2013 Costume Institute Exhibit : "PUNK: Chaos To Couture"

[lepetitcouturier]

Are there no pictures of the actual outfits themselves? Or is it just runway pictures and editorial? I could just use the internet and save the thirty dollars xD

 

[Label Basher]

What time does this start so I can work out the time difference???

 

[softgrey]

Andrews introduction spans over 6 pages btw.
*Snapped by Chanelcouture09

WOW!!!

the book looks A---MAZING---~!!!




thx SO much for the preview!!!


...

love you CC...

 

[Cold]

What time does this start so I can work out the time difference???

7 PM EST

Thanks for the scans, Richard! I think there are also some essays included. Most of its contents were taken from the original Punk Couture book published in 2009 but I don't think it's available anymore. It would've been interesting if Gene Krell contributed, he has a lot to say regarding this.

 

[Zazie]

Isn't punk more about a music movement, art & graphics, anti-fashion attitude of putting together "found" clothes (hence safety pins) than fashion? Doesn't make sense to me for fashion to co-opt its nemesis.

The only high-end designer who is anywhere near "punk" in attitude is Martin Margiela.

CdG, Westwood, etc., are nowhere subversive, they're selling distinctively brand image, very much about commerce.

 

[lepetitcouturier]

Isn't punk more about a music movement, art & graphics, anti-fashion attitude of putting together "found" clothes (hence safety pins) than fashion? Doesn't make sense to me for fashion to co-opt its nemesis.

The only high-end designer who is anywhere near "punk" in attitude is Martin Margiela.

CdG, Westwood, etc., are nowhere subversive, they're selling distinctively brand image, very much about commerce.

I have to slightly disagree with with the last part. Rei has not sold out. She's just as (or slightly, and I mean slightly, less) innovative as she was thirty years ago. She's the only one who can do two dimensional clothes that actually sell. Although I will agree with Westwood. She used to be punk's god-mother. But now she's just creating clothes that are just trying to live up to her legacy.

But I agree with you on fashion co-opting punk. I get that they're trying to show punk's influence on fashion, but it just seems stupid that if something has safety pins or spikes or something that just seems extremely innovative, then that applies to punk.

 

[Zazie]

lepetitcouturier, I see what you're saying. I do place CdG, Rick Owens, Hussein Chalayan, etc. in another category - that of fashion as "art" designers, creating and originating innovative ideas and concepts, pushing boundaries, etc., which elevates them from the Balmains, Armanis and Ralph Laurens of this world. Without them, fashion is a purely boring commercial enterprise with no spirit or soul.

CdG does "punk" sometimes, eg. her scarf dresses, but MM's artisanal collections though, are pure punk in spirit, salvaging, recycling, creating beautiful art pieces out of inexpensive found objects, in defiance of what constitutes "fashion". I think to me, there's that crucial though subtle difference, and he's also punk in his reclusive nature and absolute refusal to be part of the Fashion PR system.

I know, I know, he sold to Diesel....that's not punk, and another story.


Can't think of anyone else out there who's punk to me...sad. What they're doing with this ball is the caricature of "punk"....oooh, graffiti and safety pins! How badass! I wonder if Versace did that safety-pin dress as a satire or he truly believed in his own bs?

 

[Thefrenchy]

Punk Without the Down and Dirty

By SUZY MENKES
Published: May 6, 2013

NEW YORK — Ah! Sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll. Where would the anarchic world of punk be without them?

In much the same state as the sanitized and bloodless version of punk’s origins and influence delivered by the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the name of fashion.

The blasting music catches the pounding energy that ought to be at the heart of “Punk: Chaos to Couture,” which opens to the public Thursday and runs through Aug. 14. But the only moment the show gets faintly down and dirty is in the re-creation of grimy and gritty toilets of the 1970s East Village club CBGB. Even that comes minus any tawdry signs of vomiting or drug-taking (or any reference to Marcel Duchamp).

The entire exhibition ignores any negative aspects of punk like swastikas or drugs — unless you count the Ramones singing “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue.”

Even the hair — that leitmotif of the period as a rejection of hanging hippie tresses — comes through as identical frizzy wigs, like uninspired Afros.

