Punk's anti-style culminates in haute couture

Punk as spectacular expression took hold more in England, largely in the hands of the Sex Pistols' impresario Malcolm McLaren and the radical designer Vivienne Westwood at their influential King's Road shop called at one point Sex, and later, Seditionaries, among other names. Together, they took some of the shrugs of the New York style and blew them up, giving them a neon attitude.

Suddenly, punk became a set of incendiaries designed for maximum provocation. The T-shirts, mostly tame by modern standards, were angry and whimsical, full of assaults on various logos and images: the Queen of England, naked cowboys, Jesus, swastikas and iron crosses, Snow White. There were detours through bondage gear and schoolboy outfits. McLaren and Ms. Westwood showed that all of history was up for grabs for reinterpretation.

But legibility and consistency were key to that proposition. Because of that, punk was easily brandable and commodified - divorced from its original ideology, sure, but reproducible forever.

Almost four decades on, punk has evolved - as a word, as a genre, as a style. In fashion, it's just another reference to pull from, as valid in its negation of structure as anything that relies on structure. Modern punk, in so much as such a thing still exists, has been ossified in tight T-shirts and shellacked hair; it owes only a little to its forebears.

Still, the genre stands alone in the depth of its influence on high fashion. Hip-hop has left a mark, too, though it has been spotty and faint. Grunge has had its moments over the years, including recently, but was less a worldview than a cloak. If any musical movement has the potential to sustain an exhibition like the one at the Met a few decades down the line, it's probably rave culture and its many tributaries, which have ideas about silhouette, about structure, about size, about color that are both sui generis and viral.

Rave knows what punk knew: the clothes were always meant to be shown off. That the clothes might be someday enshrined - entombed? - in the same museum that also houses towering collections of Renaissance art, Egyptian artifacts and more is perhaps the end logic of Mr. Hell's nihilistic ideology, the dream of McLaren's hucksterism.

Such an exhibition wouldn't be possible without the systemic dismantling of the walls around high and low culture that punk helped kick down even harder than its predecessors, to say nothing of the cultural tourism that it inevitably leads to. Screaming as loud as the intended targets and getting heard - well, that was part of the goal the whole time.

At minimum, it makes for a rich renewal of debate: Does infiltration corrupt, or do the corrupt infiltrate?

The New York Times