The Metropolitan Museum of Art shows what its seigneurial former director, Philippe de Montebello, liked to call “every category of art in every known medium from every part of the world during every epoch of recorded time.” Some categories there are more prominent than others, of course, and until quite recently the art of clothing design, which arrived with the formation of the Costume Institute, in 1946, had ranked rather low in the curatorial hierarchy. For three decades, housed in a ground-floor space under the Egyptian galleries, the Costume Institute served mainly as a resource to other departments, and its exhibitions attracted a core audience of society matrons and the Seventh Avenue retailers who had agreed to raise the money for the institute’s operating costs. Things changed dramatically in 1972, when Diana Vreeland took over. Her exhibitions of “Romantic and Glamorous Hollywood Design,” “The Glory of Russian Costume,” and other pizzazz-generating subjects drew big crowds, and the Costume Institute’s annual benefit began living up to its hopeful title as the “Party of the Year.” Vreeland’s successors, Richard Martin and Harold Koda, took a more scholarly approach. Their rigorously focussed exhibitions were admired both inside and outside the museum, leading curators in other departments to view the Costume Institute in a more collegial light. (Before that, Koda says, “we were like a benign tumor.”) For a diminishing number of aesthetic purists, though, questions lingered: Was clothing design really art? Did the department’s close connections to the fashion trade undermine its curatorial integrity, and, if so, did it belong at the Met?
The questions were put to rest in 2011 by an astonishing exhibition called “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty.” For three months, as the Internet word-of-pixel spread and the waiting lines grew longer and longer, viewers marvelled at the theatre of cruelty, surrealist romanticism, and virtuoso craftsmanship bequeathed by a young British designer who had committed suicide the year before, at age forty. The McQueen show drew 661,509 visitors, making it one of the most highly attended exhibitions in the Met’s history. (Some of Vreeland’s extravaganzas had higher attendance totals, but they were up for nine months or longer; the McQueen show, like other temporary exhibitions, had a three-month run.) Thomas Campbell, who succeeded de Montebello as the Met’s director in 2009, describes the McQueen phenomenon as “absolutely groundbreaking for us, because it was so immersive an experience.” The show was widely reviewed, and not just by the fashion press. Holland Cotter, the Times art critic, described it as “ethereal and gross, graceful and utterly manipulative, and poised on a line where fashion turns into something else.”
Andrew Bolton, the Met curator who conceived and organized the exhibition, found the public response thrilling, and a little tragic. “Every time I went past that long queue,” he told me, “it broke my heart, because I knew McQueen would have been so happy to see it.” For Bolton, a forty-six-year-old British-born curator who joined the Met a little more than ten years ago, McQueen had become an obsession. They had met only twice, but Bolton had worked intensively with McQueen’s closest associates in preparing the exhibition, and he had read everything he could find on the man. “His voice was so consistent, so brave and honest and frank, that I lost a lot of objectivity,” he told me. Cotter, in his highly positive Times review, had taken issue with the McQueen show’s catalogue, which he found lacking in curatorial rigor. “If you’re going to deal with fashion as art, treat it as art, bring to it the distanced evaluative thinking . . . that scholars routinely apply to art,” he had written. “I think the criticism is valid,” Bolton said, when I asked him about this. “But the show was never meant to be a retrospective. It was important for me to engage with him as a man, who had so many lives and so many demons, and whose work was always very autobiographical. If that meant I wasn’t distant and objective, then that was the price I was willing to pay. I wanted people to experience my show as an audience would experience a McQueen runway show, and I think we achieved that.” On the show’s final day, the museum stayed open until midnight. Around 9 P.M., the line outside the building still stretched down Fifth Avenue beyond Seventy-ninth Street.
The Costume Institute is committed to doing a major show every year, and what Bolton and Koda came up with in 2012 was “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations,” a clever pairing of highly influential Italian designers from different periods, past and present. The show was intelligent and well attended—a palate cleanser after a feast. Last June, Bolton went to work on something much riskier. The title of his new exhibition, which opens to the public on May 9th, is “Punk: Chaos to Couture,” and its subject is the revolutionary and continuing influence on fashion designers of a youth-culture movement that some of us (me, for example) could have sworn was safely in its grave. It’s amazing how little some of us know. In the world of haute couture, punk is the undead.
Bolton had been thinking about a punk show for several years, he told me one day last December. We were having coffee in the Patrons Lounge at the Met, at a midmorning hour when nobody else was there. Bolton looks like the perennial English schoolboy. He is reed-thin, with neatly parted brown hair, and he was dressed that day in a narrow-cut gray suit, a white button-down shirt with the collar points unbuttoned, no socks, and trousers that stopped well above the ankle. His shoes had taps on the toes and heels, which clattered irreverently against the museum’s marble floor. Open, friendly, alert, and quick to laugh, Bolton speaks in a surprisingly resonant baritone. “Punk was the first subculture that I engaged with personally, when I was a kid,” he said. “I was nine or younger, growing up in a small village in Lancashire, in the north of England—too young to experience it, but I was aware of the music, the Sex Pistols and the Clash, and I’d follow the fashions through the music magazines and also style magazines from London. In small towns like Blackburn, where I lived, punk was very much about customization, going to thrift stores and army-surplus stores and mixing things together.”
Born in 1966, the youngest of three children in a middle-class Catholic family, Bolton harbored no punk-like grudges against the world. His father worked for a newspaper, “on the production side”; his mother was a housewife. He had a sister who was good at art and a brother who cared deeply about sports. “We all had our comfort zones, and mine was school and the academic side. I went through a punky stage where I would spike my hair, but I was too clean-cut to pull it off. Whatever I did, I looked preppy. Eventually, I just embraced that style. In England you called them Sloaney clothes, after Sloane Rangers—tweed jacket with cords, the Young Fogey look. I don’t like standing out. I’d much rather blend in with the crowd.”
He majored in anthropology at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich. “What interested me was the similarity between cultures, how people from different cultures had similar behavior patterns,” he said. After getting his undergraduate degree, in 1987, he spent his savings and most of the next year travelling in the Far East—Thailand, Indonesia—and in Australia, and this made him decide to get a master’s degree in non-Western art. He went back to the University of East Anglia, on a full scholarship. When he graduated, a year later, there was a job waiting for him at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge, which he left after six months to become a curatorial assistant at the Victoria and Albert, in London, the world’s largest museum of decorative arts and design. Bolton spent eight years in the V. & A.’s East Asian department. He had always been fascinated with clothes and the psychology of clothes—what they reveal about human evolution and social behavior—and he managed to bring in clothes by Anna Sui, Vivienne Tam, and other Chinese-American contemporary designers. The V. & A. has a very large costume collection, and when an opening came up in 1999 for a research associate in contemporary fashion, he applied for and got it. In his new position, he was able to do exhibitions. He put on a number of the “Fashion in Motion” shows that had become very popular at the museum, including one by the New York designer Yeohlee Teng, whose live models paraded through the galleries preceded by a flutist and a drummer. Bolton loved the democracy of fashion. “People are not afraid of fashion, I think, because it’s so accessible,” he said. “Haute couture is an ideal, but fashion itself is democratic. We all wear it.” In another exhibition, called “Men in Skirts,” he demonstrated that the Western world was unique in restricting such a sensible garment almost exclusively to women. The subject was so well received that he returned to it for one of his early shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Bolton’s move to the Met, in 2002, happened quite suddenly. He was in New York on a visit, having dinner with Yeohlee. “She mentioned that she was having lunch the next day with Harold Koda, and I said, ‘Gosh, I’d really like to meet him.’ Yeohlee arranged for the three of us to have lunch on my next visit. I don’t think I said a word the whole time, I was so shy and so intimidated. The Met was the Holy Grail to me, and Harold and Richard Martin, the former curator in charge, had shaped my approach to fashion. They were among the first costume curators who used the present to enliven the past, and the past to inform the present. Anyway, Harold called me a couple of weeks later, and said he was looking for an associate curator, and was I interested? I remember thinking that this was my dream job, but it’s come too soon—do I have enough experience? Am I ready for it?” (He was thirty-five at the time.) “But, of course, I didn’t think twice, it was such an amazing opportunity.”
