Where It Came From

Three waves, and the clothes people mean by the word came out of the third.

It starts in Washington DC in 1985. Revolution Summer, named by Amy Pickering at Dischord Records, pushed the local hardcore bands away from violence at shows and away from the machismo that had built up around them. The music changed first. What the DC bands wore in 1985 is thinly documented, and the wardrobe the word now means arrives much later.

The word arrived from outside and stayed there. Accounts differ on who first said it and how, and nobody in the scene claimed it, with Ian MacKaye disparaging it from a stage. So no dress code ever came out of that scene.

The second wave ran through the 1990s and dressed in a way that reads as something else entirely today. The third arrived in the mid-2000s, and by then the label had stuck. What filled the gap was a mall chain selling band merchandise, so the wardrobe got assembled out of products that already existed rather than designed. A black tee, a narrow jean, a canvas sneaker, a studded belt.

What Counts as Emo

A short-sleeved T-shirt in black, fitted rather than boxy, usually carrying a band name (My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy, most often). Jeans cut narrow through the thigh and ankle. A belt with pyramid studs, sitting below the waistband where it can be seen. Low canvas sneakers, Converse or Vans. Hair dyed black, straightened flat, cut long at the front.

Check the fit before anything else. Emo runs narrow, and a loose tee over a wide leg puts you somewhere else no matter what band is printed on it.

Narrow has a number on it. On a size 32 waist, Levi's own fit table, as reproduced by a denim retailer, gives the 510 Skinny a 13-inch leg opening and the 501 a 16. The period silhouette sits at the 13-inch end, and anything from 15 up reads as a straight leg however tight the thigh is. The belt is the other giveaway, since it rides below the waistband instead of holding it up.

Then look at whether the face is part of the outfit. A fringe across one eye or eyeliner or both is what separates this from any other black outfit with a band on the chest. The fringe is straightened flat rather than blow-dried and cut long enough at the front to cross the face on the diagonal, and one that stops above the eye reads as a normal side part.

Hardcore Was Loose and This Is Narrow

Hardcore dressed for a room where you might get hit, which meant a shaved head, work boots, loose shorts or jeans, and nothing on the body an opponent could take hold of.

Set the 2000s version against that and every item is inverted. The tee narrowed. The jean narrowed. The boot became a canvas sneaker, rubber toe cap and cotton upper. The head grew hair long enough to hide behind. Eyeliner and nail polish arrived in a scene whose earlier uniform had been a shaved head.

That comparison holds as a comparison. As a lineage it falls apart. Twenty years sit between the two, the DC scene's own clothes in 1985 are barely documented, and the decade in between went to cardigans and sweater vests. The dress code at the far end arrived by another route entirely.

Azerrad recorded that everyone involved bitterly detested the word, and Embrace rejected it from the moment it was created. Punk had shops and designers issuing a look, and goth had clubs. Emo had a label its wearers refused.

One Chain Distributed Almost All of It

Hot Topic sells counterculture clothing out of regional shopping malls, and an encyclopedia summary of the company puts licensed band T-shirts at around 40 percent of its revenue, a figure worth treating as an order of magnitude rather than a filing. At its mid-2000s peak it ran over six hundred stores. Gerard Way worked at his local branch in New Jersey before My Chemical Romance existed. If you lived outside a city, and most people did, your other option was a concert.

One supply line for most of a decade. That's why the fit is so consistent across photographs taken in different states, and why the same small set of bands turns up on the same chest. When that chain moved on, the silhouette left every mall in the same season. Anything bought after that came from eBay or from a costume aisle.

The Photograph and the Wardrobe Line Up

Hot Topic supplied the clothes. What people remember of them tracks one photo format almost exactly.

The dominant image format of the period was the high-angle self-portrait, camera held at arm's length above the head. The face fills the frame and the body is foreshortened, so everything below the collarbone compresses into a strip at the bottom of the picture.

