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| Once THE punk royal couple, Mclaren with ex-wife, Vivien Westwood |
By MALCOLM McLAREN
Music is inextricably linked with fashion. History shows that rock 'n' roll was born in 1947, at the time of Christian Dior's New Look. Unwanted and banned in the 40's, it was forced to go underground. But the moment rock 'n' roll started to cut its teeth on popular culture was the moment when every James Dean look-alike danced with an adolescent girl dressed head to toe in crinoline skirts and padded bras: the Hollywood High version of the New Look. That look, meanwhile, found a rival in the birth of pret-a-porter by Dior's successor, Yves Saint Laurent. It was the dawn of the 60's, and youth stopped imitating its elders and took on an identity of its own, taking over and changing fashion forever.
Since then, we've seen every rock-'n'-roll look strut down the runway: from the velvet-collared, lean, hungry, desperate Teddy boys; to the back-combed, beehived, turtlenecked mods; to the deconstructed, nihilistic, black-vinyl punks; to the tawdry, Spandex-clad glam rockers; to the torn, wasted, antifashion grunge tribes. Rock 'n' roll has been exploited to death by a zillion couture houses. Perhaps rightly so. The original designers are long dead, and no longer part of our everyday references. Their successors treat fashion in a merely decorative sense without any subtext. This doesn't make for news. In fact, the ugliest and most unfashionable ideas are always the most irresistible to the creative elite. They have no desire to be inspired by established thoughts and received opinion. What they want is simply to demonstrate their sexual prowess.A rock star once meant a rebel outlaw -- someone who represented the look of the music. The rules of cool. To dress up, to mess up! To be young, sexy assassins. To sing: ''I am an anti-Christ/I am an anarchist/Your future dream is a shopping scheme.'' But the fashion industry has bought and sold this look too many times. Having poured so much water on its wine, it has finally rendered it innocuous by putting an expensive price tag on it and plastering it with logos. Having been messed, abused, raped and finally left for dead, rock 'n' roll's look has run out of (gasp!) edge. It is now nothing more than a reflection of pop culture's boredom with itself. How can we go on redressing the same corpse?
Easy! Everyone today is their own curator who can pick and mix the icons they worship. Sid Vicious, David Bowie, Marc Bolan. It's all part of a culture we can relate to and in effect, now own. In this new world, shopping and entertainment merge. And the satisfaction we get from dressing like a rock-'n'-roll rebel will last for as long as it is still fashionable. For everyone knows that, once a look wanes, the passion it once stirred seems inexplicable. To understand this is to understand fashion and all those who create and consume it.
How strange it must be for Mick Jagger to sit at Hedi Slimane's show for Dior Homme and watch his naive look-alikes march down the catwalk as if they'd been born onstage in what look like his old clothes -- what he used to wear back in the day, but now produced with the Dior label and matching price tag. Stranger still to see Riley Keough, with the same face as her grandfather Elvis, plastered across magazines and billboards, modeling for Dior. We've come a long way since the 50's, when teenagers and rock 'n' roll co-opted Dior. Christian Dior, in fact, was born exactly 100 years ago.
source: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/style/tmagazine/TM1896189.html?_r=1&
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