The Costume Institute’s comprehensive inventory of clothes, from the seventeenth century to the present, is the largest of its kind anywhere. When Bolton arrived, the department was just emerging from a leadership crisis. Harold Koda had left in 1997, to study landscape architecture at Harvard, and two years later Richard Martin died, of cancer, at the age of fifty-two. Koda came back in 2000, as curator in charge, but he needed help, and he wanted somebody who didn’t think the way he did. “Since there are only two curators in the department, I felt it was important for us to have different approaches,” Koda told me. He was impressed by Bolton’s ethnographic background, openness, and understated intelligence—apparently, he had not been totally inarticulate at that first meeting. Koda, who can be alarmingly frank, said, “If I’m really honest, I am someone who is very much a dilettante, who likes a superficial engagement with things. I don’t like to go deep. Andrew is a scholar, and he loves getting in deep. What I bring to the Costume Institute is a real interest in how to put exhibitions together. As a young intern, I’d worked on exhibitions with Diana Vreeland, who had this idea that if you’ve devoted so much time and money and labor to the effort you’d better get people to come and see it. That part Andrew got very quickly. What I think he didn’t understand at first is that we have a different audience from the one he had in Europe. There, people stand around reading labels; here, if there’s someone in the way, they move on. Andrew had to get used to this.”
Koda immediately put him in charge of an exhibition called “Blithe Spirit,” about the elegant and extravagant clothes worn by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and their set in the nineteen-thirties. What struck Bolton was that the clothes of that period were so out of step with the times. “Fashion in the thirties was historicist, romantic, and fantastical—surrealist,” he said. “It was a complete negation of what was going on in the world. I began the show with the Windsors on the Riviera, and the sybaritic life style of that era, and ended it with footage of the war, and Churchill’s great speech, and the Nazis on the Champs-Élysées.” He was learning to think more visually about exhibitions. At the V. & A., he said, “fashion is seen as something social and political, while here at the Met the emphasis is more aesthetic and intellectual. Working with Harold taught me to be more rigorous in terms of one object’s relationship to another.”
He did twelve shows in ten years, some in collaboration with Koda. They worked together on the highly popular “Dangerous Liaisons,” in 2004, the Costume Institute’s first exhibition in recent times in the galleries of another department; male and female mannequins in eighteenth-century dress were brought into the French period rooms of the Wrightsman Galleries, where inlaid Sèvres porcelain furniture and delicate boiseries became settings for a variety of erotic tableaux. Two years later, without Koda, Bolton attempted a similar but bolder experiment in the English period rooms, called “AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion.” This one took on a number of social and historical issues, mashing together two hundred years of significant and undeniably British dress styles, from Beau Brummell’s understated elegance to punks in ripped jeans and T-shirts climbing drunkenly over Chippendale furniture. The show got a lot of attention, some of it highly critical. The Times’ art critic Roberta Smith found it “light-years ahead of . . . ‘Dangerous Liaisons,’ ” but also “a fabulous confusing romp” with “more ideas than it knows what to do with.” Costume Institute exhibitions were now being reviewed regularly by art critics, as well as by fashion and feature writers.
The year before, Koda and Bolton’s big “Chanel” exhibition had been heavily criticized. The main complaint was about the inclusion of clothes by Karl Lagerfeld, Coco Chanel’s successor. The Met almost never does retrospectives of living dress designers, and a previously scheduled Chanel exhibition, five years earlier, had been cancelled after a public dispute between Lagerfeld and Philippe de Montebello, the director at the time, over curatorial control. Some people assumed that Lagerfeld had prevailed this time around, pushing his way into the mix and depriving Chanel of the full-dress retrospective that her work and her colossal influence deserved. But that, according to Koda and Bolton, was definitely not the case. “We wanted the show to be about the House of Chanel,” Bolton said, “and we wanted to compare Chanel’s modernity with Lagerfeld’s post-modernity. Karl is always about the here and now and the future, and he made the house relevant to a younger audience. The biggest obstacle at first was persuading him to be included.” Both curators told me that Lagerfeld’s here-and-now ambitions made him reluctant to have his own work in what he sometimes calls the “Necropolitan” museum of art, and that, once he agreed to be in the show, he had no interest in being consulted about the clothes they selected.
