What Changed Between 1977 and 1982

Studded leather was not a 1980s invention. Sid Vicious was photographed in 1977 in a biker jacket already covered in studs, spikes and badges.

Density and intent changed. Josh McConnell, who runs the leather brand Straight to Hell, describes the escalation as a matter of degree: the look got more extreme, the hair got bigger, mohawks and liberty spikes came in, and by around 1982 a lot of the original punks had faded out while the new ones dressed harder. Dusted Magazine's Punk'd History, Vol. III: UK82 or, No Future is more specific about why. Leather and spikes and studs were plentiful, but they were no longer ornaments; they were announcements that the wearer was untouchable, or dangerous.

That marks the shift. In 1977 a studded jacket was one loud garment among several; five years later it was armour, worn by a scene that held other punk subcultures in open contempt, with roots in football hooliganism and the tribal logic that goes with it. Discharge, Chaos U.K., GBH and The Exploited were driving it. UK82 is the name that stuck.

Why Punk Clothes Have Studs on Them

It all came out of one shop in Chelsea, run by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. It kept changing direction, and one of those turns is where the metal came in.

In 1972, the second of the shop's several name changes at 430 King's Road, it became Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die and switched to biker gear. Zips, studs, leather, and a skull and crossbones over the door. Two years would pass before the shop sold anything anyone would have called punk, by which time the hardware had been sitting there long enough to seem native to it. Studs, zips and black leather were already on the rails, borrowed off rockers and bikers. Punk inherited the raw material here, then spent years deciding what to do with it.

Most punks could not afford what was on the rails there. Some stole the clothes. Most made their own. DIY defines the look, though nobody with other options would have chosen it. Hence the methods: pins where a needle would do, a belt stripped for its studs, marker pen on a plain shirt. Nothing here needs a machine, and none of it takes more than a single sitting. Pins come out, studs unfold, and only the stitched patches leave a mark on the garment underneath.

Westwood refused the label later. Any self-respecting real punk would have had nothing to do with me, she said. I'd say it was an artistic experiment.

The Different Kinds of 80s Punk and What Each One Wore

These sort into rough groups. Bands turn up on more than one list, Discharge most of all. Visual influence ran in every direction.

UK82 and street punk

Everything above the waist is loaded and everything below it is narrow. Hardware goes on the jacket, the trousers stay clean, and the boots close the line off at the bottom.

So: mohawk or liberty spikes, bleached first and then dyed. A leather or denim jacket under studs, spikes and painted band logos. Bondage trousers, frequently tartan. Combat boots, and as much belt and wrist hardware as the wearer could get hold of. Dusted's piece describes two GBH members photographed in this period who between them cover the whole range, Colin Abrahall in bleached liberty spikes with a bullet belt, Jock Byth in a bright indigo mohawk over a sleeveless denim battle jacket.

American hardcore

The UK82 look inverted, item by item.

Red Bull's Illustrated Guide to Punk Rock Fashion Through the Ages sums up the DC and Southern California scenes as utilitarian and universal: what the kids working at the local drugstore or petrol station were wearing. Jeans or cut-off shorts. Plain t-shirts or work shirts. Sneakers or boots. Hair cropped short or shaved.

You bought it to wear and then you wore it. No patches, no studs, no paint. Black Flag, Minor Threat and Fear all came out of this. Refusing to dress up carried the whole position. Minor Threat formed in DC in 1980 and were finished by 1983.

Principle accounted for some of it. If the clothes are a costume you can buy, then whatever they signal can be bought along with them, and a scene built on refusing what is for sale cannot then sell its members a uniform. The practical side mattered too, because hardcore shows turned violent. Wear a jacket covered in spikes into a room where everyone is being thrown around and it becomes a liability.

It's also why this one still works outside its decade. Take the band name off the shirt and nothing in the outfit gives away when it was assembled.

Anarcho-punk

Much of the scene around Crass and Subhumans was vegan, so leather got avoided where possible: jackets in fake leather or cloth, boots in canvas or synthetic, hair products picked on whether the manufacturer tested on animals. Plenty of people in that scene wore studs anyway. Discharge's visual language ran straight through it. Mohawks and liberty spikes turn up less often in photographs of this scene than in the UK82 one, and hair is more often just dyed, or cut short.

