Guide to PUNK: Chaos to Couture by Hack the Met

PUNK: Chaos to Couture

Last month, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened PUNK: Chaos to Couture, the latest exhibition brought to you by the museum’s Costume Institute. Here’s your Hack the Met guide to all you need to know about the show!

FAST FACTS

• The Costume Institute is one of the museum’s 17 curatorial departments. Its holdings include over 3,500 costumes and accessories that represent 700 years of dress across 5 continents.

• The curator of the Costume Institute is the dapper as ever Andrew Bolton, who has been at the Met since 2002 (he was formerly at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London for 9 years).

The chic and very British Andrew Bolton

• PUNK: Chaos to Couture explores punk’s resonating influence on high fashion, especially the relationship between the punk concept of “do-it-yourself” and the couture concept of “made-to-measure.”

• Although punk was at its core, anti-nostalgic, the museum chose to structure the exhibition as a reverential shrine to the movement.

• Punk started in NYC in 1974 as mostly a music movement and in 1975 in London as mostly a fashion movement (although where it truly started is still highly contested).

• Galleries are divided into the following themes:

  • Clothes for Heroes (a reference to the name of the Vivienne Westwood shop at 430 King’s Road in London – which is recreated in the gallery)

  • D.I.Y.: Hardware (NOTE: the walls are made of styrofoam, tag away)

  • D.I.Y.: Bricolage

  • D.I.Y.: Graffiti and Agitprop

  • D.I.Y.: Destroy

OUR FAVORITES

• The D.I.Y.: Hardware gallery, which is designed to mimic the kinds of classical niches you’d expect to see in the Greek and Roman galleries at the museum BUT everything is made of styrofoam and you’re encouraged to tag the walls by carving into them. Sure it’s a little hokey but it’s fun, ok? Also, the dresses (mostly Versace and Givenchy) are studded and pinned beauties.

Example: this little Versace number made for Elizabeth Hurley in 1994.

NOTE: This dress has its own Wikipedia page, it’s that iconic.

• The Moschino and Alexander McQueen bag dresses in the D.I.Y.: Bricolage gallery, they really speak for themselves.

A Fall 2009 McQueen dress in the exhibition as it appeared on the runway

• The über-iconic Alexander McQueen S/S 1999 Dress, No. 13 in D.I.Y.: Graffiti and Agitprop (see below for a YouTube clip, it was spray painted on the model by two industrial painting machines at the finale of his show).

• The change of headgear in the final gallery, D.I.Y.:Destroy…the wigs throughout the show were designed by Guido Palau, a British hair stylist extraordinaire who famously styled George Michael’s hair in his “Freedom” music video in 1990 and has worked for more fashion houses than you can shake a stick at since.

Guido Palau’s wigs featured in Vogue’s May 2013 issue

CRITIQUE

WARNING: This might rip the Met a new one, we LOVE the place but we also love to critique it!

There are few things less punk than the Met, let’s take that as a starting point.

Hack The Met= sort of punk

The Met= at best, punk in an Avril Lavigne sort of way

SO PUNK

Our thoughts:

• The CBGB bathroom is a real shame. The intention was to elevate it to the status of the period rooms (those galleries on the first floor of the museum designed to look as they did hundreds of years ago) but it comes off as straight up Universal Studios. Even if everything were authentic, moving that bathroom to the Met and putting it behind glass couldn’t be further from the conceptual intent of true punk.

The original CBGB bathroom before it closed in 2006

(compare this to the one on display when you visit the exhibition)

• Also, and I hope my art history peeps back me up on this, not every urinal in a museum must be a reference to Duchamp (a reference heard at a recent talk about the exhibition). We’re past that aren’t we? We should be.

NOT THE SAME

• The video in the first gallery of the show depicts the Sex Pistols performing their iconic anthem God Save The Queen. Right on. However, the song was banned from the BBC as it was seen as a threat to the Monarchy. So, the Met, in keeping with this censorship, chose to play a coronation piece by Handel (as in the 18th century Handel) over the video. Interesting juxtaposition? Perhaps. Extension of the exhibition’s blatant institutionalization of the most vehemently anti-institutional movement of the last century? Sure seems so.

The cover for God Save The Queen

• Mr. Bolton (boyfriend to heavily punk-inspired designer Thom Browne) recently discussed the iconic Chanel suit worn by the model in all of the exhibition’s advertisements. While nothing screams whitewashed luxury like a Chanel suit, this one (designed in 2011 by Karl Lagerfeld) is “punk-inspired,” which really means it has holes that were painstakingly handcrafted to never fray or rip. I kid you not. In Mr. Bolton’s own words, “the aesthetic of poverty becomes the aesthetic of luxury” in this suit, in other words, the aesthetic of a movement inherently against “the man” is horribly misappropriated into a suit worn by that man’s wife. Ouch.

SUMMARY

Despite its flaws, the show is really worth seeing. It’s a multisensory jolt most museums avoid like the plague and the works are mindblowing. You’ll leave wishing you could D.I.Y. something half as chic as some of the works on display. If there’s one sentiment that comes through the show it’s that you can do a LOT with a little, if McQueen can turn Glad bags into THAT…

To keep this truly “Hack the Met,” if you want one smartass thing to say about the show next time you’re out for drinks and it comes up, use one of these:

IN DEFENSE:

“You have to consider the exhibition in the context of the Costume Institute, one of the museum’s 21 mini-museums that aims to honor the traditions of high dress. The show isn’t about punk so much as how it has had such profound, albeit unintentional, impact on high fashion of the last forty years.”

TO HATE ON IT:

SEE ABOVE (Mark likes to hate on things) 😉

To wrap things up, here’s a (somewhat) relevant little gem: