Are You Punk Enough For Couture?

The Graffiti Room (www.style.com)

The Metropolitan Museum in New York opens its doors this week to the annual Costume Institute exhibition with this year’s theme, Punk: Chaos to Couture. It looks back to honour the roots of the antiestablishment counterculture that emerged in the seventies and how this ended up inspiring and influencing all levels of the fashion world from then till now.

The exhibition show cases many high end designers with pieces that perhaps were never intended to be worn in any form, and were merely used as shock factors on the runway. The question surely then has to be asked, is it really punk if its couture? If it causes discomfort, then that’s surely a nod in the right direction.

It all comes down to the truism that everything old is new again, and when considering fashion everything really has been done before but the magic is how it is interpreted and reinterpreted. Surely everyone has had a go at punk, whether it be street level or couture. If you look back and see a (fake) leather jacket, ripped jeans, a safety pin holding something together even if unseen, that rebellious piercing or tattoo when you were 16, the political t-shirt you now just wear to bed…It might not be properly hard core but there’s an undercurrent just as there is a flower child in us all as well!

So get a little disruptive this weekend, provoke your inner punk and meld in a little DIY couture just for the hell of it.

John Lydon 1976 (Photo, Ray Stevenson/Rex USA) and Junya Watenabe FW 06/07 (Photo, Catwalking)

The style that epitomised the punk era of the 70’s (www.sodahead.com)

Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren punk’s parents (Photo, Suzanne Dechillo The New York Times)