Three Kinds of Punk

Emo has three of its own: DC in 1985, the Midwest through the nineties, the malls in 2003, so pick which punk you mean before you pick which emo.

The Studded Belt

Studs, spikes and torn clothing belong to the two British waves. By the early eighties the American scene around Black Flag, Minor Threat and Fear had dropped every one of them for T-shirts, jeans, combat boots or sneakers, and crewcut hair. Keith Morris of the Circle Jerks put the split plainly:

The punk scene was basically based on English fashion. Black Flag and the Circle Jerks were so far from that. We looked like the kid who worked at the gas station or sub shop.

Jimmy Gestapo of Murphy's Law cut off the spiked hair, dropped the bondage belt, shaved his head and put on boots. He wanted clothes he could move in at a show.

Emo came out of that stripped-down scene. The studded belt had been gone from punk's American branch for four years before emo existed.

On a wide jean over boots it is 1982 British. Put the same belt on a black skinny jean and you are in 2003. By 2003 the belt was back, on the emo lists and on the mall racks.

Where Emo Came From

Rites of Spring formed in Washington DC, in late 1983 by Wikipedia's dating and in the spring of 1984 by Dischord's own. Their album was recorded at Inner Ear Studios in February 1985 and released that June as Dischord number 16. The producer was Ian MacKaye, of Minor Threat.

Embrace was MacKaye's own band, formed in 1985 with three former members of the Faith, and it played from that summer until the spring of 1986. Fans started calling both bands emocore. MacKaye's response is on the record: the term was, in his words, the stupidest thing he had ever heard.

Guy Picciotto and Brendan Canty of Rites of Spring later joined MacKaye in Fugazi.

Revolution Summer is the name Dischord's Amy Pickering gave to the summer of 1985 in DC. It ran inside hardcore. Pickering's own summary is worth having: Revolution Summer was the climax, the end of something, not a beginning.

The University of Maryland holds the primary record of that year in fliers, zines and photographs. What the collection documents is a scene arguing with itself: an editorial by John Stabb of Government Issue asking whether the audience wanted a football game or a show, and the February 1985 issue of Chow Chow Times opening with a robed figure of death labelled hardcore, reaching towards a tombstone carved with the names of venues that had closed or turned hostile.

The June 1985 anti-apartheid Punk Percussion Protest outside the South African Embassy came out of the same circle. The flier, designed by Tomas Squip of Beefeater, asked people to bring drums, cans and noisemakers.

Dischord's own account of Rites of Spring locates the split in the music and the behaviour: the band challenged the macho posturing that had taken hold in the scene, and defied musical and stylistic rule. They played fewer than twenty shows, nearly all of them in DC.

If you want the 1985 version, you are shopping for hardcore. Army surplus, band tee, hooded sweatshirt, boots. There was no separate emo rail in 1985 because there was no separate emo wardrobe.

The 2000s Version

Emo is a music word first. It came out of hardcore punk in DC and stayed a description of sound for its first fifteen years: mid-tempo where hardcore was fast, confessional where hardcore was political, built to climb from quiet to a shout. In the nineties it fused with indie rock and picked up arpeggiated guitars and melodic vocals. The third wave crossed that with pop-punk. The hooks and the choruses come from there, and so does the moment the word stopped describing a sound.

What people mean by emo clothing is the 2002 to 2008 wave: skinny jeans, tight band tee, zip hoodie, studded belt, Converse or Vans, and a straightened side-swept fringe over one eye.

That version arrived through two channels at once, a shop and a website.

MySpace launched in 2003, and emo crossed over in the autumn of that year. The scene made the site its home base, and a self-taken photograph shot from above, with the fringe across one eye, became the way the look travelled.

The other channel was mall retail. Hot Topic had been supplying suburban alternative fans with band tees, accessories and CDs since the nineties, and restocked around whatever was on MTV or headlining Warped Tour. When Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance broke through, the shelves changed to match. Hot Topic's own company history records Gerard Way starting at a New Jersey store in June 1999, and lists members of Sleeping With Sirens, Motion City Soundtrack, Chiodos, Atreyu, Pvris and half a dozen more among its former staff.

In 1985 you put the outfit together out of army surplus and whatever you already owned. Eighteen years later the whole thing was available in one shop on a Saturday afternoon.

The Midwest strand running through the nineties had its own kit: thrifted cardigans, plain glasses, ordinary jeans, hair cut at home.

Punk had the same thing happen to it, twenty years earlier and at a smaller scale. By the early eighties you could buy a mohawk wig and a pre-studded leather jacket off a shelf, no shaved head and no hammering studs in yourself. The hardcore scene was reacting against exactly that. Morris comparing his own band to the kid at the sub shop, Gestapo swapping the bondage belt for boots, both of them putting distance between themselves and anything you could buy ready-made.

