The Test, on One Dress

In 1977 Zandra Rhodes made a punk evening dress and called it Conceptual Chic. The V&A catalogued it clause by clause.

Matte black rayon jersey, sleeveless, floor length.

Deliberately and decoratively ripped at the bodice and lower skirt.

The raw edges of the slashes emphasised with machine zigzag stitching in blue cotton.

Fraying is what a raw edge does, and it is why a tear on a worn garment keeps getting bigger. Zigzag stitching stops it. The tear was made and then sealed at the size it was made.

Decorated with beaded safety pins.

A beaded pin can't close anything: the beads sit where the point would go through.

Ball link chains of the type used to secure domestic plugs.

A wallet chain carries a wallet and a bike chain locks a bike. A plug chain holds a plug in a socket, and on a dress it holds a plug in nothing.

And randomly placed diamanté.

Every other mark on a worn garment is put there by something: a knee, a seam.

Every element that would normally be doing a job has been reproduced in a form that cannot do it: a pin that closes nothing, a tear that cannot spread, a chain that carries no weight.

Punk garments sort into two piles on that basis. In one, hardware and damage that are holding, spanning, carrying, spreading. In the other, the same shapes reproduced in a form that cannot.

What a Pin Is Doing

Only where the cloth has gone: a shoulder seam that has come apart, a tear across the thigh, a waistband gaping at the back. Put yours where something has come apart.

Put one through a panel that is still whole and it becomes a badge.

Three people have claimed the first one, and they don't agree. Rotten has always said the pins were practical before anything else, holding the seat of his trousers together. McLaren says he brought the look back from New York, having seen Richard Hell at CBGB in torn clothes pinned back up. Jordan, who worked the counter at SEX, has said she started it. In all three versions the pin is holding something shut, and nobody can settle the rest of it.

The God Save the Queen video from 1977 shows the same thing in use: a row of pins down the front of a grubby white shirt, each one closing a gap.

What a Rip Is Doing

Rotten's sleeves came off the Anarchy in the UK shirt before he went on stage, and the catalogues credit him as a modifier of it. Philip Sallon's vest is catalogued as asymmetrical and one-shouldered. Same cut, different garment.

Two alterations have a record behind them, and sleeves coming off is the better documented.

The V&A describes Sallon's vest as partially dyed red, and stops at the colour.

Taking a trouser in has no record at all. Nothing in the archive shows anyone altering one.

Cut sleeves. Dye if you want to. Leave the trouser to the shop that cut it.

What a Stud Is Doing

Put two studded belts next to each other.

Worn on their own, both work. Worn under a jacket that already has studs across the chest, A still registers and B goes into the noise.

Belt A on this rail is the cross-buckle studded belt at $15. Black leather, two rows of dome studs, a plain cross buckle: two elements on a strap wide enough to carry both.

If it arrives already studded, a pattern of holes has already gone through the hide. They stay after you pull the studs out.

The stand-collar leather jacket here is $77, and the whole surface is yours to work on. Throat strap at the collar, one centre zip, ribbed hem, black-green distressed finish. Five years of badges, studs and paint will all fit on it, and the first badge goes on wherever you decide.

The front of a jacket loads from the top down.

That order comes down to weight. Metal is heavy, and a pin puts all of that weight on one small hole. It goes high, where the shoulder seam takes the load. Patches lie flat and weigh almost nothing.

Badges unpin. Studs leave holes. Paint doesn't come off. Load in that order, leaving time between the three.

Hardware Built to Come Off Again

Clip a chain onto a belt loop, buckle a strap round one thigh, knot a bandana through the back loops. All of it comes off again in a second. Nothing is committed.

The originals were built that way. The V&A holds the Seditionaries ensemble in six pieces.

Every piece after the trouser attached to the same set of hip rings, in 1976 and now.

The One Measurement That Has to Be Yours

Start with what can be measured on an actual garment.

T.405-1995 is the pair of Seditionaries bondage trousers Philip Sallon wore, and the V&A gives two figures for it: a 76-centimetre waist and 95-centimetre hips. T.252&A-1989, the bondage suit, is measured at the straps and the apron — 126 centimetres, 121.5 centimetres, 44 by 30.

Not one punk trouser in the collection has its leg opening recorded.

Which leaves the fourteen inches the vintage trade quotes. No garment in the museum record stands behind that figure. It circulates because dealers use it.

Lay the trouser flat, run a tape across the bottom of one leg, double it. Fourteen or under puts you in the London band.

Drainpipe or skinny

Both can measure fourteen inches at the ankle. The difference is what happens further up the leg.

Rigid or stretch

Two pairs at fourteen inches, one with elastane and one without, over a year.

What the Shoe Decides

Take the same fourteen-inch hem and try it over two shoes.

Over a creeper. The shoe ends at the sole. The hem stops clean on top of it and stays there when you walk.

Over a boot. There are several inches of leather above the ankle. The hem catches on the shaft and rides up until it settles somewhere on the boot.

This outfit runs on a flat shoe for that reason. It is also why the trouser here measures narrower than a grunge one, since a grunge trouser is cut to fall over a boot shaft.

George Cox creepers are Goodyear welted, the welt stitched through upper and lining to the insole, with the insole bedded on filler so it takes the shape of your foot. The sole is natural plantation crepe. The pointed-toe model is the Diano, still in the current range. Three eyelets, or two D-rings.