The main funding for the Costume Institute exhibitions has always come from the fashion industry, and Koda and Bolton have had to deal with the perception in some quarters that the sponsor must be calling at least some of the shots. They are both acutely aware of the criticism that engulfed the Guggenheim Museum in 1999, when it was announced that Giorgio Armani, who had pledged a reported fifteen-million-dollar gift to the institution, would be given a retrospective exhibition there. “In the years I’ve been at the Met,” Bolton said, “it’s been absolutely clear that the sponsor cannot have any curatorial voice. But the problem is that people see fashion as a commercial enterprise, not an art form.” This perception may be changing. A complete renovation of the Costume Institute’s ground-floor space is under way. Scheduled for completion next year, the space will provide a forty-two-hundred-square-foot gallery for rotating exhibitions (funded by a gift from Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch), as well as a new conservation center, a library, and expanded storage facilities. All the Costume Institute’s annual exhibitions now take place in the museum’s special-exhibition galleries upstairs, and the question of sponsor influence rarely comes up anymore. It was never raised about the McQueen show, which was funded mainly by the firm of Alexander McQueen.
On an unseasonably warm day last December, Bolton showed me the scale model for “Punk: Chaos to Couture,” which was scheduled to open in less than five months. The model was on a table in a large, cluttered room in the temporary quarters that the Costume Institute is currently using during the renovation. File cabinets lined two walls, along with boxes and crates and paraphernalia of all sorts, including a life-size mannequin of the late Diana Vreeland, peering out sardonically from behind a stepladder. The Styrofoam mockup was divided into seven spaces, where miniature images of mannequins in authentic punk clothing—torn T-shirts and jeans held together with safety pins, bondage-wear, deconstructed garments accessorized with chains, zippers, spiked collars, razor blades, and Dr. Martens boots—were juxtaposed with riffs on them by Zandra Rhodes, Gianni Versace, John Galliano, Rei Kawakubo, Karl Lagerfeld, and other paladins of advanced couture.
A few days earlier, Bolton had presented the model and discussed his plans for the show with Thomas Campbell, the museum’s director, and Jennifer Russell, the associate director for exhibitions. He had also shown it to Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue, who is a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum, and who, as co-chair and prime mover of the Costume Institute’s Party of the Year benefit, has seen its annual take rise from $1.3 million in 1995, when she took over, to last year’s record of more than $11.5 million. “ ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ really changed the way people looked at Costume Institute exhibitions,” Wintour told me. “Once we got upstairs and started to involve the museum more, and to put clothes into a context, the exhibitions became more popular and got much more recognition. I think a lot of that had to do with Andrew. What’s interesting is that museums all over the world now want to do fashion shows. They all see this as a way to bring in the audience, and to make money.”
The meeting with Campbell and Russell had gone well, according to Bolton. “They loved the concept and they loved—well, most of the design. Tom was worried about visitor circulation. They’re expecting the show to draw a lot of people, who might get confused about where to go.” I asked about Wintour’s reaction. “ ‘Another black, another black,’ ” he said, channelling Wintour’s concise diction. “She likes color. But she had a smile on her face, which is a good sign.” According to Koda, “Anna wants to know what we’re doing, so she can integrate the party with the show. She tells people that she makes my life and Andrew’s life a living hell, but she doesn’t. Anna can be our most important sounding board. We don’t necessarily take her direction, but we always take note. And very often she is spot-on.”
The first three galleries in Bolton’s exhibition tell the story of punk’s dual origins, in New York and in London. Malcolm McLaren, a London-born clothes designer and would-be entrepreneur, spent the winter of 1974-75 in New York, and saw something new emerging in youth culture. The word “punk,” long associated with prostitutes, petty criminals, and prison inmates singled out for homosexual rape, had been applied to a few garage-rock bands in the sixties. In the mid-seventies, it attached itself to an eruption of aggressively rebellious tendencies in music, dress, and social behavior on the downtown New York scene. Disgusted by rock music’s decline into sentimentality (singer-songwriters like Billy Joel) and overblown bombast (bands like Jethro Tull, Yes, and Pink Floyd), young, urban malcontents responded immediately to the stripped-down, speeded-up sound of the Ramones, a young group from Forest Hills, Queens, who played their first gig at CBGB, the red-hot music club on the Bowery, on August 16, 1974.
“In the first gallery here,” Bolton pointed out, “we’ll try to evoke CBGB, with loudspeakers blasting the Ramones. Some of punk’s visual codes originated in New York—the swastika armbands, the safety pins, the torn shirts. The absolute basic line for punk clothes, as established by the Ramones, is a biker jacket, a shrunken T-shirt with an infantile image on the front, skinny jeans with a tear in the knee, and sneakers.” Richard Hell, born Richard Meyers, who was a member of the proto-punk band Television and went on to form Richard Hell and the Voidoids, is credited with being the first to tear his T-shirts and close the rents with safety pins; one of his shirts was interestingly stencilled “PLEASE KILL ME.” “Without a doubt, though, the single most influential thing I’ve done was my haircut,” Hell now says. Reacting against the long-haired androgyny of the despised hippie generation, he adopted a ragged, patchy crewcut that “was something you had to do yourself.”
McLaren took elements of all this back to London, where he and his partner, the dress designer Vivienne Westwood, had a clothing shop on the King’s Road. The designers made and sold clothes that echoed Richard Hell’s ripped-clothes look, as well as loosely woven string and mohair sweaters, bondage suits, leather pants, rubber garments adapted from the gear in S. & M. outlets, and studded boots. McLaren slapped together a band called the Sex Pistols, which took the look and the sound to a louder, angrier, and much more confrontational level. Other bands, both male and female (the Clash, Buzzcocks, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Slits), picked up on the fast tempo and the obscene, anti-establishment lyrics, which were shouted rather than sung. In remarkably short order, punk music, punk clothes, punk haircuts (spiky, multicolored), and punk attitudes caught on and spread like a virus to France, Australia, and many cities in the United States beyond New York, as well as to English towns like Blackburn, where Andrew Bolton was growing up. “Punk in London was music-based, but it quickly became a political, class-conscious thing,” Bolton said. “It was a very depressed time in London, and working-class kids were acting out the realities of being on the dole. The battle cry of the Sex Pistols was ‘No future—no future for you and no future for me.’ ”
Johnny Rotten, the Pistols’ lead shouter (his civilian name is John Lydon), rode the wave of youthful discontent like a born-again surfer. When a series of strikes by London trash collectors left towering piles of garbage on street corners, Lydon started wearing the trash bags. “That was a perfect, perfect item of clothing,” he now recalls. “You’d just cut a hole for your head and your arms and put a belt on, and you looked stunning.” Lydon and Sid Vicious, later the band’s bassist and its most strident provocateur, aroused and insulted their audiences with a fury that overrode their musical shortcomings. When the Pistols were at the height of their infamy, in 1976, Bolton said, “the performers and the audience just sort of merged. They were goading each other—yelling obscenities, spitting, and breaking glasses. There was something dangerous and violent about it all.”
The violence, the anger, and the infamy didn’t last long. The Sex Pistols broke up in 1978, and Sid Vicious died of a heroin overdose in 1979—the same year that Margaret Thatcher took office as Prime Minister. Bolton makes a connection between Thatcher’s ascendancy and the dwindling of punk’s vital energies. Punk had made a ruling principle out of do-it-yourself—the discovery that you could design your own clothes, start your own band, publish your own magazine, and generate your own publicity. “Thatcher redefined D.I.Y. as a social virtue, a form of individualism,” Bolton said. “But a lot of people think it was Zandra Rhodes who really put the nail in punk’s coffin. She was the first couture designer to take up punk. She did a collection in 1977 with safety pins and black jersey and tears, which she called Conceptual Chic.” Rei Kawakubo experimented with punk hardware and deconstruction in the early nineteen-eighties, incorporating rips and tears and the deliberate ruination of perfectly nice garments. Then, in the mid-nineties, Gianni Versace did a much talked-about line of safety-pin dresses, and before you knew it other designers were tearing and deconstructing their clothes, sewing on the straps and buckles associated with bondage-wear, using studs and chains and zippers instead of sequins or beading, and showing a punk-like avidity for throwaway materials. John Galliano, Dior’s guiding genius until his recent anti-Semitic rants cast him into fashion purgatory, achieved a post-punk apotheosis in 2006 when he made a gown with an eighteen-foot train of black aluminum foil. Bolton was planning to give this “garbage-bag dress” a central place in his show, if it still existed, and if Dior would lend it.
