Skip to main content
A semi-friend emailed me a question about punk stuff (she knows I like "weird"--her term--music and I make clothes, so I guess this made sense to her?). I spent my lunch hour Googling DIY punk clothes, using various terms. I saw a lot more This Is Not Punk and This Is Suburban Faux Punk claiming to be Punk than I did actual Punk. I mean I could be wrong about this since I'm definitely not punk, but I don't think so. Jelly-bean semicircle miniskirt? Not Punk in my book.
Unexpectedly, this makes me a little sad. I remember the punks hanging out outside the mall when I was a kid. Real punks. I was scared to death of them, but now I'm afraid that they have been driven out of their aesthetic territory by those blasted hipsters, as I was when hipster culture ate flannel shirts and old-time music (and yes, I even like this band, but I have ambiguous feelings about them). Now I have to wear pencil skirts to look eccentric. I'm not kidding.
A moment of silence, please.
Comments
To me, Punk is both an homage to a musical and fashion style and (more importantly) an ethos about how to subvert the common (consumerist) culture, so I think DIY clothing and music fits nicely. If it's handmade and authentic, it's Punk... maybe not 'Sex Pistols punk' (but I'm not sure they really were anyways), but True Punk in an avant garde, individualistic way.
As an 80's 'punk', who had to dive thru bins of dreck to find my vintage and weird clothes and amend what I found, seeing kids buy their bondage pants at the MALL, just chaps me! I know that make me sound like an old codger and I'm okay with that. :^) And props on The Devil Makes Three! They're a great band.
I was just sad that so little of what I found was DIY! I'm a little too young to have been a "real" punk (I'm solidly Generation Grunge, although I never got into the music) but I'm guessing these kids were shredding and spray-painting their own clothes. Not so much anymore, from what I see now. Even DIY is so . . . cutesy-fied. I did whatever the live-person equivalent is of rolling over in one's grave when I started seeing Hello Kitty-style skulls on stuff.
The stuff that was punk-style was commercial, and the DIY stuff was so candy-colored.
Sigh.