A Spike in the Heart of Pretty: Punk Rocks Again
By RUTH LA FERLA
Published: October 26, 2004
Jasper Vigil, a singer with a band named Virus, gazed at a poster of the Ramones above the register at Trash & Vaudeville, the long-running rock boutique on St. Marks Place, where he moonlights as a salesman. "Ugly miscreants," Mr. Vigil muttered with affection. His own look — tar-colored, soap-stiffened hair, sleeveless black denim jacket, tight jeans — owed a clear debt to Joey Ramone and his unruly clan, the American granddaddies of punk.
Another salesman, Ian Michael, a member of a punk band called the Planks, was just as intimidating. His raggedy hair was blackened on one side and bleached white on the other — a stylized male Cruella De Vil. He hoped to look dangerous. "A little danger is kind of appealing, isn't it?" he asked.
Just when it seemed safe to look pretty again, with ladylike clothes in stores, punk has reared its spiky head, a compelling alternative to the ruffles, granny brooches, fox stoles and well-mannered tweeds that are this season's chief retail statement.
Punk's aggressively downbeat look — a pastiche of black leather jackets, shin-hugging jeans and festoons of chains — has showed up on a few runways, in ads and in the wardrobes of high-school hipsters.
Spurred in part by the return to the news of the Ramones — three of whose members have died in the last three years, prompting tributes in print and on concert stages — punk's influence is resurgent. Its wayward sensibility filtered into Karl Lagerfeld's black-and-white collection for the department store H&M, to be available in November. The collection includes black pegged pants with rows of safety pins running down the seams and white T-shirts emblazoned with Mr. Lagerfeld's image.
A more mannered incarnation of the Ramones, of Patti Smith and of other studiously seedy habitués of Max's Kansas City in the 1970's swaggered on the runway of Hedi Slimane, whose spring 2005 men's wear for Christian Dior was rife with Ramone clones in slim ties and striped pullovers.
Ann Demeulemeester, the Belgian designer who forged a career channeling Ms. Smith's maverick style, paraded slouchy white shirts and shredded skirts on her runway in Paris last month. And while that look has yet to infiltrate many big department stores, "Some of it looks good to me again," said Julie Gilhart, the fashion director at Barneys New York.
And it must have looked good, too, to Carine Roitfeld, the influential editor of French Vogue. The magazine's October issue featured a 10-page spread, "Sensation Punk," including a photograph by David Sim showing a cardigan that appeared to hang in tatters over the shoulders of a model. Its designer was Vivienne Westwood, the mother of Anglicized punk.
Two young Ramones fans, Allegra Fierro and Liana Perry, both eighth-graders at the Sacred Heart academy on the Upper East Side, scoured Trash & Vaudeville last week for outfits to wear to a guitar concert at their school. Ms. Fierro, wearing black socks and Keds, struggled to articulate why punk was enticing to her generation. "It's unique," she said, "not like anything I've seen before."
"It's funny: last year we were told we would all be wearing tweeds," said Irma Zandl, the president of the Zandl Group, a research and trend consulting company focused on youth. "Now we're back in black."
Punk, of course, has often been resurrected since the Ramones first thrashed around the stage of CBGB in the mid-70's. Its current expression is more polished, well mannered enough to be embraced, at least tentatively, by the fashion flock. That crowd responds to "a stylized version of punk," not to the unadulterated reality, said Ed Burstell, a New York retail consultant and a former general manager of Henri Bendel.
In some ways, he added, the return of punk is fashion's equivalent of a palate cleanser. "It brings a sense of visual relief," he said, predicting that while the pretty clothes now in stores will endure for a while, "no one is going to want to dress out of their grandma's attic anymore."
Punk's latest incarnation is also tame enough for mass consumption, vastly titillating to teenagers, many of them the younger siblings of the sensation-hungry upper middle class adolescents who a decade ago appropriated the baggy pants and oversize hoodies of hip-hop heroes. "When the mainstream culture gets really boring and bland, kids will go to any length to find something exciting," said Donna Gaines, a sociologist, a Ramones fan and the author of "A Misfit's Manifesto: The Spiritual Journey of a Rock & Roll Heart" (Villard, 2003).
Paradoxically, punk fashion, which still thrives in some quarters as a do-it-yourself look, its elements culled from thrift shops and family castoffs, now sells robustly on the Internet and at the mall.
The youth retail chain Hot Topic sells studded chain chokers and skull-and-bones T-shirts with tattoo sleeves. Interpunk, which has a popular Web site, offers grommeted plastic chokers, vinyl wrist cuffs "hand-crafted from an actual record," and shrunken-looking black Eisenhower jackets.
Trash & Vaudeville, where punk style is a constant, has felt a spike in demand for pointy-toe black Beatle boots, loose-fitting bondage pants of the sort favored by Avril Lavigne and fake leather Sid Vicious jackets. One day last week, the store sold thousands of dollars in punk paraphernalia, said Jimmy Webb, a buyer for the store, noting that a typical item goes for $60 to $80. "We see so many kids buying punk clothes," he said. "Some are no older than 7 or 8."
Mary Perry, who accompanied Liana, her daughter, to the boutique, said she saw no problem with the perky miniskirt the youngster chose to buy. "Last summer at camp I even let her do her hair green," Ms. Perry said. "But I don't let her go to extremes. No tattoos. No piercing." She sighed. "I guess you pick your battles."
to say nothing of her being the Anti-Christ 
jk
