This article originally appeared in the August 16, 1977 issue of the Boston Phoenix.
Johnny Zero (the one with the studded leather dog collar around his neck) and Jimmy Blitz (he’s wearing the torn .44-Magnum Killer T-shirt) – both members of a New York punk band, the Dead Boys – are on stage at the Rat. Rita Ratt (it’s a combination name and title, she tells me), one of the better-known fashion plates of the local punk scene, is leaning against the bar toward the back of the club. She is concerned, so concerned that she is trying to talk over the music, a near-impossible task. Her problem: for the first time in the short history of punk rock, a history fairly dense with arrests, beatings and public outrage, many observers (including this reporter) are worried about its survival. The reason: punk music has somehow gotten involved with the fashion industry.
“Punk is shock chic,” People magazine declared a few weeks ago, and there doesn’t seem to be anything punks can do about it. They don’t like it; they know that any punk-fashion alliance would be an uneasy one (a Hell’s Angel’s boutique at Saks Fifth Avenue would stand a better chance) but they also know, deep down, that punk fashion – a style that synthesizes the influences of Iggy and the Stooges, Patti Smith, the Ramones, the Sex Pistols and others, an ingenious jumble of fish-net stockings, safety pins, rummage sale clothes, chains, torn shirts and sci-fi hairdos and makeup – could catch on in a big way. And public acceptance, for the hardened punk, is a depressing prospect: Sammy Davis Jr. with a torn black T-shirt and a dog collar, singing “I Got To Be Me” on Johnny Carson; Cher in a see-through safety-pin dress; Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme explaining their matching “Sex Pistols” T-shirts to Merv Griffin. A dangerous situation to be sure, one that would almost certainly drive the whole punk movement into shrimp-colored leisure suits.
But it hasn’t happened yet – so far, New York and London are the only cities to carry the look – and Rita Ratt, for one, doesn’t see why it should happen at all. “I just can’t understand why people would want to buy punk fashion in stores,” she says, “It looks so bad. The T-shirts say “Punk” in straight letters – straight neat letters – the rips and tears are hemmed, the safety pins are gold – it’s really sad.
“I mean, I wear T-shirts.” She opens her work jacket to reveal a black T-shirt with “Drop Dead” scrawled in white letters across the front. “I’m wearing this tonight for the Dead Boys, but I would never buy a punk T-shirt in a store. Punk is anti-fashion; we wear stuff that we find and make ourselves – like safety pins – you won’t find anyone in the Rat wearing that fashion stuff.”
“Punk may not be your cup of tea but, what the hell, some people will buy anything.”
–Boutique magazine, a retail clothing trade magazine
At Macy’s, a middle-aged couple and their teenage daughter are looking through the shirt department in the rear of the “New Ideas” department. The shirts are strange colors – purple, green, bright yellow. Some of them have rips, others have safety pins and small chains. All of them have sayings on the front: “Nasty,” “Reject!” “Good For Nothing,” “Punk Rock Rules!” etc.
“It’s punk rock,” the girl explains. “It’s $16 for a ripped shirt,” her mother replies. Nevertheless, they continue to browse through the racks. But when they reach the shirts with the cigarette burns and the rubber bats dangling from the collars, the mother starts tugging at her daughter’s sleeve. “Pam, you don’t want these,” she pleads. The father, who has been observing the situation with a wry grin, shakes his head and says, to no one in particular, “What a racket.”
A few minutes later the mother is cheerfully showing her daughter some sportswear on the other side of the room, and salesperson Theresa Dillon comes over. “We have these shirts in the back of the store now because everybody’s already got them. When we had them up front and were advertising, hell, everybody was buying ’em. The funny thing was that most of the people were not punks at all: they were usually well-dressed young women looking for the black ones that said ‘Punk’ – nothing too crazy.” I hold up my favorite, a yellow T-shirt with a white skull and daggers above desperate lettering that reads, “BOREDOM!”
“No, we didn’t sell many of those,” she says politely. After a short search she picks out a shredded white turtleneck so weighted down with chains that she is having trouble holding it. “Now this,” she says with a grin, “didn’t do too well, either.”
