There are insects preserved in amber and trees that have turned to stone by permineralisation. John Cooper Clarke has either got a painting in his attic à la Dorian Gray that can explain his looks or he has been miraculously and misteriously preserved by a strange concoction of heroine and other assorted legal and illegal substances that still allow you to illustrate a feature about him with a picture taken over ten years ago as if it had been taken yesterday. Ah, bless him. Yet this post is not about him, or rather not just about him.
As you may have heard, during "London Collections: Men" the punk poet with the mid-period Dylan hairstyle re-emerged as the unlikely icon of style at Topman's catwalk show. John Cooper Clarke read a poem written for the Autumn/Winter 2014 collection before the show opened.
Some critics spotted the return of a rocker style in the collection, though Clarke's shrunken tailored clothes and skinny trousers were mostly replaced by wide-legged pants (also seen on other runways including MAN and J.W. Anderson's) and the looks were distinctly British and went well with typical UK weather.
Creative director Gordon Richardson stated indeed the collection was inspired by Northern boys, bleak shipyards and laden skies. If you knew British cinema you may have spotted also another reference, films such as A Taste of Honey (1961) by Tony Richardson.
This movie follows the coming of age of Jo (Rita Tushingham), a young girl living wih a careless mother in Northern England. After her mother remarries and leaves her alone, Jo becomes pregnant by Jimmy, a black sailor who leaves her after a short while. She then befriends Geoffrey, a gay design student, who takes care of her at least until her domineering mother reappears on the scene.
There are references from this bleak movie also in the collection and in particular in the shipworkers' thick knits and turtlenecks, in the voluminous duffel coats with PVC panelling, pac-a-macs, blanket jackets (reinvented with fringes) and chunky bovver boots. Geoffrey's style also re-emerged here and there, reinterpreted in the more feminine cropped peacoats or in the zipped up jackets. Outerwear prevailed, almost to point out that the main idea was to provide a wardrobe for a dockyard job carried out under the rain.
John Cooper Clarke's poem, entitled "Top Man", also hinted at the Northern scene:
Razor wire and Gaffer tape / a footprint on a fire escape / PVC with a careless drape / a peacoat cut right outa shape / steel ropes and battleship chains / overarching cranes and trains / straight down the middle of the lanes / CLICK CLACK CLICKETY CLACK / return of the PAC-A-MAC / in a semi see-thru shade of black / this kick-ass boot with a heavy track / ask me and I'll come back with / speaking on as a professional poet / there's apparel, Jim, but not as we know it.
Apparel, Jim, watch this space / when winter shrinks your pretty face / a faint smile seems outa place / the final trace of an island race / BASS - how low can you go / no money down without I owe it / there's apparel, Jim, but not as we know it / return of the Pac-a-mac / in a semi see-thru shade of black / is worn by Ann Dvorak at that / after party at the Shanghai Spivak / ask me and I'll come back with / speaking as a professional poet / there's apparel, Jim, but not as we know it.
Recruiting the original punk poet John Cooper Clarke was the perfect thing to do for high street giant Topman to inject back into London's blood some genuinely revolutionary moods. But this wasn't the only attempt at reintroducing a bit of rebellion.
At Alexander McQueen's, Sarah Burton and the head of men's wear design Harley Hughes re-launched classically punk three-piece kilt suits, occasionally in pink and black tartan.
The punk elements weren't the only references to the past: the collection - showcased on a soundtrack that comprised "Bela Lugosi's Dead", a track that perfectly hinted at the dark sides dominating the collection - also featured geometrical stripes on gray suits or evening coats, and prints of Lucian Freud and of poet and translator Oliver Bernard, as portrayed by John Deakin. The photographs were printed on a trenchcoat and on crisp shirts, while embroidered bits and pieces of Bernard's "Peace Poems" were also used on a coat.
Deakin photographed the Soho art scene in the '50s, a further reference to the place where the show took place, the former Welsh Presbyterian church on Shaftesbury Avenue that was turned in the '80s into The Limelight and is currently awaiting conversion to a new performing arts venue.
The gold accents of this collection provided by zips or geometrical stripes running on coats and suits were used to highlight the darkness, rather than providing a sense of suffocatingly baroque refinement, almost to remind us that the insufferable neo-dandy of last season clad in soft jackets and wearing annoying velvet slippers, may have finally died a horrible dead to give more space to punk warriors in militaristic attire.
Also Katie Eary went for a punk approach: in her collection she mixed Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s Seditionaries styles and the creative energy of British artist Linder Sterling. The former reappeared in Eary's punk straightjackets (the answer to punk bondage pants?) and pleated kilts; the latter in the prints of monstrous collages featuring random bits and pieces of heads, teeth and lips and a Mickey Mouse silhouette (a few models also donned plastic Mickey Mouse heads on the runway).
Surely going back to punk and rebellion may not be a desperately innovative solution, but for too many reasons London committed the mistake of looking at other fashion capitals trying to adopt a more polished look and forgetting about its own history. Maybe the time has come to look back in anger at the past and reinvent through it a new radical future.
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