As a teenager in the late 1970s, Kave Quinn dressed in black plastic bin bags. She would hack out a neckline and armholes with scissors, patch and shape them with safety pins and maybe add a belt and fishnets, until they looked something like a dress.
Quinn remembers doing all this at her home in the London suburbs after seeing the Sex Pistols on television. Her improvised ensembles were worn on long bus rides into town to see punk acts like Richard Hell, The Clash and the Ramones. Her use of rubbish receptacles, she says, was instinctive rather than any self-conscious visual metaphor for the futility of existence. As a 17-year-old, Quinn says she was “just trying to look the opposite of sexy”.
Quinn, now 62, drew on her bin-bag memories for her role as production designer on Pistol, the forthcoming Sex Pistols biopic series made for television by Danny Boyle and based on Lonely Boy, the memoirs of the band’s guitarist Steve Jones.
In one episode, the character of Jeannie — a young punk from the north of England who travels to London to form a band — is seen fleetingly wearing a bin-bag dress. Her styling is a direct lift from Quinn’s youth: “She’s a reflection of me at that age.”
As well as memories, Quinn scoured 1970s film footage and pored over photographs with costume designer Liza Bracey and the actors, to try to deconstruct how punks assembled and wore clothes. Quinn also worked with Murray Blewett, Vivienne Westwood’s archivist, to recreate in painstaking detail pieces from Westwood’s punk boutique on London’s King’s Road, which operated under ever-changing names including Let It Rock, Sex and Seditionaries, and from which Westwood directed the Sex Pistols’ look.
Another key adviser to the creative team on Pistol was Jordan — whose given name was Pamela Rooke — the model, actress and scenester who worked for Westwood in her boutiques in the mid to late 1970s. Rooke, who died last month aged 66, spent time with Quinn, Bracey and the actors to help them understand how and why she assembled her startling look.
The generation depicted in Pistol are now in their sixties and seventies. Many former punks, including Quinn, say that their interpretations of punk style were broader, more complex and creative than is often recognised today. They also say that their punk style — or elements of it — has never left them.
Quinn has kept some of her own late-1970s clothing: a yellow zippered miniskirt — “We were going to use it in the series but it wasn’t quite right. Zips were later, more Clash-era than Sex Pistols-era” — and an array of mohair jumpers. Some 45 years later, her punk heritage still informs her style. Quinn’s hair, once short and pink, is now punk-short and grey. She still wears a Westwood pirate blouse from the early 1980s.
John Robb, 61-year-old author and bassist with English punk band The Membranes, has had the same haircut since 1978: a mostly shaved skull with a spiked, rockabilly quiff. (“I go to this great barber in Manchester called Strangeways Tony — he learnt how to cut hair in prison.”) Neither has the rest of Robb’s style changed. He is, he says, still a punk.
“Punk has become codified over the years into a leather jacket and Mohican,” he says. “But that’s not the whole look. It was a confluence, as if pop culture had gone backwards in time with a pair of scissors and joined everything back together.”
Robb remembers how, as a teenager in north-west England, he found it impossible to buy the exotic, expensive gear created by Westwood. Instead, he would buy “demob suits” — 1940s pinstripes issued to returning servicemen by the government after the second world war — from charity shops, then customise them with rudimentary needlework. “Oxfam was your go-to for punk-rock clothes in the north,” he says. “You could ruck it up and make weird juxtapositions.”
Robb’s DIY approach was in a punk tradition. In his biography of Malcolm McLaren, the writer Paul Gorman notes that the Sex Pistols’ manager and impresario had been customising tailoring in the same way, as an art student in the late 1960s. McLaren used shears to tear and fray fabric to create what he described as “a style that couldn’t be bought, you had to be it, know it, wear it as an attitude”.
Robb has not kept his original outfits (“I don’t want my life to be a museum”). He still favours smart suiting with Teddy Boy shoes, though now his shirts are tailor-made. “I like sharp cuts,” he says. “But if I stood next to someone who worked in the City, I wouldn’t look anything like them. It’s the tiny codes that make punks look different.”
Like Robb, Alice Bag of Los Angeles punk band the Bags still wears the “home-made, painted and refashioned” ensembles she wore as a frontwoman in the late 1970s. “I was influenced by a band called The Weirdos. I think there was a dada influence there and it really spoke to me,” she says. Her cartoonish, slightly kitsch 1950s look, with changeable hair colour ranging from electric blue to canary yellow, has stayed pretty much consistent, and still informs her choice of stage gear today.
A lack of money also spurred Bag’s inventions. “I was influenced by poverty,” she says. “Then and now, I shop almost exclusively at second-hand stores, garage sales, swap meets and flea markets.”
Where do former punks think the style — which was expressed differently in the UK, the US and Europe — came from? For Robb, punk style was certainly a way for young people to shape their world. “Teddy Boy shoes, drainpipes, demob suits and rocker styles were all mixed up in it — a lot of things that had gone before were put back into a different order to create a different future,” he says. “Even hair was cut-and-paste — you shaved chunks of it out.”
For Quinn, black plastic bin-bag dresses were an expression of the very teenage act of self-discovery: “You were trying to place a question mark over who you were.”
Not all former punks still dress as they did 45 years ago. Gaye Black, 65-year-old former bassist with English punk band The Adverts, says she has toned down her glowering, glamorous stage look, which often involved black leather. “I try to look inconspicuous now because I’m really quite shy,” she says.
But in other ways, Black — aka Gaye Advert — has barely changed. “I’m still walking around in T-shirts with band logos on — The Damned, UK Subs, the Heartbreakers — all sorts.” Her dark hair remains the same, and until recently she occasionally dyed it bubblegum pink. She kept most of her 1970s band T-shirts for years until they finally disintegrated, with the exception of a Sex Pistols T-shirt given to her by McLaren, which she sold to a collector in New York.
It was Black’s deadpan face that, in 1977, stared out in defiance from the sleeve of the Adverts’ single “One Chord Wonders” and its promotional material. The band split up in 1979, but Black’s bleached-out image is still reproduced on T-shirts. “Increasingly I come across people wearing it in the street, and I’m confronted with my own face.”
This article was amended to reflect that John Robb is the bassist with The Membranes, who continue to perform
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Letter in response to this article:
Straights and short hair meant moral panic in ‘76 / From Mark Jones, Bath, UK