Fashion
The desire to be different, to stand out and be noticed, is something which is now synonymous with the punk movement in music and fashion.
But with today's constant cravings for the Next Big Thing, the ravenous consumption and reinvention of ideas old and new, are we in danger of making originality a thing of the past?
In the Middle Ages, a secret society of men disillusioned with the political statues quo robbed their way across central Europe, slashing their Tudor robes as a sign of their banditry and protest.
The look was copied at courts all across Europe, with noble men and women slashing their oversleeves to reveal flashes of a different material underneath. The fact that this was accepted as a current trend and grew so widespread meant that the original bandits ended up being pastiched.
Dissatisfaction with the social climate in the 1970s and 1980s, frustration over their helplessness to effect change, the yearning for the end of stuffy Toryism and the ineffectuality of the left wing opposition led the rising generation to turn to anarchy as an ideology, but lacked a political window in which to express their feelings.
The relatively new media of mass popular culture, particularly music and fashion, came into their own as a way of expressing discontent. In 1976, as the result of a long line of musical and stylistic evolution, from Elvis Presley through Iggy and the Stooges and the New York Dolls, Punk was born with the emergence of the Sex Pistols, who played their revolutionary first gig wearing the rips, zips, chains, Mohicans, safety pins and scandalous slogans with which we are now so familiar.
Woman of the moment Vivienne Westwood was the founding mother of punk fashion, providing the clothing, designs and inspiration for the attire of not only the Sex Pistols (whose manager was Westwood's partner) but many other influential bands. She certainly had a no-holds-barred attitude when it came to how to shock: her infamous boutique on the Kings Road opened in 1970, selling all kinds of punk clothing, from t-shirts with slogans made of chicken bones to rubber S&M suits to ripped clothes with pornographic text and images, and was often advertised on the naked buttocks of the designer herself and her friends, including Chrissie Hynde and Jordan.
Westwood's innovative designs and indeed the punk movement as a whole are nothing if not intensely British.
The blend of medieval splendour and chaotic punk which has characterized much of her work since the Sex Pistols' heyday took inspiration from those Tudor bandits whose anarchistic attitudes predated their modern counterparts by about half a millennium.
Revered as she is, however, Westwood's ethos has suffered the same kind of style-biting, being adopted and re-interpreted by a wealth of artists, musicians, designers and social groups throughout the past 20 years.
One need only flickbriefly through catwalk reports to see that biker boots and jackets, studs, belts, straps, leather, chains and buckles make their way into designer collections year after year.
The nation is certainly desensitised to what used to shock. A group of 12 year old girls walk down the High Street: one is wearing a tiny halter top with the slogan "FCUKs like a bunny" emblazoned across her pre-pubescent chest; another has three tattoos and a nose-ring; the other is chain smoking and telling her friends about how wasted she got last night. No-one bats an eyelid.
It would be ridiculous to argue that styles should not be made popular and evolve through the different ways in which people interpret them, even more so to advocate restriction of certain fashions to certain groups: this could not be further from the punk ethic itself.
In fact, the armies of pre-teens in skater-flares, spiky necklaces, Korn hoodies and too much eyeliner that would make even Ms Westwood want to burn her safety pins are no different from the endless supplies of designer copies brought to us by your wallet-friendly high street store.
Slashed-price version of designer items might seem economically heaven-sent, but in reality, might also be the devil taking the originality and political potency out of the art of fashion design.
22nd Apr 2004