Clothing the Discontented
Martin Margiela and Joy Division’s 1979 – part 1
Where were we? A proposal that Margiela existed both out of (fashion) time whilst also glimpsing a sticking point of a different time. Not simply fashionable revival as we see endlessly across other designers and houses, but both untimely in its situating and antagonistic in its recalcitrance. Margiela introduced a menswear line in 1999 – as we saw in the odd photoshoot in Sleazenation – but the clothing had a resemblance of an earlier unfashionable era and it stayed there.
Seemingly for Margiela, the ideas, aesthetics and products of the past collide and overlap in an eternally fixed present, losing their teleological anchors and forestalling the future. In 1999 Margiela orbits around a stammering sticking point of an imaginary 1979. Possibly back to his graduation in Antwerp, but also possibly back to the Winter of Discontent ravaging the UK, a Groundhog Day of post-punk. Two decades traversed, and a nullification of everything in between.
Rubbish and unrest – UK79
1979, the year of Martin Margiela’s graduation, presents an intriguing starting point that, in turn, invites a tantalising speculative dynamic. By the end of the 1970s, fashion as a dynamic was firmly split between both dedicated and detailed looks defined by a myriad of music subcultures and the world of high-end fashion. In the UK (later mirrored across Europe and North America) the development of scenes such as punk, revivalist mod, skinhead, new romantic and rockabilly supported specific looks and a number of specialist design outlets or mail-order suppliers advertising in the back pages of the music newspapers.
A prominent example would be the collaborative power of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood who nurtured a punk look through the latter half of the decade from the base of their shop in London’s King’s Road. Up until this point the clothing developed and circulated in what we call a ‘street’ environment, away from the formal world (and timetables) of high-end fashion. If the youth dressed in a certain way to signify membership of a subculture, then street fashion would move forward on a dynamic of simultaneous waves. Some subcultures such as mod and new romantic prioritised a rapidly changing pattern where the contest to be scene leaders meant innovating in how you dress – perfecting a look that was different from what existed in the scene but also being similar enough to be recognised as part of the scene. Following certain unwritten rules, so to speak. Other subcultures such as rockabilly and skinhead were more staid and anchored in iconic garments and styles. But you still strived to look ‘good’ with the scene.
During 1979, particularly in the UK, something strange and significant happened to music – the birth of post-punk. This was proclaimed and midwifed at the time by the UK music newspaper NME with a plethora of genre-defying music that saw out a frantic six months in the latter half of the year. The music from this period has undoubtedly had an incredible influence and longevity, as indicated and meticulously documented by Simon Reynolds in his 2005 masterwork Rip it Up and Start Again. However, Reynolds’ work is deceptive. He writes with authority and great craft, so much so that his particular archaeological unearthing and interpretation of this messy era is taken as an ultimate and exhaustive truth. It feels positivist and pre-planned, when in fact it was ad-hoc, disconnected, tentative, and unformed.
It is quite easy to forget (or fail to grasp) how these post-punk bands were at the time playing to relatively minuscule audiences. For example, the band Joy Division – nominally considered the key band - often played at moderately-sized venues to small crowds up until their demise in early 1980. Decades later the presence of their debut album Unknown Pleasures as a talking point and as a tee-shirt is prolifically inscribed on the contemporary reflective vista.
Politically, 1979 commenced with the UK in deep crisis with the continuation of what was labelled the Winter of Discontent. Industrial unrest, strikes, and the vital infrastructure of everyday life (transport, schools, hospitals, council services) were crumbling with visible markers such as piles of uncollected rubbish and empty supermarket shelves. This social and political climate was accompanied by a particularly cold winter – it felt like the world (or this little bit of the world) was coming to an end. The preceding four years had seen the punk movement nurtured and unfurled in the UK, an affront to moral strictures, cultural standards and the expected way of life. It was almost as if punk had willed on the Winter of Discontent, a prefiguration or foreshadowing. A general election in May 1979 saw the British public elect the Conservative party to power, emboldened by their forthright figurehead Margaret Thatcher. Tolerances and intolerances were equally upstaged and re-routed on both sides of the coin, as society embarked on a new direction that would see the full instalment of neoliberalism, aligned to a parallel movement with the election of Republican Ronald Reagan in the USA.
Punk, as both a music scene and a subculture, seemed to respond. Sometimes directly, but often as an osmotic process drawing off the dank and dread of the times. The last six months of 1979 saw a clutch of unique albums that forewarned of a dark and dystopian direction cloaked in experimental sounds of dub and angular metallic screeds of guitar, and a very much anti-prog-rock use of synthesisers and studio techniques. Post-punk was forged, sonically, by the aforementioned Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, PiL’s Metal Box, Gang of Four’s Entertainment, This Heat’s eponymous debut album, The Human League’s Reproduction, works by Cabaret Voltaire, Wire and A Certain Ratio, plus ground-breaking extended mix singles by Killing Joke and Bauhaus.