“Mick Jones, of the Clash, said that punk in its pure form lasted a hundred days,” Bolton said. After that, the clothes and the attitudes went public. By the late nineteen-seventies in London, torn and dirty jeans and T-shirts had given way to flamboyant, increasingly colorful outfits pieced together from junk shops, trash bins, and shops like the McLaren-Westwood boutique, where for a time the wares were called Clothes for Heroes. English punk style was more colorful and much more eclectic than the New York version, which favored funereal black. British punks borrowed from earlier street stylists, including Teddy Boys and skinheads, and from their childhood closets—plaid pants and school blazers, accessorized with toilet chains, razor blades, tampons, slogans, and anything else they found lying around. They fetishized the Mohawk, a stiffened crest of stand-up hair, dyed toxic colors, that would have made Chingachgook run for cover. Punks on the King’s Road became a tourist attraction, like London taxis or telephone boxes. Bolton was determined, in his thinking about the show, to avoid the movement’s later, cliché aspects. “I don’t want this to be a trip down memory lane,” he said. “I know the show is going to be very controversial among people who lived through the period.” Adverse reactions were already coming in. Three months before the show was set to open, the widow of Malcolm McLaren (who died in 2010) told the London Observer that there were misattributions in the Metropolitan’s collection of punk garments, and that she had written to tell them that “pretty much everything in there is wrong.” The late Pat Buckley, who ran the Costume Institute’s Party of the Year before Anna Wintour took over, could easily have felt the same way. I asked her son Christopher, the writer, what she would have made of “Punk: Chaos to Couture,” and he said, “My guess is: ‘It should have stayed in chaos.’ ”
For the next few weeks, Bolton focussed on the clothes he wanted to borrow for the punk show. The Costume Institute owned some classic punk garments, acquired in 2006 when Bolton persuaded the Met’s trustees to buy the collection of an English post-punk rocker known as Adam Ant. (Part of his and Koda’s job is to study auction catalogues and go to the collections, looking for things they believe the Met should acquire.) Bolton’s wish list now stood at about a hundred and thirty objects, which would be narrowed down further before the final selection. Among the more famous items already secured were Zandra Rhodes’s 1977 black rayon dress with beaded safety pins; Gianni Versace’s 1994 dress (worn by Elizabeth Hurley to the première of the film “Four Weddings and a Funeral”) in which slashed openings on both sides were accented by gold-and-silver-toned safety pins; Lagerfeld’s suit for Chanel’s spring-summer 2011 collection with dozens of carefully crafted holes; a red parachute ensemble (canvas, with straps front and back and a metal ring in the middle) by Westwood and McLaren; and several Westwood-McLaren annotated T-shirts, including one, called “God Save the Queen,” which showed Queen Elizabeth II with a safety pin through her lips. Not one of the classic punk items had to be re-made for the show, Bolton told me. The Met had bought one or two items at auction, but the rest came from private clients, from Westwood, and from the Adam Ant collection. Both Westwood and Ant had preserved and archived pieces with great care, never doubting their historical value. “Ideally, I’d like to show a hundred garments, and have the show last a hundred days,” Bolton said, referring to Mick Jones’s comment about the life span of “pure” punk. The final tally, as of this writing, includes a few more than a hundred garments, but the show will be up for exactly a hundred days, from May 7th to August 11th.