How could Andrew Bolton, the brilliant and cerebral museum curator, whose blockbuster shows have included the Alexander McQueen retrospective and last year’s fusion of Elsa Schiaparelli with Miuccia Prada, have made punk seem so dull?

Mr. Bolton said that he did not want to “parody” the spikes and mohawks, and gave those directions to the exhibition’s hairstylist Guido Paulo. Yet the fantastical hairdos and extraordinary makeup, requiring hours of artistic imagination, were emblematic of defiant, anarchic, rebellious individuals kicking against the boredom of being no-hopers. The hair was as significant as the do-it-yourself clothing.

And why wouldn’t Mr. Bolton, given his intelligent and intellectual foreword to the accompanying book, have linked that nihilistic spirit of London’s political and social crisis in the 1970s to other 20th-century movements like Dada?

“Everyone has an opinion about punk,” said Mr. Bolton as he prepared for the opening gala on Monday night. “It was difficult to keep my thoughts and my focus when it means so much to so many different people who respond to it emotionally.”

He also emphasized that the focus of the exhibition is the enduring influence of the low-down punk on high fashion.

The show opens with Richard Hell, the American luminary of punk, backed up by others including Blondie (New Wave) and Patti Smith. The latter might be seen rather as the end of the hippie era when compared with the British punks whom Johnny Rotten (John Lydon) of the Sex Pistols described as “utterly fearless.”

Then there is Vivienne Westwood, who, driven by Malcolm McClaren, her partner, offered a sense of rowdy revolution. Her vibrant plaid bondage pants, furry sweaters and anarchic T-shirts make a striking display, interspersed with pieces in a similar spirit, like torn dresses and hose from Rodarte.

The rebel-yell T-shirts include the infamous punk Queen Elizabeth. And an outrageous Westwood commentary from the designer can be heard on a 1970s film, played on a period television set, placed in a re-created version of the couple’s store on King’s Road in London. Its name was changed from “Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die,” to “Sex” and then to “Seditionaries” as their ideas evolved, says Ms. Westwood, claiming that she did not see herself as a fashion designer “but as someone who wished to confront the rotten status quo through the way I dressed.”

That is more or less it for examples of original 1970s punk. The next four rooms, their grandiose high ceilings suggesting salons of haute couture, are filled with four decades of punk inspirations, right up to Burberry’s current silver studs.

The ranks of high-fashion outfits, shown with no context, start with punk’s first appropriation as wedding and evening dresses by Zandra Rhodes in 1975. That faces off the flesh-exposing black dress, held together with gilded safety pins down the side, that shot Elizabeth Hurley into paparazzi heaven in 1994 at the London premiere of “Three Weddings and a Funeral.”

Some of the clothes — the recent collection made by Gareth Pugh from garbage bags or the shredded complexity of Comme des Garçons — absolutely deserve their place as imaginative bricolage. Yet the exhibition is static, neglectful of digital opportunities to show the runways and to bring clothes to life, as the Victoria & Albert Museum in London does with its current dramatic screen-filled study of David Bowie.

To take John Galliano’s recycled shreds and threads for Dior haute couture entirely out of context is to lose the detailed intricacy of broken beauty; and to fail to explain why bringing Dior down to the level of punky do-it-yourself seemed so scandalous.

Having attended every single collection that brought these stationary clothes to life, I can remember the impact of Martin Margiela’s models, dressed in transparent dry-cleaning bags, walking the suburbs of Paris followed by gawping multicultural kids.

I watched the designer Katharine Hamnett, wearing a T-shirt declaring war on nuclear missiles, encounter British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1984. But how many museum visitors will know it as the source of the famous image? And how would they understand its relationship as “graffiti and agitprop” to splash-paint ball dresses from Dolce & Gabbana or the colorful work of Stephen Sprouse?

The final room, focusing on destroy and deconstruction, creates a valid place in fashion history, even if the museum was unable to get the piece that started it all: the famous “gruyère cheese” sweater with deliberate holes from Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons.

The premise of the exhibition is worthwhile. But the Metropolitan Museum is facing a quandary. Its much-anticipated, celebrity-fueled, fundraising galas risk overwhelming the museum shows themselves.