One account of the standard profile picture describes it shot from the top down and overexposed until the only readable features are a pair of charcoal-rimmed eyes and a pierced lip. Underneath, you get two or three items at most. A vest, jeans that make the legs look like pipe cleaners, and Converse customized with a biro.

The hair, the eyeliner and the top of a chest graphic are what that format shows. The belt sits at the edge of the frame. The shoes sit at the very bottom edge, which is exactly why people wrote on the toe caps. A white toe cap was the part such a photograph could still register.

What carried the identity was whatever landed inside that crop.

One caution about the direction of that arrow. The evidence here is a retrospective account of what the pictures looked like, not a study of cause. It is equally possible that the taste came first. A scene already fixated on the face would produce the high-angle shot to suit it, and the crop would be following the wardrobe rather than shaping it. What the pictures establish is the correlation. The items that survive in the popular image are the ones the frame contained.

The shelf had far more on it than that. One woman who finished high school in 2009 lists black-and-red Chuck Taylors, fishnets, tripp pants, sweatband bracelets printed with band names and six or seven rubber bracelets on one arm. Clip-in hair colors, an oversized hoodie and a tie. Another in the same piece remembers platform Mary Janes, fishnet stockings and arm warmers. Tripp NYC bondage trousers came hung with chains and D-rings over tartan flannel lining, and two or three studded belts at once was a normal thing to do. Tartan turns up again in miniskirts and in striped or plaid trousers, and the shoe rotation ran wider than Converse, taking in Vans slip-ons and chunky DC skate shoes.

The pieces that did survive in memory are the ones on the face. Snakebite lip piercings and stretched lobes are still the first thing anyone draws when they draw an emo kid.

Now put the forgotten ones against the same frame. The rubber bracelets sat on an arm, and in a high-angle self-portrait one arm is holding the camera and the other is outside the picture. The tripp pants, the fishnets, the platform shoes, the plaid trousers and the skate shoes are all below the knee, in the strip at the bottom. The belts are at the edge. Every item on that list is outside the crop, and every item on that list is one people now forget was ever there.

Put the chain and the crop together and you have the wardrobe. One decided which garments existed within reach, the other decided which of them registered. One is a shop and the other is a photo format. Between them they settled the silhouette.

The 1990s Version Looked Nothing Like the 2000s One

A whole decade sits between DC and the mall, and it dressed differently.

Second-wave emo ran through the 1990s on bands like Sunny Day Real Estate, formed in Seattle in 1992, and Cap'n Jazz, formed in Chicago in 1989. Sunny Day Real Estate's Diary came out on 10 May 1994.

The clothes went the opposite way from punk. Emo dress in this period was clean-cut and tended towards geek chic, with thick-rimmed glasses of the Buddy Holly kind, button-down shirts, sweater vests, cardigans, tight jeans and Converse. Hair was short or messy and mostly left alone.

Hardcore next door was still shaved and booted. This went quiet in the clothes as well as the songs.

One item survives the jump into the 2000s. The thick horn-rimmed glasses stayed in style while everything around them changed, which is why they turn up in the next inventory looking like they came from nowhere.

The fringe has a starting point too. Justin Pearson of Swing Kids wore choppy spikes at the back with straight bangs at the front, a prototype for the haircut that arrived later. So the 2000s wardrobe borrowed even its one apparently original element.

What the Mid-2000s Version Was Made Of

The version that gets called emo now is twenty years after DC, and it has a fixed inventory.

The inventory for those years runs to skinny jeans, tight short-sleeved T-shirts usually carrying band names, studded belts, Converse sneakers, Vans and black wristbands. The names on those chests went wider than the three everyone remembers. Taking Back Sunday, Brand New and Further Seems Forever turn up in first-person accounts as often as My Chemical Romance. Eyeliner and black nail polish became common through the middle of the decade. The layering rule was a long-sleeved thermal or striped shirt underneath a short-sleeved graphic tee. That is why the sleeves in every photograph are two different colors.

Every item on that list existed before emo did. Converse Chuck Taylors date to 1917 and Vans to 1966, and the vulcanized construction that bonds their soles is why a worn pair splits along the seam rather than wearing through. The studded belt came over from punk. The T-shirt is a T-shirt. Even the haircut had a precedent.

