The Fashion Businesspicked up the light, and clothes that showed off the body. Indeed, disco helped
introduce underwear as outerwear. Especially popular were silken slip dresses
with spaghetti straps.
By contrast, punk rock spawned a deliberately “revolting style”. The punks
are most notorious for their ripped tee-shirts, Doc Marten boots, and “tribal”
hairstyles. As Dick Hebdige writes in Subculture: The Meaning of Style:
Safety pins were... worn as gruesome ornaments through the cheek, ear or lip.
‘Cheap’ trashy fabrics (plastic, lurex, etc.) in vulgar designs (e.g. mock leopard
skin) and ‘nasty’ colors, long discarded by the quality end of the fashion industry
as obsolete kitsch, were salvaged by the punks and turned into garments... which
offered self-conscious commentaries on the notions of modernity and taste... In
particular, the illicit iconography of sexual fetishism was... exhumed from the
boudoir, closet and the pornographic film and placed on the street.More important than safety-pins and mohawks was the way the punks
used the visual strategy of bricolage, throwing together wildly unrelated
elements, like army surplus and fetish underwear. The punk style was initially
greeted with horror. Yet within a very short time, it was a major influence
on international fashion. Vivienne Westwood was a pivotal figure in the
transmission of punk style, with her notorious pornographic tee-shirts and
bondage trousers. Soon Jean Paul Gaultier was producing underwear-as-
outerwear, and black leather became mainstream.
Fashion photographers like Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton also drew
on violent and pornographic iconography. Newton often depicted women
fighting, in positions of dominance, or posed as sex workers. He was hired
as a consultant for the horror film The Eyes of Laura Mars, which depicted
Faye Dunaway as a fashion photographer whose work mixed sex and
violence. In one scene, two models wearing nothing but underwear, high
heels and fur coats engage in a violent hair-pulling catfight in front of a
burning car. Guy Bourdin focused explicitly on the connections between sex
and death. His shoe advertisements for Charles Jourdain were especially
notorious: In one advertisement he depicted what appeared to be the
aftermath of a fatal car crash; one of the victim’s shoes lay at the side of the
road. Fashion advertising of the 1990s continued this trend, especially with
the vogue for “heroin chic”. Aspects of aggression proved erotically alluring
to many people.
Saint Laurent exploited the eroticism of sexual ambiguity, most famously
in his female version of the tuxedo suit, le smoking, which Helmut Newton
photographed for French Vogue. Saint Laurent’s evening clothes, on the other
hand, revelled in the “retro” and “ethnic” influences so beloved of the hippies.
With his Russian – or Ballets Russes – collection of 1976–7 Saint Laurent