The next time we talked, Bolton said he was still waiting to hear from Dior about Galliano’s trash-bag dress. He also reported that they might have to lose a forty-foot-long, Styrofoam statue of Vivienne Westwood, which he and his creative consultant, Nick Knight, had planned to fabricate and install in one of their four large galleries. The idea had been to have her lying on a distressed mattress, where visitors would be able to project graffiti on her nude body by using their cell phones and the Internet. Knight, a British photographer and media artist, had worked out the technology three years earlier, with a twenty-five-foot-tall statue of the supermodel Naomi Campbell that he installed at Somerset House in London: people were encouraged to project images on her electronically, and they did so with great enthusiasm. “To my mind,” Knight said, “this is a good way of getting chaos into the exhibition. Punk was essentially a movement that came from the street, so I’m trying to allow the world to participate.” Both Thomas Campbell and Anna Wintour felt that the statue would take up too much exhibition space, though, and be a needless distraction—“punk lite,” Campbell called it. (Campbell has revealed that he, too, as an English schoolboy, had dyed his hair platinum and “tried to make it spiky for parties.”) A lot of Knight’s ideas were dependent on the budget, Bolton said, and it looked as though this one might not survive.
Bolton’s working hours were getting longer. He arrived at the Met by 10 A.M., riding his bicycle uptown from his apartment on West Twenty-fourth Street, and he rarely left before ten at night. Early-morning workouts at a gym helped to keep him energized. He had wanted me to meet his friend Thom Browne, who had recently achieved fashion nirvana by designing the coat and dress that Michelle Obama wore to her husband’s inauguration, but there never seemed to be time to do that. He had been following Browne’s work for a decade, and about six months ago they had become romantically involved. They wanted to rent a weekend place out of town—they were thinking about Tuxedo Park—but because Bolton spent every weekend working at the museum they never got around to that, either. “Seeing Thom’s menswear show in Paris a year ago crystallized my thinking about punk,” Bolton told me. “His clothes had that really narrow silhouette, tight jackets with high armholes, and they reminded me of films I’d seen of punks walking down the King’s Road in very tight trousers and tight T-shirts. The connection between haute couture and punk really became clear to me when I saw Thom’s show.” He had adopted the Thom Browne narrow silhouette for his own use, I realized, along with shortened pants and no socks. After all those years as a Young Fogey, he had graduated to a punk-inspired high style.
The deadline for the exhibition catalogue was bearing down. Bolton started writing his own essay in January, but he still hadn’t solved the Richard Hell–Johnny Rotten problem. Hell had been ambivalent from the start about writing an essay for the catalogue. “I didn’t know if I wanted to even implicitly endorse a show about rich people’s expensive status symbols,” he said. He was also concerned about seeming competitive with Lydon, if they both wrote essays. In the end, though, “I decided, Fuck it, it was an interesting challenge, and I can hold my own with any of those people.” Both Lydon and Hell agreed to write for the catalogue, but Bolton didn’t know that until late January. He had hoped to get an audio recording of Patti Smith reading a poem by Arthur Rimbaud, the teen-age ur-punk, but she was off on tour and didn’t have the time. (New York punk was more literary than the British brand; “the new house god was not a rock star but Arthur Rimbaud,” as Jon Savage, the author of punk’s elegy, “England’s Dreaming,” writes in the show’s catalogue.) Patti Smith had been the patron saint of New York punk, the oracle who once said that everything important happened in the toilet at CBGB; Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph of her for the cover of “Horses,” her first album, wearing a man’s white shirt and a skinny black ribbon at the neck, was one of the enduring punk images. “I remember my sister wearing that white shirt and black tie,” Bolton said. David Byrne, who also performed at CBGB, with his band Talking Heads, in the mid-nineteen-seventies, said recently that punk, to him, “didn’t connote a fashion style or even a musical style as much as a sense of empowerment and experimentation,” but that, unfortunately, “it became codified in both sound and dress, and much of that was left by the wayside.”
Just before Christmas, Bolton reported that the statue of Vivienne Westwood was definitely out. “I understand the reasons,” he said. “We were trying to show how the D.I.Y. aesthetic was being used today, through the Internet, but I was worried about losing all that space for showing clothes, too. If it hadn’t been for that, I would have argued harder.” In mid-January, he heard from Dior that the Galliano trash-bag dress was not available, but he already had alternatives in mind. He said that the young, avant-garde British designer Gareth Pugh was working on a new line of skirts, dresses, and capes made from trash bags that had been shredded and then knitted back together so they looked like fur. (The trash-bag line appeared on the runway in Pugh’s recent show in Paris.) “I’m going to use two or three of Gareth’s pieces,” Bolton said. “He’s taking the idea of trash to the heights of luxury.” Another possible implication, Bolton agreed, was that fashion is trash.