The Nineties in Between

Between DC and the malls sits a decade.

The second wave ran through the middle of the country: Cap'n Jazz in Chicago from 1989, Christie Front Drive in Denver and Braid in Champaign from 1993, Mineral in Houston from 1994, The Promise Ring in Milwaukee and The Get Up Kids in Kansas City from 1995, with Sunny Day Real Estate out of Seattle and Jimmy Eat World out of Arizona. American Football, Texas Is the Reason, Jawbreaker.

Andy Greenwald traces the stereotypes to this wave: boy-driven, glasses-wearing, overly sensitive, overly brainy, chiming-guitar-driven college music.

The clothes went with that. Thick horn-rimmed glasses, sweater vests, cardigans, button-down shirts, fitted trousers or corduroys, hair kept short and messy. Costume histories of the period file this under geek chic.

No studded belt in any of it. No skinny jeans, no black, no eyeliner. A decade of emo bands from Chicago to Seattle.

The belt did not travel down the emo line from 1985, because the line it would have travelled through was wearing cardigans.

What the shop had been selling before was nu-metal: chains, wide-leg UFO pants, spikes and studs. That receded in the early 2000s and gave way to the glam-goth look of Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance. The customers changed and the studs stayed on the rail.

Morris turned up again twenty years on, this time aimed at the Warped Tour bands: a record company paying for the buses and the hotels, and making sure their hair was trendy and that they wore the proper clothes that all the kids like and wear. His own band played the tour in 2007.

MacKaye and Gerard Way

Ian MacKaye on stage

A description of him fronting Fugazi gives the whole thing in one line: hair buzzed down to the scalp, a maroon T-shirt, and charcoal thrift-store slacks or shorts.

Three garments, one of them maroon and one of them plainly second-hand, set down in a concert write-up that was never trying to inventory a wardrobe and records only what was noticeable from the floor.

Gerard Way, 2004

Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge came out in June 2004, and the look that went with it is the one still copied at parties: an entirely black tailored suit, a red tie, dark red eye makeup, long black hair. That description comes from a student-paper retrospective, so treat it as one writer's recall of the era.

Why putting them side by side is unfair

One of those is a man's clothes. The other is art direction for an album campaign, worn on stage and in videos and in press shots, closer to costume than to a wardrobe. Offstage in the same period Way ran to a black sweater vest over a white shirt, a much quieter set of clothes.

The suit contains no skinny jeans, no studded belt, no Converse and no zip hoodie. The most copied emo frontman of the decade was not wearing the emo uniform.

The uniform belonged to the audience, who were sold it. The band on stage wore what a stylist chose for a record campaign. The kids in the crowd wore what Hot Topic had on the rail that season. Those are two different wardrobes that share a name.

Hardcore did not have that split, because it had no styling budget and no shop. MacKaye on stage and the audience in front of him were dressed out of the same thrift shops.

Fit

One catalogue gives a sense of the range. Levi's publishes both cuts at a size 32 waist: the 565, its widest, at an eighteen-inch leg opening over a twenty-inch knee, and the 511 slim at fourteen and a half over sixteen and a quarter. Three and a half inches at the ankle, four at the knee, between one company's loose fit and its slim one. A true skinny sits below the 511 and army surplus sits above the 565, so the spread across the two scenes is wider than those two numbers.

Black is the base on both sides. Hardcore breaks it with the muted greens and greys off an army surplus rail, emo with red and dark jewel tones.

What the Women Wore

The hardcore standard for women was army pants, a band shirt and a hooded sweatshirt: the men's kit off the same rail in the same shop in the same sizing, nothing altered.

Some women in the eighties scene took that further and dressed deliberately androgynous. Punk in the seventies had carried a flirtatious register. This was a refusal of it. Wearing the men's clothes in the men's cut meant a woman at a hardcore show read as another person at a hardcore show.

Mall emo went the other way and dressed to be looked at. Fishnets. A slip worn over a tee, out of the house, where a slip goes under a dress. Tutus. Striped tights in two colours.

The scene-queen variant took it further again: colour laid into the hair in blocks, and volume raised at the crown until the silhouette of the head changed. The term began inside hardcore as an insult for girls thought to be dressing for the band and not the music.

By the middle of the decade the people it described had audiences of their own. Audrey Kitching and Kiki Kannibal built followings on MySpace-curated looks, razored bangs and worked eyeliner, and teenagers copied them directly from the profile photographs. The men in the scene kept using the phrase as an insult while the women it named were the ones actually setting what the scene looked like.

Hair and Face

Punk puts things on the face you can see from the back of a room. Safety pins through the ear or cheek, heavy dark eye makeup on some, a hard contour, nothing that reads as flattering.