What that leaves is military surplus in all black, plain shirts, second-hand boots, and anarchist symbols stencilled or hand-painted on. Political slogans where another strand would put a band name. Everything runs looser here than anywhere else, because surplus is cut for layering and nothing gets tailored down.

Where hardcore stripped the surface and left it at that, anarcho used the cleared space for slogans.

Oi! and punk-skinhead

Dr. Martens, braces hanging down off the waistband, and tight jeans rolled two or three turns above the boot so the whole shaft shows. Braces give it away. Worn down off the waistband, they separate this from ordinary workwear at a glance. Bleach-splattered denim is common. Punk and skinhead style cross over here, in the one strand where the boots are the centre of the outfit.

Five Punk Outfits You Can Build Now

The one-piece version. A patched or studded denim vest over a plain tee, straight jeans, boots. The vest carries everything, so the tee under it and the jeans below it stay plain and a second loud piece would only compete with it. Cheapest entry point, because the vest is the only thing you have to build.

The hardcore version. Plain or band tee, straight jeans or cut-offs, and either eight-eye boots or low canvas sneakers. Hair short. Nothing studded, nothing patched, nothing painted. Buy the tee off the band at a show if you can, since it is the only part of the outfit carrying any information. Easiest of these to wear now, and the closest to what the American scenes actually put on.

The UK82 version. Studded jacket, tartan or bondage trousers, ten-eye boots, a studded belt over the top. It only balances if the hair is doing its share of the height, so without a mohawk or liberty spikes most people drop the bondage trousers and keep the jacket over straight black jeans.

The anarcho version. Black surplus trousers, plain black shirt or a stencilled tee, second-hand boots that are not leather. Slogans go on by stencil. No leather anywhere, which rules out the standard biker jacket and puts a surplus field jacket in its place.

The 1977 reference. Bondage trousers with the straps left buckled loose, a printed shirt, safety pins used as both fastener and jewellery, a length of chain, boots. This is the only one of the five that reads as period costume, so it wants one piece dialled down.

How Tight the Trousers and How High the Boots

Trousers are tight and stop at the ankle. Tapered jeans, tight leather, or bondage trousers with the hobble straps pulling the legs in. The opening wants to be narrow enough that the hem sits on the boot shaft and stays there, because the boot is meant to be visible in full.

Boots come up, and Dr. Martens are sold by eyelet count, so the count tells you roughly what you are getting. Eight eyelets on a 1460 gives you a shaft of about six inches, just above the ankle. Ten eyelets on a 1490 runs to seven or so. Fourteen-eye models go up the calf again. Eight and ten became the defaults, since it is the height that makes the outline work. Swap in sneakers for the hardcore version and the whole outline goes with them.

The jacket is the one thing you should buy a size up. You need room to layer a hoodie under it, and you need flat panels to work on. Curved, tensioned surfaces pucker when you set a stud into them, which is what a close-fitting jacket gives you. A battle vest gets worn over a jacket or a hoodie as often as over a shirt.

Whatever height is left comes from the hair. Liberty spikes and a mohawk both make the head narrow and tall, and against the narrow trouser the whole outfit reads as one vertical line with a mass in the middle.

Safety Pins, Studs, Chains and Belts

A safety pin started as a repair and picked up two other jobs on the way to becoming jewellery. It holds a tear closed, sticks a patch on where you can't be bothered to sew, and goes through an ear when there is nothing else to do with it. In 1977 it mostly did a job. By the 1980s it as often just sat there. The rest of the metal divides up the same way: studs, spikes, chains, belts, each with a job that came before the look.

Studs do the bulk of it, laid as pyramids along a seam or cones on a shoulder, and what they say depends entirely on how many of them there are. Forty studs picks out a collar and a couple of seams and leaves the denim doing most of the work. Push it to four hundred and the base garment stops registering as denim at all; by then the jacket sits like armour because it weighs like it. Spikes escalate the same idea. Put them on shoulders, collars and wristbands and nobody stands close.

Chains go through the belt loops, off a wallet, or draped across the chest. Bicycle chain got used for that last one. Leave a jacket hanging on a hook with one on it and the shoulders will pull out of shape.

