Fashion, Style & Popular Culture - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2015

From the late 1970s through the late 1980s, Atlanta, Georgia, played host to a thriving Punk scene that developed its own varied and unique way of navigating within both dominant hegemonic southern culture and the established Punk subcultural style. In terms of dress, the Atlanta scene featured elements of global Punk style such as spiked and studded leather jackets and brightly coloured Mohawks alongside regional-style variations. This article aims to shed light on the way the Atlanta Punk scene worked off a balance between the influence of global Punk fashion and locally initiated style trends that responded to the specific characteristics of youth cultures and society in the south of the United States. The beginning of the Atlanta Punk scene may be tied to the US debut of the Sex Pistols, who played the Great Southeast Music Hall on 5 January 1978. At the time of the concert Atlanta Punk rock fans did not yet constitute a particular subculture. After the seminal Sex Pistols concert, however, a Punk scene quickly developed in the neighbourhood of Little Five Points where two major Punk clubs, Metroplex and 688, were located. Newspaper and magazine articles of the period described the clothing choices of performers and fans emphasizing how Atlanta punks differentiated themselves from the conservative southern concert. Punk acts and fans adopted a variety of trends including the do-it-yourself (DIY) culture and a revival of rockabilly fashion, best demonstrated by the home-grown band The Restraints. Perhaps just as telling were specific elements that were absent from the scene such as skinhead motifs and any indication of gender interplay or androgynous clothing. An exception was singer Phreddy Vomit, who often wore feminine make-up and fur. This article narrates the early development and basic characteristics of the Atlanta Punk scene describing some of the venues and the clothing pieces present and absent from some of the local Punk acts and their fans.

Many musicians working in the avant-garde of American jazz in the post-Civil Rights era publicly aligned themselves with black power cultural ideologies. The Afrocentric fashions worn by some of these musicians were a visual representation of their cultural beliefs and endure as a major component of the musical form’s legacy. This article reevaluates these performers’ standing in popular culture, recognizing them as fashion innovators on top of being musical revolutionaries. These musicians’ adventurous style lives on in popular culture through fashion statements in hip hop, neo soul and other musical genres.

Many historical analyses of the cultural impact of the Beatles have noted, but failed to explore, the overall significance of the group’s visual imagery. In a decade when fashion and music became recognized as two of the principal elements in British popular culture and quickly developed into profitable global businesses, the group’s stylistic choices and modes of display became crucial components of its continuing story. Inspired by influences drawn from the United States, Liverpool, Hamburg, London and India, the Beatles presented a succession of visual identities that charted their transition from a local, semi-professional group of musicians to international arbiters of taste and style. Their manipulation of new and existing styles also paralleled the Beatles’ departure from a career built around a collective sensibility to one characterized by the rejection of uniformity and the demonstration of an unexpected independence.

Dressed as a dandy, a bureaucrat, a regional schoolteacher or even as an undertaker, French composer Erik Satie was easily spotted in Paris during the first half of the twentieth century. Hundreds of testimonies and anecdotes about the musician reveal that his appearance was perceived in itself as an artistic statement. After World War I he was known as ‘The Velvet Gentleman’ to the anglophile artists of Montparnasse and during the last 25 years of his life; not even on the sunniest of days in the Ville Lumière did he leave his house without his famous umbrella. With all these eccentric uniforms, Satie embraced his lifelong habit of defying preconceived notions of the connections between art and everyday life. The self-image he carefully tailored was in clear opposition to the setting of his room in the suburb of Arcueil-Cachan, which he never cleaned or tidied up. Satie is hence an interesting case study of the opposition of private and public image as well as of the unification of art and life. Many of his friends recall that watching him come out of his house was like seeing an actor going onstage.

In stark contrast to the widespread popularity of the Gothic literary genre in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, goth music and goth fashion were largely relegated to subculture from their inception in the late 1970s. Over the past decade, however, goth fashion has moved past its musical counterpart into ubiquity, stretching its shadow-laced fingers across popular culture and into contemporary hip hop as artists incorporate goth aesthetics and Gothic literary themes into their expanding style lexicons. From the ‘Ghetto Gothic’ fashions of A$AP Rocky and Mykki Blanco to the monochromatic macabre videos of Jay-Z and Kanye West, the sartorial signs of the doomed undead are now de rigueur in rap, and washes of reverb-laden guitar beneath mournful Anglo-European voices are no longer prerequisites for sepulchral style. Contrary to the authenticity-obsessed goth scene, this phenomenon can be viewed as momentary ‘Gothic drag’, or more in keeping with hip hop culture, as ‘aesthetic sampling’ that mirrors the long-standing tradition of music sampling in rap. Rather than standing in opposition to classic definitions of goth subculture or Gothic literary tropes, the cultural syncretism in today’s hip hop serves to revitalize and recontextualize the entire macabre genre, rendering it more inclusive of diversity and free from its characteristic restraints.

Ever since the beginning of post-subcultural studies, youth studies have developed in the direction of theorizing on the decreasing emphasis on the significance of a coherent style, towards the disappearance of subcultural boundaries and a switching between identities. In our article we are going to demonstrate that in some cases subcultures maintain and defend their style. By highlighting studies of German punks and skinheads and the Estonian metal scene, we show how subcultures develop strategies for defining the boundaries of their scene and collective identity. Subcultures prompt an inner discussion about the ‘real’ and ‘wannabe’ ways of being a member of a scene. We show in the case of German skinheads that a purist cult of ‘old-school’ clothing can appear and demonstrate with the example of Estonian metal fans that a subculture can choose and focus on some elements of style which they claim to be ‘theirs’ and which become central symbols for the metal style. The main platforms for these discussions within both subcultures are printed fanzines and face-to-face interactions. In this manner subcultures develop the ‘communities of practice’, which is critical to the commercialization of former subcultural dress and other commodities. Using social network theories we show that subcultures are capable of establishing methods of inner social control and initiating discussions with the aim of establishing clear boundaries between the mainstream society and their scene, through controlling the ‘meaning of style’. This demonstrates that in combination with network theories the classic subculture theory can still be relevant for understanding music-related social groups.

Fashion Rules: Dress from the Collections of HM The Queen, Princess Margaret and Diana, Princess of Wales, Kensington Palace, London, 4 July 2013–Summer 2015

David Bowie is inside…

David Bowie Is, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 23 March–11 August 2013

Vampire Culture, Maria Mellins (2013) London, New Delhi, New York, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 149 pp. ISBN: 9780857850751, p/bk, $29.95

Punk Style by Sklar, Monica Sklar (2013) London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 173 pp. ISBN: 9781847884220, p/bk, £17.99

Are you Queer? Or are you just dressed well?

Queer Style, Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas (2013) United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Academic, 208 pp. ISBN-13: 9781847881960, p/bk, $29.95

Slogan T-Shirts: Cult and Culture, Stephanie Talbot (2013) London: Bloomsbury, 176 pp. ISBN: 9781408157541, p/bk, $34.95