadn't slept or washed in years, and looking like he didn't really give a fuck about you!” McLaren went back to England. He wanted to build his own Richard Hell, further deconstructed, torn down completely, covered in even more slime. McLaren found a broken man with decaying teeth named Johnny Lydon, renamed him Johnny Rotten (the teeth), and surrounded him with a couple of other miscreants who could barely play their instruments. The Sex Pistols was born.

McLaren and Westwood renamed their clothing shop SEX and began to sell ripped clothing, dirty t-shirts and repurposed S&M outfits. You could walk into SEX and buy all the gear that would make you look just like a member of The Sex Pistols. The “look” that McLaren saw in The New York Dolls, in Richard Hell and in Johnny Rotten was central to what became known as “punk.” Punk was a fashion before it became a subculture, a politics, a style of music. (...)

If punk is more than just fashion, it leads us to another question. What is fashion? According to Andrew Bolton and the people who put the show together at the Met, fashion is a form of freedom and self-expression. Punk was therefore important to fashion because it opened up new possibilities. Any kid could rip up some jeans and stick clothespins in a shirt and become the master of his or her destiny. Punk, so this thinking goes, made everyone into a designer and made any attire possible. The current Do-It-Yourself ethos within fashion and the culture at large is a direct result of the freedom given to us by punk. That’s the way Punk: Chaos to Couture sees it.

But fashion is only about freedom and self-expression on the surface. At its core, fashion is a kind of death drive. The number one imperative of fashion is, after all, to produce something new every season. This means killing the style of the last season. This process is relentless—some would say exhausting. The styles that are killed off are inevitably recycled down the line, only to be killed again in a cyclical process that never ends. (...)

Fashion took off as an industry around the same time that Nietzsche was thinking about nihilism. Fashion works well in a society that is unsure about its highest values because fashion has nothing to do with values. The point of fashion is to produce style. No style is inherently better than any other style. One can’t be better than another, since every style is only good for the moment. There is a democratic spirit to fashion for this reason, and a sense of freedom. But the freedom of fashion has a desperate quality. The newest style in fashion is fresh for the brief period in which it is new. Then it must be discarded.

The excitement of fashion is the constant excitement of novelty. But the flip side of this excitement is exhaustion, boredom. When Malcolm McLaren discovered Richard Hell in New York City in the 1970s, he loved Hell’s broken down and carefree look. One of the words McLaren used to describe Hell was “bored.” McLaren said, “He was this wonderful, bored, drained, scarred, dirty guy with a torn and ripped t-shirt.” You see that look on the faces of many classic punk rockers. They were dirty and bored. In many ways, the boredom was more unsettling than the anger. Sid Vicious could look scary when he put on a scowl and flipped you the bird. But he looked truly terrifying when he stared blankly into the camera lens, caring not at all whether he — or you — lived or died.

by Morgan Meis, The Smart Set |  Read more:

Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art