Emo puts things on the face you have to be near to read. Eyeliner on men as well as women, worn heavy and slightly smudged. Snake bites, two piercings side by side on the lower lip. Horn-rimmed glasses.

Both scenes pierce. What gets pierced differs: punk goes for the ear and the cheek and the septum, emo for the lip and the eyebrow.

Hardcore hair goes up and off the face, in crewcuts and shaved heads and short spikes, while emo hair comes down and across it, straightened and layered with one side swept over an eye.

Both scenes have had long hair and both have had short. Direction is what carries the reading: up and away, or down and across.

British punk of 1977 also goes up: the mohawk, the spiked crown, the bleached crop. On this measure the London punk of 1977 and the DC hardcore kid of 1982 agree with each other. You cut a hardcore crop once and leave it. A shaved head takes clippers in the bathroom every couple of weeks. The emo fringe needs a flat iron every morning. The layers behind it need cutting every few weeks or the swoop collapses into a curtain.

Colour works the same way it does on the clothes. Punk bleaches the whole head and puts something saturated over it, green or pink or red. You can see it from the far end of a street. Emo goes jet black and adds a stripe or two at the front.

Boots and Canvas

Hardcore and punk both end up in a boot. Dr. Martens, combat boots, motorcycle boots, sneakers if you were going in the pit.

Emo ends up in flat canvas. Converse Chuck Taylors, usually black and usually drawn on with a marker, and Vans slip-ons.

The 1460 takes its name from its release date, the first of April 1960, and went out as a two-pound work boot for postmen and factory workers. Skinheads took it up in the late sixties as working-class uniform, punk took it from them in the seventies, and Dr Martens' own history has the boot arriving again with nu-metal and early emo.

In late-eighties European punk scenes, black boots with red laces marked left-wing sympathies while oxblood boots with white laces marked racist skinheads.

A Dr. Martens 1460 stands eight eyelets up the ankle on a welted air-cushioned sole with a defined heel. The upper is stitched to that sole, so the boot can be resoled without being rebuilt. A Chuck Taylor is a canvas upper vulcanised to a flat rubber sole with no heel and no separable welt.

Punk boots pick up chains, bandanas or studded leather bands round the ankle, hung on the outside. Emo Chucks get marker pen on the white rubber and lyrics up the canvas.

Buy the shoe before the trouser, whichever side you are on. The boot decides how much hem you need to clear it. Flat canvas needs none. Buy in that order and the trousers get chosen to suit the shoe.

What the Clothes Say

Hardcore dress is functional and says so. Henry Rollins of Black Flag, quoted in Dazed:

Getting dressed up means wearing a black T-shirt and some really basic dark pants. Fuck clothes. The more time you spend worrying about clothes, the less time you have to grab life by the balls.

A scene participant in the same piece lists his own kit from memory: black jeans, Converse, band T-shirt, leather jacket, short spiky hair. He also separates out the strands running through hardcore at the time, including a skateboarding influence that brought in baseball caps, Converse and bandanas, and a metal crossover that brought leather jackets and long hair.

Emo dress goes the other way and asks to be looked at closely. The fringe covers one eye, so the face is half hidden and you have to get near to see it. The eyeliner goes on to smudge, so that by the end of an evening it reads as having been cried in, and the fit is close where hardcore's is loose, showing the shape of a body that the other wardrobe is built to hide. Whether that is honest or performed is the argument the two scenes have been having since 1985.

The Word Itself

The word spread anyway, over MacKaye's objection in 1985. Rites of Spring's own members have said the same thing about being filed as the first emo band. Punk claimed the name for itself, while emo bands have spent forty years refusing it. The label came from outside both times, coined by fans in 1985 and carried by press and shops in 2003.

Dressing to it now means dressing to a category its inventors disowned.

Punk went the other way with its own name. It was in use as a self-description within months of the first records, printed on sleeves and painted on shop fronts, and the fights were over who counted as punk, never over whether the word should exist. A punk in 1977 and a punk in 2026 will both use the word about themselves.

Which One Are You Wearing

Look at the trouser first, because loose or tight decides the question before any accessory gets a say. There is no threshold to quote, since every brand cuts to its own block and no two size charts agree. Lay the trousers next to a pair of straight-leg jeans you already own and look at the ankle: narrower by an obvious margin reads emo, wider by an obvious margin reads hardcore.

Then the hair, off the face or over it, and then the shoe, either a heel and an ankle or flat canvas.

The belt, the tee, the chain, the wristband and the plaid tell you nothing, because both sides have worn all five.

Boots first if you are going hardcore, since they set the weight at the bottom and the trouser has to clear them. Flat canvas first if you are going emo. A skinny jean tucked into a boot shaft gives you the tight leg of one side with the heavy foot of the other, too narrow to be hardcore and too heavy to be emo.

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