Punk style

   A fashion movement that had its roots in the music world and, although it was believed to have started in New York City in the 1970s, historians now agree that it began sooner. Andy Warhol's Factory in the mid-1960s, the pop art movement, and the hippie movement that followed were incubators that set the stage for the next baby boomers' rebellion, punk. The Lower East Side in Manhattan was the hub of the music scene at the time with clubs like Max's Kansas City, CBGB, and Mother's, where bands like the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, the New York Dolls, and Patti Smith performed.

   Later, punk appeared in Great Britain with groups like the Sex Pistols, with band member names like Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious, and the Ramones, as part of the punk antiestablishment, working-class aesthetic. At first clothing was influenced by the American musicians who adopted black as their uniform. However, once British "glam rock" crossed the Atlantic, and Malcolm McClaren became the manager for the New York Dolls, he and his designer wife Vivienne Westwood defined the punk dress code. Their first shop on Kings Road, called Let it Rock, was followed by Too Fast To Live, then Sex, then Seditionaries, and the last one was called World's End. Westwood's punk style involved the use of bricolage, such as safety pins, ripped T-shirts, bondage trousers, and antiestablishment slo-ganed T-shirts and jackets. Black leather motorcycle jackets, black pants, Doc Marten work boots, body and facial piercing, crazy colored spiked hair, and mohawk haircuts were trademarks of "high-punk." By the late 1970s, punk was overly commercialized, resulting in its demise. However, the core belief of the punk movement lived on in all of the youth culture movements that followed, namely grunge and hip-hop.

   See also Rhodes, Zandra.