The punk exhibition’s main sponsor is Moda Operandi, a three-year-old retail fashion outlet that describes itself as “the world’s premier online luxury retailer.” I asked Bolton if he’d had any contact with the two young women who run it. He said that the Met’s marketing department had made a preliminary presentation of the show to them, and that was it—they signed on. Punk’s appeal to the luxury trade was not only undead but irresistible.
At eight-thirty on a Monday morning in mid-February, in the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum, Thomas Campbell introduced Bolton at a press conference for “Punk: Chaos to Couture.” Standing on a low platform, flanked by five mannequins in original punk garments by Westwood and McLaren and nine more wearing high-fashion punk couture by Comme des Garçons, Chanel, Moschino, Versace, Givenchy, Zandra Rhodes, Dior, Rodarte, and McQueen, Bolton spoke for ten minutes, in a firm, confident voice, although, as he confided later, he was just getting over a bad cold and he was so nervous that his knees kept shaking the whole time. He identified each of the outfits on view, all of which would be in the show. The early ones included Westwood and McLaren’s “Anarchy in the U.K.” shirt, with the image of a torn Union Jack, and their other, equally famous T-shirt featuring two pant-less cowboys with dangling penises. Bolton discussed these and other garments in terms that would not have been out of place in the upstairs galleries of European painting. With regard to punk’s D.I.Y. legacy, he said, “In a bizarre twist of fate, their ethos of do-it-yourself has become the future of ‘no future.’ ”
A day or so earlier, we had talked about punk’s amazingly long afterlife. (At Fendi’s Milan show later that month, all the models were wearing faux Mohawks.) Much of what I’d been hearing about the movement’s origins and early manifestations sounded so puerile—an extended post-adolescent tantrum—and I wondered what had induced the fashion world to co-opt this, and then to go on feeding off it for more than three decades. “You’re right, a lot of it was puerile,” Bolton had said, laughing, “especially in England. The notion of cool was very much part of the New York punk scene, coming down from Warhol, but in London it was never as self-consciously cool. There was desperation, and for many people punk came as a great release. I think a lot of it was really quite infantile, about an unwillingness to grow up, or to be mediocre and unoriginal. And, of course, the irony was that punk became a uniform. In the end, everything punk tried not to be, it was. But in fashion it changed so much, and in that sense I think it was a noble movement, like dandyism. Beau Brummell, the original dandy, was defying previous sartorial codes, all that male plumage. He was the grandfather of punk, although he insisted that he wanted to be invisible.” Dandyism, in other words, could be ascetic as well as ornate—Brummell and Oscar Wilde. I asked Bolton if he knew Albert Camus’s comment on dandyism: “The dandy is, by occupation, always in opposition. He can only exist by defiance.” Bolton said that it reminded him of the “Incroyables” in France after the Revolution’s Reign of Terror, the people who rejected proletarian forms of dress. “They became incredibly flamboyant, wearing very tight pantaloons and high-waisted jackets with big lapels,” he said. “That was a political gesture. It was very much about aristocracy and nobility.
“The psychology of clothes is so fascinating,” Bolton went on. “There’s nothing so immediate as fashion, in terms of an expression of one’s values and one’s state of mind. Even the negation of fashion is a statement. But high fashion is usually seen as an expression of femininity, which is why a lot of people don’t take it seriously, or see it as an art form. It’s not just that fashion can’t be an art form because it’s functional, but because it’s feminine.” Punk, in its original, rough-beast form, was both gender-neutral and transgender. Bolton talked about the girl known as Jordan, born Pamela Rooke, who grew up in a council estate in Sussex, commuted to London from Seaford, worked for McLaren and Westwood at their shop, wore their clothes, and turned herself into a living embodiment of the punk spirit. “There’s a really nice quote by Jordan in a documentary called ‘Punk: The Early Years,’ where she says this was going to go down as the most boring decade in history, but punk had saved it. Hearing that gave me goose bumps. She was absolutely right. Punk was about making something ugly beautiful.” ♦