Then the belts. A bullet belt does exactly what it sounds like, threading blank cartridge cases onto a strap. Studded belts do the same job cheaper. Wearing two at once passed for normal. Razor blades and padlocks turn up as pendants, worn on a chain.

Hardware goes where a body ends: wrists, throat, waist, shoulders, ankles, because that is where it catches light as you move and where someone standing next to you registers it. A back panel stays clear in the middle unless the studs make a shape, a border or a word; scattered across open denim they read as damage, and the eye goes looking for the tear that put them there.

What Makes a Trouser a Bondage Trouser

Turn a pair inside out and you are looking for three things: a zip running under the crotch from the front of the waistband to the back, a detachable flap of fabric hanging over the seat, and a pair of buckled straps running between the legs at knee height.

Those straps give the trousers their name. Buckled tight they cut your stride to a shuffle, which is why most people wear them on the loosest hole or let one hang unfastened.

All three show up on the original. The V&A holds a bondage suit made in 1976, museum number T.252-1989. Its catalogue traces the design to three sources: military uniform, the waxed cotton jackets motorcyclists wore, and the fetish trade. It was shop stock. Westwood and McLaren did not put a collection on a catwalk until Pirate in 1981. Everything before that went out over the counter at 430 King's Road. Every one of those references was a decision, as were the mohair jumpers sold alongside, which came loose-woven so they would unravel on the rail before anyone had worn them. The combat gear supplied the cut and the webbing straps, the motorcycle leathers supplied the zips and the buckles, and the fetish wear supplied the restraint: straps that connect one limb to another and stop you moving normally.

How a Battle Jacket Is Actually Built

Call it a cut-off, a cut, a kutte or a battle vest, and battle jacket or patch jacket covers it whether the sleeves are there or not.

It came to punk from bikers, who had it from the air force. American airmen sewed unit insignia onto issued flight jackets during the Second World War and carried the habit into motorcycle clubs afterwards, where the insignia became club colours and the base garment became denim. By the 1970s US bikers had settled on a Levi's jacket with the sleeves cut off. Punk took the object and swapped the club name for a band name.

Take the sleeves off at the shoulder seam, all the way.

Build it on denim, which carries the weight of hardware without tearing and gets tougher as it ages where cotton does neither. That matters because a densely studded panel pulls in as you work across it, so lay out from the centre of each panel outward and leave the edges until last. Most people start with a Levi's trucker.

Then the studs, where size does the talking. Small pyramids run along edges and seams, while medium and large go around patches or sit in block arrangements. Oversized ones tend to be cheap stock: thin plating that wears through to base metal in a season, and prongs soft enough to snap when you fold them. Cones come as round, cone, English 77 and English 77 large. They work in lines. Use the more aggressive ones to fill gaps between unconnected patches.

Setting a stud takes a pair of needle-nose pliers and a flat surface. Lay the jacket over cardboard or a scrap of foam, push the two prongs through from the front, turn it over, and fold each prong inward across the shank so the two cross. Crossed prongs hold. Parallel ones work loose and drop the stud inside the lining. Denim takes the prongs straight through at any weight from 10oz up and nothing needs punching first, which is the whole reason the method spread the way it did. Leather is the exception, and wants an awl or a rotary punch set to its smallest hole.

Lay out from the back. Your big back patch is the centre of the whole thing, so build outward from it. Small patches and badges go on the front, studs and spikes on shoulders and collar.

Acrylic flexes with the denim and bonds to it. Paint first, hardware after, never the reverse.

People who build these will tell you to stop buying studs altogether and buy a studded belt instead, then pull them off it.

How to Get Patches, Slogans and Paint on a Jacket

Sewing takes longest and dates a jacket most reliably. Band patches sit on a chest panel or a sleeve, and a back patch fills the space between the shoulders. Pin them if you can't sew; if you can, a narrow zigzag or a satin stitch round the edge holds through a wash; a running stitch lets the edge lift and catch. A collection accumulates over years, which is why the mismatch is the point. Different sizes, different weaves, different states of fade. A back panel assembled that way reads as a record of gigs.

