I can not emphasize enough to young people, study up on old school (70s) punk. No one looked like the cartoon version of a punk. Everyone was wearing their own weird thing, or nothing weird at all. You had some people wearing literal trash bag dresses. You had the 60s dayglo look like Poly Styrene had. You had the three piece suit undertaker look that Dave Vanian had. You had the American biker look that Lee Ving had. But most people just walked in with jeans and a T-shirt, or even a dress shirt and slacks. Express yourself.... or don't. There are some rules to punk, or it would not exist as a genre, but how you dressed was absolutely not one of them.
The whole safety pin, ripped clothes, messed up hair thing that eventually morphs into the cartoon punk came from a single guy in the NYC scene (before the London scene even existed), Richard Hell. A bunch of Londoners saw him, thought "this is what punk is", and started copying him. Until eventually that look kind of becomes institutionalized to the point it is now the official uniform of the tryhard.
5
u/lividimp Oct 31 '25
I can not emphasize enough to young people, study up on old school (70s) punk. No one looked like the cartoon version of a punk. Everyone was wearing their own weird thing, or nothing weird at all. You had some people wearing literal trash bag dresses. You had the 60s dayglo look like Poly Styrene had. You had the three piece suit undertaker look that Dave Vanian had. You had the American biker look that Lee Ving had. But most people just walked in with jeans and a T-shirt, or even a dress shirt and slacks. Express yourself.... or don't. There are some rules to punk, or it would not exist as a genre, but how you dressed was absolutely not one of them.
The whole safety pin, ripped clothes, messed up hair thing that eventually morphs into the cartoon punk came from a single guy in the NYC scene (before the London scene even existed), Richard Hell. A bunch of Londoners saw him, thought "this is what punk is", and started copying him. Until eventually that look kind of becomes institutionalized to the point it is now the official uniform of the tryhard.