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"FacebookPinterest\n\nIn honor of the upcoming Met Costume Institute exhibit \"Punk: Chaos to Couture,\" which opens on May 9th, we decided to pick the brain of our resident punk expert, the Style Guy, Glenn O'Brien, about the birth of the punk scene and it's influence on style. And, oh yeah, what it was like to party with Johnny Rotten\n\nYou were a big part of the punk scene when it first broke. How did it happen? Was it through your connections with the art world?\n\nYes, I moved to New York in 1970 to go to Columbia, and then I worked for Andy Warhol. That was kind of my first real job, and there were a lot of great artists around. And a lot of people that made art also made music, like James Chance\u2014he was in the Contortions. I was in a band. John Lurie was making paintings, and he had the Lounge Lizards. And some people were acting in other people's movies, so it was kind of like this whole art scene. Keith Haring and Basquiat were born out of that and even Christopher Wool. But that's kind of what New York was always about.\n\nAnd how did the scene evolve into what we now know as punk?\n\nIt all started with these downtown art scene bands that were playing bars. Mickey Ruskin, who owned Max's [Kansas City], sold it and opened a bar called Lower Manhattan Ocean Club. Max's was well before CBGB. I saw Patti Smith play there. The Talking Heads played there as a trio. And the summer I came to New York was the last run of the Velvet Underground upstairs at Max's, and Iggy Pop would play there. Then CBGB opened. Hilly [Kristal, owner of CBGB] intended it to be a country, bluegrass, and blues club and the legend is that Television just happened to walk in there, saw that they had a great P.A. system and said, \"Can we play here?\" And then there was the Mercer Arts Center. That was crucial. That's where the New York Dolls came from, Patti Smith, these crazy bands like Ruby and the Rednecks, maybe the Cramps played there. But that was pre-everything.\n\nWas it even called punk at that point?\n\nNo, I think the punk thing came from Punk magazine. Although, maybe the English people called it punk first, I'm not clear on that, but we never said \"punk.\"\n\nDo you remember when that word entered the lexicon?\n\nIt was after people like the Talking Heads and Blondie and Patti were signed to big deals, then I think people started calling it punk. Like I said, it might have been the influence of Punk magazine, which was started by John Holmstrom and Legs McNeil. And Roberta Bayley, who was the door person at CB's, was the photo editor, and the publisher was Ged Dunn [Jr.]. They made this funny little cartoon magazine that was an influence in that it promoted the stupid aesthetic of the Ramones. But it promoted the Ramones, Blondie, you know, the Dead Boys\u2014a lot of those bands. And interestingly, I think the term \"new wave\" was invented by Sire Records because they were trying to explain the difference between the Ramones and the Talking Heads. So the Talking Heads were \"new wave\" and the Ramones were \"punk.\"\n\nWas punk more about the scene or the music when it first started?\n\nWell, I think that when it started out it was almost like people didn't really think that there was any chance that they were going to be big rock stars, or big famous artists, or Hollywood filmmakers so everybody was kind of... There was a little scene of people making things to be consumed by their friends and just the local thing and then at some point, you know, I think people realized \"Wow, this is... They got signed! Someone's actually going to listen to this!\" But it started out just kind of like a garage band hobby kind of thing for a lot of people.\n\nWhen did you first realize that something similar was going on in the U.K.?\n\nI went there over the holidays in...was it '77, I guess, and it was the first time I saw those kids. I had some friends that were sort of on the edge of that scene like Duggie Fields and Andrew Logan and these London artists. And I was taken to\u2014I can't remember if it was New Years Eve '77 or '78\u2014It must have been '77. Andrew Logan had this loft by the Tower Bridge in London and it was this huge party that he had every year and the Clash were there, and the Sex Pistols were there, and Malcolm [McClaren] and Vivienne [Westwood], and everybody looked amazing. But at one point, Johnny [Rotten] and Vivienne got into a fist fight and were really punching the shit out of each other and then they flew into this big table and all the liquor started falling and all the wine and everybody was freaking out because all the drink was going on the floor. But that was very not New York.\n\nHow influential were the New York bands on the U.K. scene?\n\nI think the Dolls and the Ramones both toured in London pretty early and I think that stylistically a lot of the bands in London picked up a lot of musical chops from both of those bands. Those were the two key bands. I mean, I listen to the Sex Pistols and I hear the Dolls and I listen to, oh man... All these other bands that were really fast tempo and that came right out of the Ramones, like the Buzzcocks and Siouxsie and the Banshees. The most original one was the Clash, I think. They were really doing their own thing.\n\nIt seems like the lasting image of punk is more the U.K. safety pin look than the rocker look of the Ramones.\n\nYou could make the case that Richard Hell started the torn t-shirt and pinned look. I think it's like where a few fashion designers were credited with inventing the miniskirt, and they're all probably right because they probably did it at the same time. So it's kind of in the air. The earliest safety pin thing that I think I saw was, there's a picture of Andy Warhol with a bunch of safety pins pinned onto his turtleneck like a brooch. But then somebody told me it was an old window dresser thing because he'd been a window dresser, so who knows? But I remember Richard with the ripped clothes and the \"Please Kill Me\" shirt and all this stuff, which was very much like what was happening in London at basically the same time. But the fashion thing was really big. I mean, I was impressed, you know, going around London and going to the shops and going to SEX, Malcolm and Vivienne's shop, and there was a shop called BOY London where there was a lot of wild stuff.\n\nAnd what about the NYC style?\n\nWell the Ramones look came totally out of the male hustler aesthetic. The guys that would cruise, you know, stand on 53rd and 3rd Avenue, waiting to pick up tricks and wearing tight jeans and black leather jackets. The Schott motorcycle jacket was part of a huge sub-culture in the gay scene.\n\nIs there anything specifically from the style of that era that you love?\n\nI mean, if I look back at that time, I was doing [the cable access show] TV Party, and if I look at the pictures, I think, \"Wow, we looked really good.\" But the thing was everybody had their own style and it all came out of thrift shops and there was no such thing as designer clothes and there was no fashion really. A lot of those people had this kind of self-invented style. Like the Lounge Lizards\u2014they all kind of picked up on the old Jazz Man and narrow suits look. And Basquiat had his sort of antler dreadlocks. People were into looking good. I don't know. \"Punk\" is kind of a catchall term. I see it more as the \"Punk Era,\" but punk fashion is a little bit harder to define.\n\nDoes it bother you that the fashion world adopted styles from something as anti-fashion as punk?\n\nNo, that's what fashion does! That's what it's always done. It was this exact same thing with hippies, you know, because you had these, basically, homeless people in San Francisco with long hair and kind of freaky tribal stuff and then two years later you had them in St. Moritz at The Hotel du Cap wearing these things they bought in Tangiers. They were like the jet-set hippies. So it's like rich people want to be cool, they just do it on a different level. But then you have somebody like Vivienne Westwood who was really a punk. She still has that same spirit. Or even Betsey Johnson! She was kind of a punk. And you know, when I came to New York I hung out at Max's every night and there were a lot of designers there! And New York is a fashion-town so, you know, fashion exploits everything."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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