When the sole goes, a welted shoe takes a new one without the upper being touched.

Where the Jacket Has to Fit

Put it on over the thickest thing you plan to wear underneath.

Press a thumb on the end of your shoulder bone. The seam should be under your thumb.

Drop your arms. The cuff should end at the wrist bone.

Look down. The hem should be somewhere between your hip bone and the top of your thigh.

If the shoulder is wrong, put it back. Hide stretches at the elbow and across the back, never across the shoulder line.

A close-cut jacket over a fourteen-inch trouser gives one straight line from shoulder to ankle. A jacket two sizes up over the same trouser gives a wide top over a narrow bottom, also photographed. Loose jacket over a loose trouser: no photographs at all, since loose trousers were not part of this scene. Anyone who says that combination works is going on a general dressing rule.

Underneath, wear two shirts, and the one below wants the longer sleeve.

Colour Working, and Colour Decorating

Every bondage garment in the V&A catalogue is black cotton. Bonhams lists the same trousers in red and in black. The tartan drainpipes the Ramones, the Clash and the Sex Pistols wore were red.

Black is the ground and red is the interruption, and there is only ever one of it: the trousers if you go tartan, or the tee if you go print. Anything white stays as an under-layer. The Trondheim shirt sits there.

Studs stand out most against plain dark cloth. A pin reads clearest with nothing patterned behind it. Both of those are reasons the ground stays black.

Rotten in Trondheim, One Studded Cuff

Rotten on stage at the Studentersamfundet, 21 July 1977. Hair cropped and pushed up, dry, with one earring. A pale collarless shirt worn open over a white one. A dark tie pulled loose at the neck, and on the right wrist a leather cuff with conical studs in two rows.

The white cuff comes past the sleeve of the outer shirt by roughly two inches. The studded wrist is the only metal in the picture.

Sallon's Four Sources

Four garments, four separate sources, none of them a set. Philip Sallon assembled his that way, and the V&A catalogues it piece by piece.

Black on the boots and the jacket, colour on the vest, hardware on the trousers. Army surplus, one shop, a rival shop, his own hands.

Counting the Difference

Take every punk-era object the V&A holds from 1975 to 1985 and check each for twelve features: zips, straps, studs, chains, rings, pins, prints, tears, tartan, leather, exposed metal, snap fastenings. The count comes to 160 objects. Split them by what they are: things somebody wore, and things made to depict punk.

The whole top of the ranking sits in the second column. Seven features, the densest object in the collection, is a woven tapestry of a punk with an anarchy A knotted between the eyes. Six is a tour costume. Five is the companion tapestry. Four is a costume design for an Ugly Sister in Cinderella. The highest-scoring thing anyone wore is the bondage suit, at five, and half of that comes from the clip-on parts.

Now the dates on those four: 1980, 1983, 1980, 1979. Every one of them falls outside 1976 to 1978.

Narrow the same data to those three years and the pattern inverts. Thirty-two worn objects average 1.34 features; thirty depictions average 0.67. The depictions from 1976 and 1977 are mostly Jamie Reid's paper archive and Westwood's fabric samples, which carry nothing because they are not garments.

The finding is real. It belongs to the decade. The scene inside those three years behaves differently.

There is one further limit. A museum collects designer pieces, things with a famous owner, and things somebody kept on purpose, so the worn column measures what got collected. The jacket a sixteen-year-old in Sheffield covered in studs in 1979 and wore out stayed in Sheffield.

What survives all of that is the floor. Fifty-seven of the 116 worn objects carry no marked feature at all. Narrow the window or widen it, the fifty-seven holds.

Where These Rules Stop

American hardcore threw the look out on purpose. Keith Morris of the Circle Jerks put the London scene down to English fashion and said his own bands had nothing to do with it: "We looked like the kid who worked at the gas station". Henry Rollins said dressing up for him meant a black shirt and dark trousers, and treated an interest in clothes as a distraction. Jimmy Gestapo of Murphy's Law described moving from spiked hair and a bondage belt to a shaved head and boots as wanting clothes that worked. The DC and Southern California scenes ran on plain tees, work trousers and trainers.

Anarcho-punk, built around Crass from 1977, went to all-black army stock with anarchist symbols and no red at all. Crust went the opposite way altogether: vests packed edge to edge with studs and band patches, sewn on with whatever came to hand.

The hardest rule here, that only one garment carries metal, is a King's Road rule. In a crust scene the opposite holds, and a jacket has to be loaded to register at all.

With a Skirt, and On Your Head

Swap the trouser for a short skirt or a dress and put the narrowness into the leg: opaque tights, or fishnets already laddered. Keep the leg looking the same width from the knee down. That was the trouser's job.

Poly Styrene performed in a short green dress with an army helmet. The helmet holds the metal; the dress is plain.

One thing at most on the head, and the Trondheim frame has none of it: hair cropped and pushed up, dry, holding its own shape. A helmet, a beret or a bandana uses up the allowance for the whole outfit.

In Summer

Cut the sleeves off the jacket at the shoulder seam.

Unclip the chain. Bare skin in July is the reason.

Creepers have no lining. Rigid cotton sits away from the leg.

The Errors

Before You Leave