Punk Style

Description

Punk Style examines the dress of this incredibly diverse, long-lasting and hugely influential subculture and its impact on mainstream fashion. Taking a comprehensive approach, the book includes a historical overview, a discussion of motivations behind dress practices, and a review of fashion cycles and merchandising methods. Punk is frequently positioned as a forerunner of trends that later become commonplace, as demonstrated in the proliferation and acceptance of body modification, the repeated use of deconstruction as a design aesthetic, and the recent boom in fashion that reflects DIY style through handmade crafts. The book explores how this dominant subcultural style continues to expand via the internet, youth buying-power, and the constant re-appropriation of its distinctive styles. This accessible text brings the discussion of punk fashion up-to-date and provides a concise overview for students and scholars and general readers interested in the punk subculture.

Monica Sklar obtained her PhD in Design-Apparel Studies from the University of Minnesota, USA. She has taught several college-level courses in dress and retailing, and has published widely on the subject of subcultural style.

Why are some subcultures traditional and others progressive? How are seemingly mundane design symbols powerfully meaningful? These types of questions have driven the author's study of punk style. Based on powerful interview data, this timely book examines the past influences, contemporary manifestations and future directions of this iconic style. -- Dr David Muggleton, University of Chichester, UK 'Punk's Not Dead' is a slogan one still occasionally sees scrawled in crude letters on the back of a battered leather jacket. Monica Sklar's Punk Style shows that writing about Punk is also very much still alive. Too often those who have written about Punk cover what happened on one side of the Atlantic only. Or they focus on the music while ignoring the look (or vice versa). Punk Style makes none of these mistakes. Here's a clear, compact account of how and why Punk changed everything. Not just another, yet another subculture, Punk ushered in the post-modern age and Sklar shows how it is still gleefully ripping holes in a once coherent and comforting space-time continuum. How delightfully ironic that 'No Future' has kept on keeping on. -- Ted Polhemus, author of Street Style (2010) and Fashion and Anti-Fashion (2011), UK