Punk fashion is hard to do. Fashion exists to make boys and girls look pretty, and punk requires a fundamental not-wanting-to-be-pretty. No figure illustrates this better than singer Siouxsie Sioux. In black-and-white photographs of her from the 1970’s and 80’s, before she started working with professional stylists and makeup artists, it's clear that she’s a classic English beauty, slender-hipped and fine-boned, and also that she’s willing to throw that beauty, and the privilege it confers, away. She dyes her hair ink black, then shears it close to her skull or teases it freakishly high. She paints her eyes with great black bat wings. She wears trashy slip dresses that expose her breasts, and slim leather trousers and squarish t-shirts that make her look like an adolescent boy. There’s something about her willingness during these years to make herself conventionally unattractive in order to make a statement (I’m not like you, I’m not a lady, I’m pissed-off) that is punk.
Because womens’ identities are, traditionally, so wound up in their looks, punk fashion might be harder for women to do than for men. Courtney Love did it, thrillingly, in the beginning, with bad skin, bad makeup, bad dye jobs, and bad clothes. Debbie Harry never did it but has always carried herself with an artsy disdain, an unattainability, that is, if not punk, impressively defiant. Madonna has wanted to do it all along, very badly, but has, really, never done it. At this year's Costume Institute gala, the night before Punk opened to the public, Madge walked the red carpet pantless, in a studded plaid jacket over fishnets, with black leather gloves, a bobbed black wig, and silent movie star makeup. She was trying to be punk but she was, still, pretty.
Siouxsie Sioux, 1976. By Sheila Rock.