With its pounding beats and defiant lyrics, Punk was a cultural revolution that tore down societal norms. The evolution of punk fashion that emerged from this movement, seen in Joan Jett and The Runaways, embodied the same fearless energy—DIY, unfiltered, and dripping with attitude.

Joan Jett and The Runaways were influential in shaping the sound, look and feel of the music and the performers, and a leading voice of Punk fashion. Jett and The Runaways embraced chopped hair, leather jackets, ripped jeans, goth makeup, and a disheveled look that shouted rebellion. The music of Joan Jett and The Runaways left an indelible mark on rock and punk. They redefined the performance band. Jett and The Runaways put the female rockstar or in this case, punkstar, front and center as musical messengers and fashion icons.

The Runways led by Joan Jett Were The Punk Fashion Runway

At the pinnacle of glam rock, disco, arena rock, and overproduced albums of the mid-1970s, The Runaways brought a defiant aesthetic that was distinctly punk. While mainstream female musicians and singers were corporate Barbie copies playing dress up with extravagant outfits, and stylized hair that represented the corporatization of rock, Joan Jett and The Runaways were streetwise.

The look and feel of The Runaways became an influence for others from New York, Boston, Europe, and South America. Their style became the poster of the Punk look. It was a look that matched the lifestyle of nights that turned into dawn. It was tough; it screamed confidence and a refusal to conform to a society of sameness.

Black leather became the material of punk, but it was individualized by the wearer. It was paired with worn and tattered black or blue jeans and topped with thrift store t-shirts a size too small.

The Runaways used studded accessories to individualize the look. The Punk Culture embraced studs, message buttons, safety-pins, chains and metal decorations that played well against black leather.

Jett Takes Off on The Runway

Joan Jett and The Runaways disbanded but she continued to be a driving fashion influence while fronting The Blackhearts. Jett’s basic outfit on and off stage was skintight leather pants, biker boots, and heavy accessorized outfits. She wore her beliefs on her sleeve with studs, pins, and patches that represented her music, her politics, her art, her aurora, and her inner core.

The Jett fashion look was adopted by bands, fans, and those who lived punk. It was not just the sound of her voice or the driving force of her rhythm that influenced Punk, it was her look that said, “I reject mainstream clothing etiquette.” The punk aesthetic of Jett was a personal statement against the conspicuous consumption of mainstream America.

Jett Fashion Continues to Highlight the DIY of Punk

The look of Jett adapted by the Punk culture was a thrift store fashion. It symbolized the DIY ethos of the early days of Punk when bands recorded and distributed their music without corporate oversight. The Jett fashion look born from recycled thrift store clothing continues the DIY ethos of sustainability.

The Punk look was copied and sold by designers around the world as cutting-edge fashion. The real look that continues today influenced by Jett, The Runaways, The Blackhearts and the core of Punk comes from secondhand thrift stores. It is purposely repurposed fashion as a statement against the decadence of a society of waste.

Like previous youth revolutions that embraced a new and different soundtrack, Punk Rock gave birth to a new wave in art, theory, philosophy, fashion, and lifestyle. The raw driving primal sound of the Punk soul born of the disaffected and determined to do it their way in a DIY ethos gave birth to a corresponding new wave of fashion.

Punk as music embraced a stripped-down driving beat with primal lyrics that spit in the eye of the sellout of rock. Punk was and is a response to the elaborate album production and arena rock shows spawned by the corporatization of the financial profits of a counterculture gone mainstream. Hippie fashion that was birthed in the anti-war psychedelic rebellion of the college middle class was mass-produced for sale at every mall and corporate clothing chain around the world.

The Punk Symbolism of Torn and Shredded Fashion

Coincidence, fortuitous, or determinative early punk fashion reflected the ideology of the sound.  The torn and shredded fashions of the early punk days mirrored the driving, primal synthesis of remedial rock accented by the sounds of voices rebelling against the status quo. Punk was a rebellion that was determined to tear apart the exploitation of music for corporate profits. Punk as a music, philosophy, art, fashion, and lifestyle were taking dead aim at shredding the homogenization of rock.

Customization was a do-it-yourself fashion statement, ripped, torn, studded, and pinned was the unique look that although similar among the punks was different for each. Torn t-shirts and frayed seams were embraced throughout the punk scenes from Boston to New York, to LA to Detroit, across the Pond to London, and over to Berlin.

Politics and the messages of divergent societal norms became dominant features of the shock of punk. In Europe unlike America, the symbols of the Nazis were at once ultimately offensive and intimately expressive of a society gone awry. Punk fashion embraced the symbols of political slogans no matter how shocking.

Commercialism Hot on The Trail of Punk Fashion

Punk as a clothing style was a statement that screamed out that the standards of consumerism beauty were as meaningless as the overproduced music of the masses. When any movement is discovered beyond the gates of the founder’s garden its essence is tainted. Consumerism was infiltrating the purity of punk from its self-produced records turned mass produced, to its fashion and embrace of revolution.

The hallowed clubs of punk neighborhoods from the Bowery in NYC to Camden in London, the identity of punk was being infiltrated by the corporate structure which it hated so much.

In London, Vivenne Westwood was quick to embrace the new fashion of the new wave of Punk. Along with her partner Malcolm McLaren, they were quick to design a brand for the Sex Pistols. They opened and ran a London boutique, SEX which became a mecca for the London punk fashion scene. Its successful popularity was quick to commercialize the look of punk. The fashion was wildly popular, and some questioned what drew new fans to the fashion fads of punk or punk rock.

Captured in Black and White

Overnight the Sex Pistols, Television, The Clash, Dead Kennedy’s, Talking Heads, Human League, David Bowie, Billy Idol, Joan Jett, and Johnny Rotten were transformed from punk revolutionaries to pioneering fashion statements.

The cameras and lenses of Michael Grecco were a constant from the earliest DIY punk fashions of the Boston to the New York scene. A masterful artist of understanding the interplay of shadows and light reflected in the Days of Punk,  through the progression across the globe of Punk, Post Punk, and New Wave, Michael Grecco memorialized the nuances of Punk and the iconic fashions and styles of rebellion.

The Color of Post-Punk

Entering the 1980s with punk, post-punk, and new wave weaving from black and white to eclectic designs and colors, Pam Hogg, a Scottish Designer took the stage. Launching her first collection in 1981 title, Psychedelic Jungle, Ms. Hogg brought eccentric colors, irreverent styles, and materials to break through the black and white of Punk fashion

Along with fashion shows that made museum venues, Pam Hogg became a brand as a performer on stage and screen. She befriended and dressed post-punk, new wave artists that included Ian Asbury, and Debbie Harry. An early supporter of The Pogues, Ms. Hogg melded art into art, fashion, music, and performances while touching the careers of Anita Pallenberg, David Soul, and Daryl Hannah.

The daring colors and irreverent treatment of traditional royal cuts of the Punk, Post Punk, and New Wave fashions of Pam Hogg put color film into the Michael Grecco photographic collection.