Clothing the Discontented
Martin Margiela and Joy Division’s 1979 – part 2
A recap – Part 1 of this article looked at the UK in 1979, including the acknowledged birth of post-punk through a sequence of political, social and musical circumstances. I also proposed that whereas punk often lends itself to an analysis through fashion, post-punk has not. Instead, post-punk exudes a type of seriousness and musicality that transcends the triviality of fashion. I flagged this as something to return to and redress. I then pinpointed the graduation of Martin Margiela in 1979, at Antwerp, and noted that Antwerp (and Belgium) became a Continental node of British post-punk at the same time – mostly through the efforts of Joy Division. A question hangs as to whether this means anything…
We also know that the Antwerp Six made inroads into British style culture in 1986 (I wrote about this a few posts back). By this time, seven years on from the Winter of Discontent and inaugural post-punk, the interconnected web of British music, subcultures and fashions had shifted significantly. The music scene had conceded ground to a what appeared to be a (sometimes tongue-in-cheek) Thatcherite excess of new-pop partly launched by the new romantic subculture. However, during the first half of the 1980s British avant-garde fashion was still tethered to subcultures and a street dynamic, with designers celebrating a continuity of dressing up that had been initiated by the new romantics and émigré punks such as Adam Ant. Many British fashion designers operated out of small shops, serving a style-obsessed subcultural clientele that devoured a clutch of new underground fashion magazines such as The Face, i-D and Blitz (all birthed in 1980) that provided information on what to wear and where to be seen. As the Antwerp Six crossed over the North Sea, this peculiar British mix was their background and context. However, Margiela graduating in 1979 would have had a totally different context. In subcultural fashion terms, maybe a nothingness or antithesis.
Locked groove
Let’s go back to 1979. Part of my fascination with Margiela as a designer is the conceptual transference to avant-garde and (post) modernist literary threads that accompanies his work – some of which I also tried to sketch out in earlier articles. As I delved into his clothing in the early 2000s I felt I was making a connection to an earlier version of myself that devoured this literature. It was an abstruse rationale for seeking and wearing clothes – not seeking out how I used to look when looking good counted, but seeking out a period of intellectual endeavour when looks had no value.
There is another connection from Margiela that resonates with my earlier musings on his asynchrony, though it is glimpsed through the aforementioned plainness (in clothing design) elicited by William Gibson. Margiela’s plainness is more radical than simply appearing-to-not-appear, a more tactical asynchrony. How can we situate and articulate this plainness? Is it even a plainness, or are we looking for a different word?
Let’s start with his look-books. They are collectible objects of art – a concertina folding of dyed white distressed thread bookending a sequence of Polaroid photographs depicting a straight-up posed model with their eyes blacked out with the deliberate motif of quasi-criminalised anonymity. The clothing shown is disconcerting, echoing a mundane late 1970s. The S/S 2004 selection shown here includes numerous examples of semi-flared undistinguished trousers, mawkish 1970s shirts with front pleats and paired chest pockets, plain blazers accessorised by a row of biros in the top pocket – trapped forever in a new build office in the past before the age of computers. That link back to the 1970s is neither subcultural nor stylish, but it is something that unsettles an inherent plainness or nothingness.
Margiela’s signifiers of leisure do not offer anything either more modern or classic – cropped bombers with squared-off shoulders in muted colours with deep brown contrast panels, a sleeveless leather jacket in fetching ginger with choke collar that would grace Bodie and Doyle from The Professionals, two characters who never managed to escape the 1970s. We can add Dennis Waterman’s character Terry from the series Minder as another 1970s-in-1980s atavist with a predilection for ginger leather. It is the bad fashion exemplar of the decade that is the exemplar of bad fashion.
Returning to a subcultural fold it is precisely and properly post-punk, harking back to the happenstance of Margiela’s graduation year of 1979. This does not mean a post-punk filtered through time and produced as signifiers (such as fellow Belgian fashion designer Raf Simons has tended towards); it is clothing as worn by post-punk experimentalists in the late 1970s. And of course, Margiela had an obsession with reworking his famous German Army trainers, another direct acknowledgement of post-punk anti-fashion or non-fashion.
I am thinking here (once again) specifically of the Manchester scene, with raincoats and office shirts, tank-tops and semi-flared trousers, and their flagship band Joy Division. The band dressed as if they were holding down minor clerical jobs in drudging bureaucracies, which of course some of them were. But they had a look, which is hard to pinpoint – something from nothing. It was not something that journalists spoke of, instead over-fixating on the band’s artfulness and archness, their impossibility of sound categorisation, the lines of flight into literature and art.
Their look did make some journalists take note – for example, Dave McCullough interviewing them for Sounds in August 1979 writes: “Their dress is somewhere between a factory-worker’s eye for the practical and early and middle period Buzzcocks’ eye for the proletarian chic, somewhere between the contrived and non-contrived… perhaps a representation in clothes of the truth about Joy Division”. A solitary, but important, observation.
Their drummer Stephen Morris captures this aspect, and its evasiveness of contextualisation, in the first part of his autobiography Record Play Pause. Perusing the classic photographs created by Kevin Cummins for NME of the band in their brutal urban setting given an illusory magic with a dusting of snow, he remarks:
Compared to the rest of the bands in the NME that week we just looked odd. We didn’t really look like a band at all. To me, the four of us, Ian, Barney, Hooky and me, looked just, well, odd. My geography teacher blazer and stripy woolly jumper was about as rock and roll as a mug of Horlicks. Forty years on, the same photographs say something else. Now, we look like a band with something to say.
Their manager Rob Gretton had a hand in guiding this look, planning and purchasing certain items of clothing on behalf of the band – this was evident in his recently published notebooks One Top Class Manager where he documents a strategic shopping expedition for purchasing clothes (something that Morris also recalls in his memoirs and Hook mentions with Gretton buying them shirts for their first TV appearance in September 1978).
Of course, Curtis and what was to come haunts all of these photographs – giving them an after-the fact emotional charge. I will tackle this in a corollary. But if we can strip this away, as difficult as it is, there is a disconcerting and disorienting sense about the band and their chosen (anti) style. Margiela re-embraced this in the 1990s and 2000s, and kept life in a loop stuck in 1979, a locked groove of Manchester urbanism. An angular plainness that juts out of the invisible mundane.
Note – the shop I helped out at stocked the Margiela collection featured in the lookbook (I got the book from the shop). The collection struggled to sell and the ginger leather gilet sat there right until the end. I eventually bought it and it hung in my wardrobe taunting me. Each time I put it on ‘I Could Be So Good for You’ ran through my mind. Rather than, say, ‘Dead Souls’. I sold it some time later and often wonder how it’s going.