FASHION : Rock ‘n’ Roll Rags : Who’s influencing the masses crying out for style? Nope, it’s not designers. It’s the stars on stage selling attitude.
Shari Roman was at Castaic Lake for a Porno for Pyros concert recently when a thirst for beer raised its head. She was surrounded by a veritable symphony in plaid--plaid shirts, plaid shorts--and as Roman waited in line, a plaid gent behind her emerged from the chorus.
Then, for some inexplicable reason, he showed her his nipple ring.
“I looked at it,” says the free-lance music writer, “and I said, ‘Gee, that’s great. Couldn’t you afford a tattoo?’ And he pulls up his shirt and shows me a tattoo . . . The ‘90s is the Hurt Me Generation, meaning that people can’t have sex and can’t even drink coffee, so the only thing they can do is pierce themselves.”
The tracks of his tears actually go back to the late ‘70s, when early punk rockers sported pierced parts and clothing as part of their confrontational anti-fashion statement. These days, yesterday’s anti-fashion is again all the rage. On the current Lollapalooza tour headlined by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, you can find the latest in nipple and nose rings in a traveling body-piercing booth.
“Rock stars have much more influence over the masses than designers do,” says Kelle Kutsugeras, a costume designer and rock video stylist who has worked with Tony! Toni! Tone! and the Divinyls. “You look to pop entertainers to see what’s ‘in’ in a fashion direction. And sex and racy are ‘in.’ ”
Raciness, and rebellion have been common threads in rock fashion history from Elvis to Madonna--although there have been occasional bouts of modesty. Of course, in the early days, Elvis wasn’t the only king of chic--the fans were, too. And these days, the audience sets the street style as rock frocks come full circle.
At Funkeesentials on 3rd Street, baseball caps literally climb the walls. The hottest headgear is the Weedeater--which sports a marijuana logo associated with the rap group Cypress Hill--and caps that say Tommy Boy, with all the cachet of that hot hip-hop record label.
“Almost everyone who comes in here buys a cap. People want to show where their affiliations lie,” says Funkeesentials co-owner Sally Sowter. “It makes you part of something.”
The kingdom of choice for the under-30s is the great unwashed realm of pop, rock, rap and metal. Plaid shirt wrapped around your waist and a bandanna around your head. Axl’s probably your man. Does the front of your shirt button down your back? Are your pants on backward? You’re tagged as Kris Kross material.
“You take over the look of your hero, and become your hero,” Roman says.
Lately, music and modishness have meshed even more directly. The pull between rockers and models has played out in recent videos: George Michael’s “Too Funky” video not only features such strutting supermodels as Linda Evangelista and Shana Zedrick, Michael’s latest was directed by French fashion designer Thierry Mugler. Right Said Fredmade fun of fashion show snootiness in “I’m Too Sexy.” And, of course, Madonna’s “Vogue” took off on the runways of New York and Paris.
Some enterprising sorts in the music business are actually crossing the line between rock and fashion. Jerry Garcia is hawking his own line of ties--even though that conventional staple was never part of his public persona. Rapper Marky Mark, who immortalized high-riding underwear, has his own line of white boxers. And when Tommy Boy branched into Bronx-inspired hip-hop fashion, it heated up the record label partly by limiting the line of caps, Windbreakers and boxer shorts to only 25 specialty stores.
Riki Rachtman, proprietor of the Cathouse, the Hollywood hard-rock club, and host of MTV’s “Headbanger’s Ball,” launched his own Cathouse women’s sports and swimwear lines after Axl Rose created a stir in a Cathouse T-shirt in his 1988 “Paradise City” video.
“Then everybody wanted Cathouse stuff, so I started expanding there,” says Rachtman, who designs plaid swimsuits as well as stretch pants, bustiers, cheerleader skirts and hot pants. “A big part of music is image, and that’s how you create the image.”
(Merchandising a rock image can be risky business, however. Michael Jackson licensed his line of clothes when “Thriller” came out, but “when the clothes hit the stores, it was a loser,” says Alan Millstein, editor and publisher of the Fashion Network Report. “None of the rock music people have had staying power on the shelf, partly because of the boredom of the audience.”)
The pop saturation point has dropped even lower since MTV, music’s visual handmaiden, has hit age 10, making the image of music more pervasive than ever.
“The MTV phenomenon really propelled music groups to the first rank of fashion icons,” Millstein says. “That’s because the whole country is getting the same message from these music videos and they’re repeated endlessly in color and motion, which no fashion magazine has had the power to do in this country. The medium is more important than the message.”
“MTV has become the Home Shopping Network for the rock set,” says Maggie Barry, an L.A. designer whose Van Buren-label duds have been snapped up by Cher, Prince and En Vogue.
*
Long Live the King
Elvis, of course, didn’t need MTV to inspire millions of teen-agers to pomade their locks into pompadour bliss. The roots of the King’s do went back to his high school days; he began slicking his hair into a greaser ducktail partly because the Royal Crown pomade he used made his blond hair look darker. (He later took the plunge and dyed it black.)
