Cyberpunk

Youth and fashion movement that was more or less spontaneous. In strict tailoring terms, it goes back to 1983, when Westwood and McLaren’s Nostalgia of Mup Collection succeeded in influencing a generation of fashion designers, especially Kei Kawakubo, the brilliant heretic at Comme des Garµons, and Yoshi Yamamoto. All that year, and later, it wasn’t unusual on the street to see bandages and gauze worn as proud “badges,” as signs of survival and indicators of a style to come. This is remembered as the post-atomic style. By definition, cyberpunk style joins cybernetics, a system that studies artificial intelligence from a biological model, and the heritage of punk, with the accent on “heritage” in the sense of “what remains.” Then there appeared a group of designers-recyclers who used the useless scraps of a technologically advanced society to form movable “dragster” pieces of sculpture, such as those produced by the members of the Mutoid Waste Company, along with body ornaments that emphasized the already-occurred physical and psychic mutations. Obviously, when talking about cyberpunk, one must mention William Burroughs, Bruce Sterling, and J.C. Ballard as the noble fathers of the movement, as well as Guy Debord, who, in the post-situationist version of the phenomenon, expanded his influence to include Clark and Tom Vague, respectively the editors of The Psychedelic Encyclopedia and Vague, the semi-official organs of the movement that were very often visited by enthusiasts looking for more information.