The writing in this blog has a longer overarching aim of linking the subcultural time of the early and mid-1980s and avant-garde fashion of the early-2000s. This focus is prompted by high-end and avant-garde designers who seemed determined to construct a bridge back to the subcultural fashion incunabula of the punk and post-punk years. This is approximately a form of templexity, where temporal regimes overlap and interfere. So far I’ve set out a sequence of memories from this first era, and only hinted here and there at the later era and how they spill over or coexist (the Yohji Yamamoto suit was a case in point, anchoring back to an advert which in turn anchors to 1980s Leeds).
My critical tool here, allied with the temporal blurring of nostalgia that I utilised on a personal level, is borrowed from Russian cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin and his proposal of the chronotope. This embodies a significant configuration of time and space as represented in a cultural form – a critical mass of energy and presence that draws attention to the moment and stalls forward movement whilst gathering the past into its own present. An overloaded instance, where you simply cannot move left or right, forwards or backwards. In many ways it works against nostalgia, by nullifying its hoarding of time as a lure to drift forever backwards in a dream-state. Whilst Bakhtin assembles the chronotope in a literary field, I put forward a fashion chronotope – a garment (or, more so, a visual manifestation of a garment) that stops and congeals the personal experience of time.
Later essays will explore the fashion of the early 2000s, documenting how I sought designers who proposed questions of the lost time of punk and post-punk, of how I encountered garments that overwhelmed me with their power and beauty. For example, an extended piece concerning a mundane trip to Barnsley which was suddenly electrified with the discovery of a Junya Watanabe coat. In this case, and in many others, the coat in the question links back to a memory of an image of another coat that similarly overwhelmed me. Effectively a conjoining of chronotopic moments that negates the lapsed time between them.
I have so far emphasised the importance and allure that fashion and music photographs had on me, particularly in the essay that stages a careful reconstruction of my teenage bedroom. One more image that encapsulates the power of the fashion chronotope is called upon. In January 1982 the band Animal Nightlife were announced to The Face readers with a full-page photograph by scene documenter Graham Smith and text by the ubiquitous Robert Elms. As I was recently reminded by an old school-friend, we were both obsessed by this photograph.
The individuals in the band looked so cool, staring blankly, assembled on and around a utilitarian table in a sparse workroom, with one member perched behind the group on a short ladder. They slightly twist or angle their bodies, as if to get a better view of the photographer and forming a tight but edgy ensemble. The collective hard stare makes you feel like the photographer is not welcome… an interloper. Or you are not welcome as a voyeur, with your cover blown.
The main mode of dressing is heavy-duty leather overcoats with belt and buckle fastening, this type of coat figuring prominently amongst the scene-leaders of the fashion crowd emerging from the overly silly period of the new romantic movement. These coats are heaped on the table, you can imagine it groaning under the weight of thick animal hide, toughened in that workwear way. It pools and folds like the hide of some great animal. After zoot suits, before ‘hard times’… a workwear and cool Bolshevik look garnered by independent designers such as Willie Brown at Modern Classics. The figure who transfixed me is on the right-hand side standing, wearing a cut-off leather jerkin, buckle and stud Seditionaries boots, a rough wool sweater, and a leather cap. The photograph is cropped so that he looks to be leaning against the frame itself. Wow, nothing like this existed in the box advertisements in the back of Sounds and NME, I was enthralled. I couldn’t get this image out of my head and desperately needed to replicate this look. I searched high and low for a leather jerkin. It was never found, and numerous attempts to fashion one out of second-hand coats by cutting the arms off proved equally futile and wasteful (I tried with my dad’s old sheepskin jacket, sorry – again - Dad).
Images of other bands featured in the January 1982 issue of The Face, and featured on and on through the year – 1982 was very much a year entrenched in “the look”. Other images of Animal Nightlife appeared as they tried hard to claim a place as musicians, but (as is the way with the new romantic predilection) they were never photographed in these clothes again. They were even photographed on a visit to Derby’s Blue Note, slouching in the fashionable diner. Perhaps that leather jerkin had been within a few miles of my person. Never mind. More so, as musicians, their fare was pretty dire. As has been remarked, the worst thing about the new romantic scene was the sudden imperative to form bands. As scenesters adopted various period looks, and then cohered into bands, they adopted a default position to make music that reflected their look. So Blue Rondo made terrible faux-Latin music, Animal Nightlife did turgid swing music, etc.
However, it is about the photograph from 1982. How it is an exemplar of a fashion chronotope, an image to be read that stores up power, stopping time both forwards and backwards, it takes on (for me) a dazzling presence and energy. Even looking at it now, over 40 years later, I’m entranced.