While the King’s do became a fashion must for bad boys hoping to lure good girls, the late ‘50s and early ‘60s were far from ripe for rock fashion copycats. For one thing, early rockers were relatively clean-cut.
“In the ‘60s we got images through concerts or television,” says fashion historian Harold Koda of New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology. “By the time they were on television they were constrained by the requirements of the networks. So it was a less tolerant time in terms of the ability of the performers to express themselves through dress on television.”
“American Bandstand” was the big draw for rock fans--and it was other fans, not performers, they looked to for fashion tips. Not that fashion had much room to move in those days. The show had a rigid dress code until the late ‘60s that nixed pants for women and made the clean-cut look mandatory for men--ties, suits or sport jackets with the occasional crew-neck sweater.
*
The British Are Coming
Of course, the Beatles changed that buttoned-down approach to style in 1964, making the world safe for the British Mod look and later, hippie duds. The man behind the men was manager Brian Epstein, who put them in button-down shirts, silk ties and Pierre Cardin-like suits without lapels. (Ringo touched off a mini-fad of his own when he let the long end of his tie flop over the knot.)
Unlike the English Teddy Boys, who greased their hair and sported working-class drainpipe trousers, the Mod Beatles were palatable to middlebrows despite their controversial shaggy locks. And girls copied the performers’ girlfriends and their taste for Mary Quant miniskirts. More significantly, though, the Beatles’ rise coincided with the new link between designer fashion and rock--which made high style accessible to the masses.
The British invasion meshed with a huge bell curve of youthful baby boomers, dubbed “the youthquake” by Vogue. And that era’s version of music television--shows like “Shindig” and “Hullabaloo”--created armies of faux-Courreges go-go-boot-stomping teen-agers.
Cher’s debut in the mid-’60s marked her peak as a fashion icon, even though her career went on to bigger and better things--in totally inimitable Bob Mackie-designed costumes.
“You can’t look at bell bottoms, a belly button and long, straight hair without thinking of Cher,” says Maggie Barry.
*
The Summer of Love
As the ‘60s waned, the Beatles returned from India with the hippie look in tow. The West Coast embraced it and eclipsed London as rock ‘n’ roll fashion capital. The late ‘60s thumbed its nose at the psychedelics’ bogyman, the Establishment, by bucking basic standards of neatness. Instead, sartorially correct hippies sported rural handcrafts--tie dyes, hand appliques and patchwork quilts. Ironically, that democratic look was largely too expensive for the domestic garment industry because it was so labor-intensive, so hippie fashion turned to India and East Asia, where labor was cheap.
The model rocker then was the influentially blowzy Janis Joplin.
“Joplin was the hard-drinking, hard-drugging martyr,” says Mablen Jones, author of “Getting It On: The Clothing of Rock ‘n’ Roll.” “Her style has been probably more imitated than anyone else because it survived into the ‘80s with Cyndi Lauper and Madonna doing their own updates on Joplin’s thrift-shop style.”
Of course, ‘70s performers like the Bee Gees, with an assisting hustle from John Travolta in the film “Saturday Night Fever,” helped usher in that irritating era of platforms and shiny shirts. Disco, with its attendant non-threatening twirl skirts and peppy Spandex, was the rock fashion mainstream in the mid-’70s.
*
Real Punks Buy Junk
But a more interesting--and, ultimately, influential--collaboration was forming in the early ‘70s between designer Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, the father of punk who packaged the Sex Pistols, among other nasty bands. Of course, punk fashion was an oxymoron. Or, as Johnny Rotten told Rolling Stone in 1977, “Punk fashions are a load of bollocks. Real punks nick all their gear from junk shops.”
That didn’t stop high-priced designers like Zandra Rhodes from nicking the punks’ anti-aesthetic nor magazines like GQ from giving these punk how-to’s in 1977: “Punk, if treated with extreme delicacy and sensibility, can be made to work with this season’s overall fashion direction. Take the torn T-shirt. Carefully slashed to ribbons, it can work perfectly with freshly minted blue jeans and a wool overshirt . . . “
But there were also ‘70s artists who were either too mundane or elaborate in dress to influence anyone. The James Taylor look? Perhaps not. Equally unthinkable would be hordes of fans running around in giant Elton John glasses--the look was simply too costumey and stagy for real life. David Bowie and his theatrical Ziggy Stardust persona may have made a splash onstage, but the look was too outrageous and expensive to woo a mass following in the States.
On the other hand, designer Larry Legaspi, who dressed Kiss, Grace Jones and George Clinton, found a select following for some of his space-suit concoctions, which he hawked from his Greenwich Village boutique in 1973. As he told Jones in “Getting It On”:
“I actually had a woman, one of those people who actually thought they were an alien from outer space, and a man and his wife. . . . They ordered space suits because they were going to stay out in the desert to wait for a spaceship to land.
“It was cash. . . .”
*
Boys Will Be Girls
Even though glitter rock packed little fashion punch in the ‘70s, its mid-’80s heirs--Michael Jackson and Prince, to name two--sent out short-lived ripples of their own less costumey style. Jones sees the rhinestones-and-rouge-wearing performers as two sides of the same androgynous coin. Younger fans who resonated to the Pied Piper of Pop’s good guy persona sported his single glove, while some of His Royal Badness’ subjects stepped out in their monarch’s purple ankle-length coat.
