Exhibit of the week: Punk: Chaos to Couture

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Through Aug. 14

Anyone who’s a true punk should take great pleasure in the “overwhelming failure” of this major new show at the Met, said Sasha Frere-Jones in The New Yorker. “Punk” has been about negating and rejecting norms since its inception more than 35 years ago, and the very idea seems to have soundly defeated the cultural gatekeepers at one of the world’s great museums. It isn’t even as if curator Andrew Bolton needed to create a definitive statement about the meaning of the movement that initially flared in New York and London around 1976. Because he works for the Met’s Costume Institute, Bolton “was only obliged to make a narrative from clothing,” to tell “any of the many stories” that could be told about the safety pins, ripped T-shirts, and fright-night hairstyles that we associate with the punk ethos. “Perversely and consistently,” the show fails to offer any such tale. We instead just get halls full of clothes.

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Yet the clothes are all wrong, too, said Roberta Smith in The New York Times. Of the 95 ensembles displayed, 60 were created since 2006, and most of those by high-end designers who borrowed punk gestures to create clothes meant for runway shows only; “too many of the garments look like coy novelty items.” The origins of the punk aesthetic do get some play: Large screens flash images of the Sex Pistols in concert near a “titillating re-creation” of the graffiti-covered unisex bathroom at the New York club CBGB. We also see period work from British fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, who answered the call in the early 1970s when her partner, impresario Malcolm McLaren, opened a King’s Road boutique devoted to selling obstreperous, anti-mainstream clothes. But too soon Westwood’s rude slogans and S&M-style buckles and chains give way to timid 21st-century borrowings. “Fashion has rarely looked as frivolous, beside the point, and 1 percent-ish as here.”

But maybe it’s no accident that the superwealthy have recently developed a taste for punk-inspired high fashion, said Blake Gopnik in TheDailyBeast.com. Punk was, after all, the last howl heard from the working class in Britain and the U.S. before a new political culture turned away from the needs and aspirations of such people. Safety pins on a $10,000 dress may seem absurd, but such absurdities “empty punk’s original gesture of meaning and threat.” Think of Johnny Rotten’s snarling whine as the “death rattle” of the working class. “Four decades later, high fashion still needs to make sure it’s not heard.”