However intelligent and intellectual Mr. Bolton’s commentary in the catalog, the imaginative and often exceedingly expensive concoctions walking the red-carpeted steps on Monday night may well outshine the exhibition.

The true punks — those who lived and survived that moment — should find an exquisite irony in the idea that their no-future kick at a dead-end society should, 40 years on, have moved from a defiant statement from society’s impoverished and self-proclaimed social outcasts to a display of clothes for global celebrities and the super-rich having a ball.

- NYTIMES.COM

 

[godsavethhequeen]

i cant wait to see the red carpet!

 

[melfreya]

i cant wait to see the red carpet!

Do we know what time it starts for us in Europe?!
Posted via Mobile Device

 

[LucaNatashaFan]

Do we know what time it starts for us in Europe?!
Posted via Mobile Device

It starts at 1am the livestream for us in Europe (Italy, Germany, France, Spain etc), if you are in UK, Ireland then 12am

 

[Ives927]

To me, this exhibit feels nothing more than a 13 year old girl trying to be cool and different by dressing up in what she believes to be punk and not really participating in the subculture itself. It's quite the antithesis of what punk really is. This lacks honesty, authenticity, and depth. Judging from the photos I have seen so far, they seem to have curated whatever designer looks that they believe to look punk (if it has safety pins and studs, it's got to be punk!!).
Posted via Mobile Device

 

[godsavethhequeen]

Watch the Met Gala Red Carpet Live
http://www.vogue.com/videos/met-gala-2013-red-carpet-live-stream/

 

[godsavethhequeen]

It seems that Rosie will be pink hair lady tonight

Pink hair punk! What do you think?! #MetBall2013 #punkcouture

instagram.com/rosiehw

 

[Scott]

i have to say i completely agree with suzy here. i especially love that last sentiment.....it is pretty ironic to see the pinnacle of tastefulness conjugate with the era of vulgarity,tastelessness and utter rebellion against the high society.

 

[Scott]

Spike & Scott (that's almost like a punk duo LOL Fair enough of Cher and Bjork's "punky" spirit.

Hollywood would never wear real Helmut, classic MMM and CdG.

hehe...

hopefully there will be attendees outside the parameters of hollywood that show up. like social/cultural figures who maybe longtime devotees of comme and MMM since the 80's. i would love if somebody happened to show up in one of MMM's dry cleaner bag ensems

 

[happycanadian]

KK will be wearing Mary Katrantzou tonight. Just went through the last 4 collections trying to find something sorta punk-inspired ... not much, but there are definitely some epic looks that someone like KK could really werk on the red carpet. Though I doubt anything could live up to the golden-turbaned-goddess Rachel Zoe look from last year. That was magnificent.

 

[melfreya]

It starts at 1am the livestream for us in Europe (Italy, Germany, France, Spain etc), if you are in UK, Ireland then 12am

Thank you so much!!
Posted via Mobile Device

 

[KhaoticKharma]

hehe...

hopefully there will be attendees outside the parameters of hollywood that show up. like social/cultural figures who maybe longtime devotees of comme and MMM since the 80's. i would love if somebody happened to show up in one of MMM's dry cleaner bag ensems

I'm really hoping at least one socialite with her own awesome, unique sense of style brings it for us tonight (Amanda Harlech, where are you when we need you!? Or maybe Daphne Guinness?!). Because I can promise you, the celebrities will not. Don't want to offend middle American moms with your outlandish fashion choices, and miss out on that prime role in the next ensemble rom-com based around a holiday...

I think if I were going tonight, I'd go for some Ann Demeulemeester. Maybe not inherently punk, but the influences are there- especially with some hardcore accessories

 

[Cold]

hehe...

hopefully there will be attendees outside the parameters of hollywood that show up. like social/cultural figures who maybe longtime devotees of comme and MMM since the 80's. i would love if somebody happened to show up in one of MMM's dry cleaner bag ensems

Marina Abramovic is a huge fan of Margiela. But even if she is attending, Tisci most likely already got dibs to dress her.

I'm following the #metgala stream on twitter and I just read a tweet comparing the displays to a department store "I feel like I'm in forever 21" oh god, that's gotta be the worst from someone who is/was at the Met Gala preview.