Hand painting, with a brush and acrylic. Band logos on the back panel, slogans down the sleeves. Westwood was doing a version of it at the shop before punk had a name, spelling words across sleeveless tees using whatever would hold a shape on cotton, including pins, adhesive glitter and bone.

Stencils were the anarcho-punk method, and the reason the circled A appears in identical form on thousands of garments. Cut it once out of card or acetate, tape it flat against the fabric so nothing lifts, and keep the can far enough back that the paint lands dry and does not pool under the edge. One stencil does a jacket, a shirt and a bag in an afternoon.

Making a shirt runs the same way: plain tee, chalk or white pencil to draw the outline, then paint or marker over it. None of it needs a screen or a press, which is why a fifteen-year-old with a marker could make the same shirt a band was selling.

What the Colour of Your Bootlaces Meant

Docs did not start out as the punk boot. Before them came military boots, motorcycle boots, brothel creepers, Puma Clydes in suede and Chuck Taylors. Docs came in through the skinhead and Oi! side, where they were already standard work boots, and spread across the rest of punk from there. They were cheap, they could be resoled, and they were heavy enough to survive a crowd.

Once Docs were everywhere, the laces started carrying information. What white, red and yellow were supposed to mean changed from city to city and decade to decade. The same colour meant opposite things two hundred miles apart, so anyone who actually cared asked first. One version of the story recurs often enough to be worth repeating, though it is hard to verify: that some right-wing skinheads moved from black boots to oxblood because police wore black.

None of it was ever a stable code, and anyone challenged on it could deny the whole thing. What survives is the habit: someone from that scene reads your boots first, then your laces, then how far up you've laced them. Ten eyelets laced to the top reads differently from ten laced to six and the rest left loose, which is the older working way to wear them.

Why Almost Everything Is Black

Black was what military surplus came in, what leather came in, and what would not show the state of a garment worn for months without washing. It also takes overdyeing, so a faded or stained garment goes back to black in a bucket, which is how the same jacket survives years of wear.

It never stays black, though. A jacket that went into the wardrobe black comes out years later reading brown, or green, or a sort of exhausted grey. Nobody in these photographs is wearing the same black as anyone else, and the longer a wardrobe has been assembled the more obvious that gets. Cotton goes first because the dye sits on the fibre surface. A wardrobe assembled second-hand is a wardrobe of slightly different blacks.

Against all that black: tartan, red or black-based, on trousers, kilts and shirts, straight out of the King's Road. Bleach, splattered or dip-dyed onto denim: indigo sits on the outside of the cotton fibre, so household bleach strips it back to the white core in minutes and gives you a pattern for nothing. And hair, which is where the whole colour range lives, the more saturated the better.

Everything else stays narrow because most of the wardrobe came second-hand and nothing in it was picked off a colour card.

What Women Wore in 80s Punk

Leather skirts, tartan kilts worn by men and women both, fishnets laddered on purpose under torn denim. Photographs from the period are full of it.

The less visible half is that female punks in the 1980s frequently rejected the flirtatious edge that had appeared in some 1970s punk and went deliberately androgynous instead. One pairing recurs: something soft worn with something hard, a tutu or a delicate dress over heavy boots, a lace top under a studded jacket. Worn together, each garment works on the other. The boots stop the dress reading as sweet. The dress stops the boots reading as uniform.

The hardware mostly did not split by gender. Bullet belts, studded belts and spiked wristbands came in one version, worn by anyone who wanted them, and the androgyny that ran through the cut of the clothes ran through the metal too.

Punk vs Goth vs Metal vs Grunge

Goth borrowed the hardware and stopped there. It is a black wardrobe built from Victorian mourning dress, punk hardware and glam theatre, and what punk supplied was the studs and the safety pins. After that the two went different directions. Our goth style guide works through that system in detail.

Metal is closer, because it uses the same battle jacket and builds it the same way. What differs is the content. Metal stays on denim, with the back panel usually given over to one large band piece. Punk allows leather, and tends towards a lot of small patches covering everything.

Rule out grunge entirely. Different decade, different country. Nirvana's Nevermind is 1991, and the flannel-and-thermals look that goes with it has nothing to do with any of what is described here.

Common Questions