Anarchy in the V&A

ArtForum, Feb, 1995 by Jon Savage

The violent foppishness of Britain's youth stylings has long excited worldwide comment, whether in the American reaction to the Beatles' hairstyles in 1964, or in Japan's current fascination with the precise, simultaneous excavation of every youth fashion since World War II. Britain's originality in this regard has long been recognized by the mainstream media, most blatantly in the October 1983 Time cover story "The Tribes of Britain," in which a populist social anthropology - in the traditional sense, implying a sense of superiority felt by the observer/namer - tied up a complex nexus of social and emotional forces into a series' of tribes: mods, teddy boys, skin-heads, hippies, punks, the whole mad parade. This was Britain as teenage theme park: visit Buckingham Palace, then go down the King's Road and photograph a Mohican.

Over a decade later this theme park has finally been staged within a major institution: London's Victoria and Albert Museum no less. Ted Polhemus' "Streetstyle" exhibition is the most complete and coherent statement to date of the more thorough youth anthropology that originated in the Birmingham School of the mid '70s, was popularized from 1979 on by Dick Hebdige's groundbreaking book Subculture: The Meaning of Style, and has been chipped away at by many others over the last 15 years.

The great thing about "Streetstyle" is that it's all there: flow charts and photos of what seems like every single youth tribe and category, explorations of nonmainstream sexuality, notes about the relation of street style to haute couture, even a projection into the future. Beginning with American Western and preppy fashions, the show takes you - using clothed mannequins, contemporary news clippings, and annotated photographs - from the '40s (the American jazz musicians in the "Hip Cats and Hipsters" section, the blacks and Chicanos in "Zooties," the jazz fans of Nazi-occupied France in "Zazous") right through the subsequent confluence of American, Continental, and Caribbean stylings in the '50s, '60s, and '70s to today's polymorphous diversity, which it labels "The Supermarket of Style."

Caught in the profuseness of its naming and categorizing, the show begs various questions, the most obvious of which is: why Britain? The answer, surely, at least in part, has to do with the country's linguistic and other kinds of proximity to the United States. Bound by a similar language and the postwar balance of power, Britain acted as the gateway for American values and culture into Europe, and vice versa, from Europe back to America. Indeed it was during this same postwar moment that Britain finally lost its empire and became America's satellite - a situation only disputed within the last ten years.

The result was an imperialism, of course, but underneath it a more profound emotional confusion. Read any account of the impact of rock 'n' roll in Britain, in the words of performers as diverse as Richards Keith and Cliff, and what comes over is just how strange the music seemed: in a country whose pop-musical traditions were either ballad or burlesque, and where the only blacks were Caribbean, rock 'n' roll had all the impact of an alien visitation. When the Brits tried to make like Elvis, all they could attempt was a facsimile: outside any indigenous tradition, rock 'n' roll had to be learned.

The British music industry is synthetic when it is not traditional. Indeed its first genius was a manager, Larry Parnes, who, in the late '50s, invented British pop. Taking working-class teenagers with names like Reginald Smith, Ronald Wycherley, and Clive Powell, Parnes created electronic icons with marvelous, Technicolor names: Marty Wilde, Billy Fury, Georgie Fame. Much has flowed from this act of imagination, this prefiguring of the Andy Warhol superstar. For one thing, Parnes was gay at a time when the physical expression of homosexuality was illegal: in the music he produced, for the first time the secret codes of homosexuality - later called "camp" - infiltrated the heart of pop culture. (Wilde and Fury were big UK stars in 1959-60.) This influence remains in the high level (inexplicably high to many Americans) of gender-fuck and nonmacho images in British pop culture.

A similar process occurred simultaneously in the U.S. with the synthetic breed of televised stars like Fabian. But Parnes' Brits embodied their power within a static class system. Base metal turned into gold, Wilde, Fury, Fame, and all the others made it clear that British pop was about self-recreation: the idea, novel in England, that you could be anything you wanted to be.

The importance of fashion in this principle can be summed up by the fact that the Sex Pistols, the group that made the deepest exploration of Britain's subconscious so far, began in a boutique, as living pegs for Malcolm McLaren's and Vivienne Westwood's clothes styles. Despite the ideas of authenticity in rock, the synthesis of look and emotion, of commerce and politics, of an authentic in-authenticity, is the primordial soup from which British pop culture has emerged. In a country where the outward expression of emotion is frowned upon, the package acts as a baffle for the soul.