Punk

Spontaneous youth fashion movement. Their older brothers shouted “Make love not war,” but at the end of the 1970s, their own motto was “No future.” The punk movement was born in England but had soon gripped youth all over the West. The hippy styles of parkas, clogs and flowered skirts were overtaken by a very aggressive look: black, studs, chains, ripped tights, safety pins, and Doc Martins boots. Punk fashion preferred synthetic fibers (vinyl, fake leather, and plastic), and took to the extreme an ideology of dirty, ugly, ripped-up clothes. The great interpreters of punk ideology were groups such as the Sex Pistols and the Clash, whilst from a fashion point of view, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s shop Sex, on the Kings Road in London, was the only place to go. Thirty years later, Westwood’s clothes have not changed style, but her prices are those of a couture designer. The remaining Sex Pistols (Sid Vicious died of a drug overdose in the 1980s) regrouped for a new album, provoking a wave of punk nostalgia. Meanwhile in the USA, punk has been kept alive thanks to William Gibson’s literary cyberpunk movement — a provocative type of science fiction which has won the hearts and minds of a new generation.