“If Jackson’s image is an idealized version of black bourgeois aristocracy,” Jones writes, “Prince is the urban hustler who scorns it.” As MTV was taking its baby steps in the early-to-mid-’80s, designers Betsey Johnson and Stephen Sprouse were stitching up swaddling clothes for the new rock videos. Sprouse used rock imagery in designs that were snatched up by Blondie, Diana Ross and Mick Jagger, crafting ‘60s-flavored tunic minis in phosphorescent colors, velvet blazers and graffiti-patterned tights.
Sprouse’s flash, however, turned out to be mainly in the pan. His use of expensive tailoring and fabrics priced him out of the range of rock fans, and he went bankrupt twice, in 1985 and 1988. He resurfaced yet again to design duds for last year’s Guns ‘N Roses tour and he’s coming out with a new line that spins off the Axl look. On the other hand, Johnson’s knits, inspired by modern dance, used no hand-tailoring, and her more moderate clothes continue to move steadily out of her 14 boutiques around the country.
*
Like a Virgin?
It goes without saying that the chameleon-like Madonna towered over the mid-to-late ‘80s, sending her female fans to lingerie stores for outerwear and spoon-feeding them Jean Paul Gaultier’s space-age Dixie-cup bras. In 1989, when Madonna was expressing herself in a push-up, U.S. bra sales hit a high, topping $2 billion, and continued to grow, to nearly $2.5 billion last year. Millstein credits Madonna, saying, “She has done something which no music star has ever been able to do: She has made the bra a piece of outerwear fashion and goosed the sales of a dumb, white push-up bra . . . “
Millstein goes on to crown Madonna the “one icon, in my opinion, in the last five years who has had a worldwide impact . . . She knows how to sell a sexual message to an audience that is highly sexual, an audience whose hormones are at their max.”
But other Madonna incarnations never got a second more than their 15 minutes of fame, MTV exposure notwithstanding. Her “Material Girl” phase of 1985 may have been pure adulterated glamour, but glamour costs, and her fans passed on the neo-Marilyn, Hollywood siren look.
Even while Madonna was pushing her brand of chic, rock fashion was repeating itself in a sense--much like the ‘50s, fans’ style was becoming the fashion fount, rather than performers’.
Bruce Springsteen made it trendy to be Everyman in his simple working-class hero uniform--jeans, denim jacket, T-shirts with cut-off or rolled-up sleeves--with his 1983 acoustic album “Nebraska” and a Vogue photo spread by Bruce Weber. Springsteen’s anti-fashion stance borrowed from country-Western music’s traditional refusal to toe the fashion line.
*
Mean Streets
And these days, the street is having more and more impact on the stage. “Everything comes from combining the grittiness of the working class with the glamour of rock ‘n’ roll,” says Shari Roman. “That way the working man becomes glamorized. That’s why every kid is dressing like a rapper--because it’s glamorous now.”
Indeed, while the artists may get credit for setting trends, that’s not necessarily where credit is due.
“Rock ‘n’ roll has an impact in that it popularizes fashion directions,” says Harold Koda. “However, it’s rarely the originator of those directions, which is something nobody really acknowledges.”
Today’s mix ‘n’ match all adds up to “fashion soup,” Barry says. And ultimately, the pop fashion food chain is shifting into reverse: performers are dressing more and more like us.
Says Koda: “So you can’t say they’re influencing the way you dress or whether we’re influencing the way they do. Fashion is directed now from so many different points.”
They’ve Got the Looks What looks are rocking these days?
* Hip hop: Gas-station attendant shirts, caps and T’s with hot rod logos, very baggy clothes--courtesy of rappers Beastie Boys and Kris Kross.
* Metal: Lots of leather, studded everything, biker gloves, tattoos, bandannas skull-patterned pants and jewelry, just like Slaughter and King’s X.
* Grunge rock: Plaid flannel shirts--plaid anything for that matter--a bandanna and backward baseball cap, thanks to Axl Rose.
* Hag rock: Dirty hair, thrift shop clothes, belted jeans, plaid shirts, badly fitting dresses and Doc Martens, reminiscent of Janis Joplin and L7.
* Bruised baby doll: Torn baby doll dress from the ‘60s, pale skin, dark roots, a la Courtney Love and Debbie Harry.
* Pec ‘n roll: No shirt (on men), head wraps, baggy blue jeans revealing hiked-up underwear--the Marky Mark/Anthony Kiedis of the Chili Peppers/C&C; Music Factory’s Freedom Williams look.
* Polymorphous Pollyanna: It’s not what you wear, but how you wear it, preferably with plenty of conviction, much like Patti Smith, Sinead O’Connor and Annie Lennox.
* Video vamp: A ‘40s-style pin-up look with push-up bras, hot pants, thigh-high stockings with garters, platform shoes, soft curls, high-arched plucked eyebrows, big lashes and red lips, along the lines of En Vogue, Lady Kier Kirby and Jody Watley.
