God save the sex!
Image: Vivienne Westwood Archive
This article was originally published for University of the Arts London
Provocative punks and the smutty, rebellious angst of fetish subculture.
“If punk had to have a motto, it wouldn’t have been ‘let’s fuck,’ but ‘fuck you,’” cultural theorist Carlo McCormick writes in the opening dialogue to Punk Lust: Raw Provocation 1971-1985. When you dust off your dad’s dirty records you’ll find that punk was never pure. Between Sex Pistols, The Buzzcocks and tit-flashing tartans, the lines read into a music scene that was sartorially explicit as much as it was lyrically brash. It seems symbolic that sex and love-making came to be intrinsic with a movement so aggressively antithetical to romance. The red colours in its check drainpipe trousers were never about soppy hearts or Valentine’s tat, probably better aligned to a political bloodbath or love affair with socialism. Ripped jeans tore up the bullshit in the world, they were the new defilement. Doc Martens stomped down on oppression. Remorselessly, punk image chewed the Mary Quant daisy and spat it out with a poisoned hatred for mainstream fashion. The punk was an evolved working class geezer, fuelled up by fuck-the-world anger and rapidfire guitar riffs that became the soundtrack to an entire lifestyle in the 1970s. A lifestyle that became an unlikely, seminal bedfellow with fetish.
Following the Youthquake and 1960s liberation, pissed off kids rifled old safety pins from grandma’s sewing box, clobbered up in leather vests, and plonked on a few patches like Boy Scout crafts for the anti-establishment. Behind the bad eyeliner, there was a sadistic tinge to the look. Punk bordered on bondage with its studs, spikes and chains, so too did its thirst for violence. Penetrating deeper into the scene, underground clubs were chock full of harnessed men in mohawks, the sort that would scare your nan and probably shag your bird. “Society was very sexually repressed, it was something forbidden to talk about publicly – and punk is the embodiment of rebellion. It is the knee-jerk reaction against that authority,” says Scams guitarist, Rob Hoddinott. It was a subculture chiefly alone in its defiance. Sadomasochism came to be the singular friend punk had, it asserted the dominance punks craved in their fucked social structure; cooped in and restricted by politician Edward Heath. BDSM offered that same confined feel, it was a reaction worn with blatant irony. Leather bras littered sex shops, suspender belts sold in droves, silver-spangled chokers lined teenage necks.
The mood and overall zeitgeist in the seventies was relentlessly agitated. It went against all peace-favouring paths that bohemian hippies and airhead space girls of the 1960s had tread out. It was grounded in grassroots reality. “The 1970s were littered with Mary Whitehouse and the backlash to the Civil Rights liberation movement of the late 1960s, the Oil Crisis, and the Winter of Discontent,” says punk fetish designer, Jed Phoenix. “Punk probably provided a release from the pressure cooker of that.” Soon after, the movement exploded in popularity and sex references ran riot. Yet punks revelled in the angsty and controversial heat radiating it, not the romantic fire. “The sex motif of the early punk movement was about the shock value it was able to evoke, rather than any attempt at sensuality,” adds Hoddinott. It came after the Glam Rock movement and rejected the frills, the bell-sleeved frivolities that preceded it. Erotica, flashing the underside of a breast or ab-baring tears in a sleeveless vest – the sort that looked like a werewolf had ravaged your wardrobe – visualised the anger of the working class. Punks simply didn’t conform to politics or prim dress codes.
In the Covid-19 chaos today, unstable governments and pissed off youth groups are back for round two. Call it something of a hotbed revival, The Jam announced a tour this month just as a biography dropped on the pied-piper of punk, Malcalm Mclaren. Alongside his designer girlfriend, Vivienne Westwood, the duo came to shake pearl-necked seventies culture to its core. It’s easy to understand why the punk influence lasted, through genitalia t-shirts and pube-baring rubber trousers, Westwood creations were destined to be ogled at. And they still are. The clothing made oblique reference to anarchy, garments that seeped through the cracks of what society deemed modest. All sold together in a clothing store unabashedly titled “SEX”. Its inventory reads like a graphic novel: leather corsetry, dungeon harnesses, skull-tight latex masks. That’s what punk was all about though, raw provocation, everything linked by repulsion. Tartan is the spindle of fame around which all Westwood’s modern collections are spun into golden thread. The print became a tastemaker, one that embodied the fury of Scotsmen and came to define the rock music scene. So too did 430 King’s Road, London. It’s an address imbued with non-conformity and also the meeting ground for alleged sexual meetings, raunchy rendezvous. The store was frequented by musicians including Siouxsie Sioux who set the tone for sex-dressing. Femme punks traded short skirts for skimpy bondage and were ready to revolt, both on stage and pillaging the streets. Sex was now protest armour – far from its intimate, cocooned past – and Westwood led the charge.
The proximity to erotica was not entirely visual. Punk built up a sex work boomtown, incubating the red light district into a place of acceptance. There was a desire: “to do your own thing, not to conform to society’s expectations, question the status quo,” says historian Beatrice Behlen, so it was natural for punks to reside in social groups that felt just as rejected. In these city nooks, from London to New York, punk bubbled up between bored teenagers as a means to maintain some sense of dominance. It found similarity in the sex work industry, BDSM and punk fused in a magnetic attraction, the two being subcultures equally shunned by mainstream opinion. Persistent rule-breaking led way for sexual experimentation, it laid blueprints for a radical queer agenda and shook up gender norms. Punk women, in their macerated fishnets and garters used prostitution as a style guide. The resultant backlash added to their identity, in becoming women that were fierce and unfazed by societal judgement. Without boundaries, punk lust could pervade tradition, openly dressing butch was observed to have an impact on changing sexualities. “There was a split in the lesbian and dyke community between those who were pro-porn, pro-sadomasochism and those who weren’t,” says Phoenix. For men, the prominence of cock-rockers was not far behind; male musicians that performed crudely, scantily-clad.
To this day, the influence of punk impales itself in the very flesh of contemporary fashion. Punk was never about love, only a hatred for conformity. The rampant relationship between sex and the scene became nothing more than a visual outlet for rebellion. From Westwood’s bondage to McQueen’s torn tartans, it aimed to repulse not to spark romance. In a nutshell, lead singer of The Sex Pistols, Johnny Rotten affirms: “Love is two minutes and fifty-two seconds of squelching noises.” If teenagers start ripping open their paint-splattered blouses in public today, just remember it’s not an avant-garde approach to finding a shag but rather audacious protest a la punk.
Designers to credit for the growing promiscuity of punk fashion (and it’s ever shrinking hemlines)
Vivienne Westwood It would be rude not to give Ms. Westwood a mention, being the mother of punk and all. Aside from her statements, the visionary gave punk a nautical twist with pirate hats and bustles, pushing out a new wave of change for decades to follow. Her emergence in the mid-1970s set not a trend but a vindictive youth manifesto. One that is cemented into the very foundations of good ol’ English tradition (and not so angelically, sex!).
Anna Sui Punk hasn’t always been scary, and Anna Sui brings out its novelty charm. Only a student in the 1970s, Sui grew to love the wild, untamed decade spirit. Its why her archives are littered with nods to punk – leather jackets upon zebra disco dresses and metallic A-lines. The Sui girl would be proper during the week and a rocker on weekends. A partial punk, if you will.
Zandra Rhodes Known for her pink hair, she’s the princess of punk and one of the first to mix up the look with whimsical textiles and girlish adornments. No other high fashion designer dared use safety pins as accessories on satin, but Rhodes didn’t give a shit. It paid off because her collections look like a successful collab somewhere between Barbie Girl and mobbing rioter. Pink to make the socialists wink, right?
Jean Paul Gaultier Punk and couture have more in common than meets the eye – and for that we have Gaultier to thank. When the music wasn’t dramatic enough, Gaultier plastered on an extra layer of shock with flouncing gowns and a pinch of BDSM. Skirts in aggressive yellow check pattern, then theatrical chainmail and pinned leathers. If Punk: The Musical existed, he would definitely have drawn up the costumes. We’d bet on it.
Alexander McQueen British bad boy McQueen had enough red, black and tartan on his catwalks to rival a bagpipe-maker. He wasn’t around designing in the 1970s (more post- millennium) but shared the same working class penchant for social improvement, not to mention a habit of unseating prudish fashion editors. One glance at the bumster trouser or sinister use of leather and the influence is more solid than punk rock itself.
Thumbnail image: Vivienne Westwood Archive