Post-punk is treated historically through either a socio-political lens, or purely as a musicological phenomenon, but alternative (or multiple) readings are possible. Whereas punk invites typical subcultural readings of fashion signifiers through a heady mix of new styles and unique accessorization, post-punk seems to be without a look. It was approximated at best to the charity shop anti-fashion of the ‘raincoat brigade’ who connoted socio-cultural distancing, gloominess and despair. Sam Knee’s The Bag I’m In is once again on the case, devoting a chapter to a ‘look’ that was based upon “glum sobriety” and sourced clothes from “army surplus, charity shops and old man retailers”. However; it is a look that deserves a critical reflection.
Imagining October - 1979 in Belgium as speculative auto-mythology
Post-punk Britain and the soon to emerge fashion design hub of Antwerp were for all intents and purposes a disjunctive simultaneity. Whether Margiela, as a graduating fashion designer over in Antwerp and just contemplating his career path, was tuned in to this cultural hotbed is something we can only imagine. Because, with Margiela, all narrative and myth can only be imagined. Nevertheless, an important marker appears to be set down in 1979.
As the subculture of post-punk – the music, the (non)look, the attitude, the intellectual constellations – took shape, key musical events sprung up to support the scene. These were not festivals per se, since the music of post-punk did not lend itself to an amplified and overblown execution for the benefit of an easily homogenised and expectant crowd lounging in the sun (or mud). Early August 1979 saw a four-day event at the YMCA on Tottenham Court Road, where the conference centre was utilised to showcase the very best of post-punk. A strange venue that befits this new music, where attendance at a gig is akin to a job interview or focus group session.
One month later the Futurama festival extended over a dizzying weekend in the grim and cavernous enclosure of Leeds Queens Hall. The band Joy Division, buoyed by the strong reviews of Unknown Pleasures, were slowly establishing themselves as the archetype of post-punk. They played the first night of the YMCA festival alongside Liverpool bands Teardrop Explodes and Echo and the Bunnymen, and they performed a memorable set on the first evening of Futurama along with a typically grumpy PiL.
Their next step was something of an unusual one, electing to take up a support slot on the onerous Buzzcocks tour which ran through October and November. Buzzcocks were promoting their (difficult) third album and had been drawn into the pop-punk new wave genre, having procured numerous appearances on Top of the Pops through 1978 and the early months of 1979. By late 1979 the likelihood of the band maintaining this pop status was waning, and the album and accompanying tour reflected a band that had bought into the shiny surface of something that was now vanishing, whilst at the same time having failed to make a jump across to the burgeoning post-punk scene. They were floundering in the hectic musical climate of 1979, trading on irony. Manchester connections between Buzzcocks and Joy Division went back into the origins of punk establishing itself in the city, and so this is one way of configuring how the two musically divergent bands came to be entwined on this tour.
A hiatus in the hectic schedule allowed Joy Division to take part in a key event in Belgium – a minor post-punk festival of sorts that played out across a long day and offered a panoply of avant-garde arts. On the 16 October 1979, in the city of Brussels, approximately 25 miles from Antwerp, the experimental arts space Plan K opened for its inaugural event. Established by an arts and theatre group, the centre occupied a minimally refurbished former sugar beet factory on the appropriately named Rue de Manchester.
A labyrinth of rooms and spaces, post-industrial décor, a fashionable moment as Belgium sampled the post-punk assemblage of sound, literature and sci-fi. The opening night witnessed a breath-taking programme of avant-gardism. The prime movers of British post-punk – Joy Division and Cabaret Voltaire – provided musical entertainment, with prestigious readings by esteemed counter-cultural authors William Burroughs and Brion Gysin who had been collaborating on the Third Mind project. Supporting film shows included experimental work by Burroughs acolyte Anthony Balch and the ever-hip film Performance starring Mick Jagger (the mention of 23 Skiddoo on the poster is for a performance art piece and nothing to do with the important British post-punk band of the same name). The event was well attended and would cement links between the nascent scenes of experimental music in the UK and Belgium.
Joy Division would return to Belgium as part of a short tour including the Netherlands and Germany in January 1980. For this tour they revisited Plan K and also played a poorly attended gig in Antwerp, where they famously were given accommodation in a working brothel. The trips saw a blossoming of Joy Division vocalist Ian Curtis’ relationship with music journalist Annik Honoré, and the eventual establishment of the label Les Disques du Crépuscule and sublabel Factory Benelux.
Part 2 to follow
Really enjoyed this Ian.