Punk fashion at the Met

It’s not every day that an august institution such as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art puts on a show dedicated to me and my teenage friends. But that is the case with “Punk: Chaos to Couture”, an exhibition that focuses on punk rock’s influence on fashion.

On display in the opening room are classic T-shirts that we wore to concerts in Britain during the mid-to-late 1970s. There’s a T-shirt bearing graphic designer Jamie Reid’s ironic “God Save The Queen” design, made in 1977, the year of Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee, for the Sex Pistols’ banned anti-monarchy track of the same name. There’s also Vivienne Westwood’s “Anarchy in the UK” T-shirt, named for the Sex Pistols’ single that started it all off.

Also on show is a shirt depicting a pair of bare breasts so that the wearer looks topless – a design once worn by Siouxsie Sioux – and what used to be known as the “gay cowboys” T-shirt, perhaps the only one that would still have some shock power this year. Back then, none of us could have foreseen that one day these T-shirts, along with other punk favourites such as bondage trousers and tartan kilts, would appear in an establishment like the Met.

What’s more, if we had known, we would have hated the idea.

That’s because although punk was never a political philosophy, it was rooted in anti-establishment feeling. It was a demonstration of working-class pride and solidarity. People were always trying to tell you what to do if you were working class in the ‘70s, and punk rock was a way of sticking your fingers up to the lot of them. Anything to do with the establishment was considered the enemy. We would have hated the thought of our clothes being shown in a museum in the future, as that would have been seen as a betrayal of what it was all meant to be about.