That matters if you're putting it together now. People assembled this from what the mall already stocked. Reproductions now cost more than the originals did.

Three Stage Looks and One Real One

The stage version and the street version were different wardrobes. Mix them up and you get costume.

Gerard Way, The Black Parade, 2006. A black military marching band jacket with frogging across the chest, worn over a black shirt and trousers, white gloves, bleached hair, heavy eyeliner. The single was released on 12 September 2006, and the album's premise is a dying man whose image of death is a marching band he saw as a child. They wear black because the band is in mourning. It is a stage costume built for a concept album.

Brendon Urie, I Write Sins Not Tragedies, 2006. A black top hat, white gloves, skinny black jeans and long black boots, as one retrospective of the period describes it, in a video that took Video of the Year at the 2006 VMAs.

Hayley Williams, Paramore, mid-2000s. Orange hair against a band tee and a narrow jean. She is wearing the standard four. Change the hair color and this is the one look here you could wear to school.

And what a fan actually wore. One first-person account of the period lists a tight band tee, tight black leggings, black Converse written on with song lyrics, and eyeliner with dark filled-in brows. Four items. The tee and the Converse come straight off the list above, and the personalization was done with a pen.

Three of those are theater, with a budget and a concept behind them. The fourth is a black tee, a narrow leg, a canvas shoe and a face. Three of the four needed a costume department.

What the Women's Version Changed

The tee, the jean, the belt and the sneaker were unisex products bought from the same rail.

What differed was which body the same items were read on. Eyeliner, straightened hair and a narrow fit were unremarkable on women and a departure on men, and the departure is the part the scene was arguing about.

Hayley Williams of Paramore is the usual reference. Band tee, narrow jean, canvas sneakers. On the men it took a whole outfit to say the same thing.

What It Cost Then and What It Costs Now

The band tee anchors the whole thing, and its ticket price has held.

A concert T-shirt in the early 2000s ran about $20 to $25, on the account of one merchandise retrospective. Licensed band tees at mall prices have stayed close to that in cash terms.

Held prices get cheaper on their own. Twenty dollars of clothing in 2005 comes to about twenty-six today on the federal apparel index, so a tee that never moved its ticket has quietly given up about a quarter of its real cost.

That index deserves a caveat, because it is the sort of number that gets quoted without one. The apparel series is quality-adjusted, which means it tracks what a garment of constant quality costs rather than what any particular shirt costs. Offshoring and thinner cloth show up in it as falling prices. Read the comparison as the direction of travel, not as a measurement of one tee.

The rest of the outfit behaves the same way. Canvas sneakers, a narrow jean and a studded belt are commodity items, stocked in volume all year. A higher price mostly buys a different label on the same construction. The one place it buys something real is the sole of a shoe.

Goth and Scene Get Confused With It

Goth is the one people mix it up with most, and the color is most of what they have in common. Goth works in velvet, lace, mesh and leather, takes its references from history, and hangs from the shoulder, where emo works in jersey, denim and canvas, takes its references from bands that were active last year, and fits close to the body. If you want one tell, look at the shoe. A goth boot has a sole unit built for weight under it, and the Chuck Taylor was designed in 1917 to play basketball in.

Scene is closer, and later. Same silhouette, palette turned all the way up. Neon streaks through black hair, bright graphics, volume teased into the back instead of straightened out of it, plastic where emo used metal. The two shared the same platform and the same years, and the memory of them has merged since.

Where It Sits Now

The clothes are all still here, because most of them belonged to the wider market all along. A black tee, a narrow jean and a pair of canvas sneakers are on sale in every mall in the world right now. The outer layer is a hooded sweatshirt.

What returned was the label. The Las Vegas festival When We Were Young put the mid-2000s bands back on one bill, and the fringe came back with them.

Emo sits inside the wider category covered in our guide to alternative fashion, and next door to the one it gets confused with most, which is goth.

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