Jew World Order

The British duo’s impact greets visitors immediately. The entrance features an
original 1970s parachute suit designed by Westwood and McLaren placed next
to a 2006 Christian Dior parachute-inspired gown by John Galliano, to a
video backdrop of frenetically pogo-ing punks.

The first two galleries are devoted to those pioneering haunts – CBGB, where
the likes of Blondie, the Ramones and Patti Smith made their names, and the
west London store that gave birth to the British breed.

The show even includes a re-creation of the famously gritty toilet at CBGB, a
far cry from normal Met fare. Subsequent galleries trace how high fashion’s
made-to-measure principles echo punk’s “do it yourself” mantra.

The DIY Hardware display focuses on contemporary designers’ incorporation of
studs, spikes, chains, padlocks, razor blades and safety pins into their
work, drawing for inspiration on Sid Vicious (the Sex Pistols’ guitarist who
died of a heroin overdose while on bail for the suspected murder of Nancy
Spungen, his girlfriend and manager).

The black Versace dress held together by several oversized safety pins that
made Elizabeth Hurley’s name when she wore it to the premiere of Four
Weddings and a Funeral in 1994 has pride of place there.

The DIY Destroy gallery illustrates how punk’s rip-it-to-shreds look –
typified by erstwhile Sex Pistol John Lydon (known in his punk ascendancy as
Johnny Rotten) – have influenced the highest echelons of the fashion world.

Featured designers who have drawn on punk include Domenico Dolce and Stefano
Gabbana, Miuccia Prada, John Galliano, Katherine Hamnett, Karl Lagerfeld,
Helmut Lang, Alexander McQueen, Zandra Rhodes and Gianni Versace.

The show painstakingly pieces together the minutiae of punk’s heyday.

There is a ripped T-shirt bearing the “Anarchy in the UK” slogan of
the Sex Pistols, the movement’s British standard-bearers, and still-shocking
Westwood T-shirts, featuring images such as two naked cowboys and an
upside-down crucifix with a swastika.

Assistants are under careful instruction not to inadvertently remove safety
pins from shredded exhibits. One was dispatched for a night on the town to
add some scruff marks to a pair of Doc Marten boots.

Rooms are laid out in the style of French fashion houses’ ateliers, but clad
in Styrofoam and covered in graffiti.

Mr Bolton, 46, grew up in Lancashire, watching the London punk scene from
afar. He moved to the Costume Institute in 2002 and has emerged as one of
New York’s most influential fashion figures, drawing connections between pop
culture, art and style.

In true couture-speak, he said: “Since its origins, punk has had an
incendiary influence on fashion. Although punk’s democracy stands in
opposition to fashion’s autocracy, designers continue to appropriate punk’s
aesthetic vocabulary to capture its youthful rebelliousness and aggressive
forcefulness.”

The show has thrown up unusual sartorial headaches for guests at the Costume
Institute gala, a lucrative fundraiser and New York’s party of the year,
held under the withering gaze of Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor.

The unstated motto for the night, where high fashion and high society meet and
a top table costs $250,000, is “dress to impress”. But guests this
year must also balance that pressure with the punk theme.

“There’s nothing punk about wearing a ballgown and buying a table for a
quarter of a million,” said Cameron Silver, the owner of Decades, a Los
Angeles vintage-clothes store, who has handled “non-stop” pleas
for help from style-challenged gala-goers.

“My advice to women of a certain age is to go down the beauty route and
accessorise fetishly. Maybe don’t wear all the diamonds this time, but I do
hope that some octogenarian is not going to get her septum pierced for the
night. Rich women should not dress too punk.”

Not everyone is happy with what they view as the transition from subversion to
subverted.

“Getting these high-fashion designers, what does that have to do with
punk? So rich people could go slumming? Come on, give me a break,” Legs
McNeil, writer and founder of Punk magazine, sounded off to The
New York Times. He called the show and gala “a fantasy” for
Wintour and Vogue.

But John Cooper Clarke, the British “punk poet”, told The Sunday
Telegraph that he saw no clash between the show and punk’s
anti-establishment provenance.

“This show is a natural progression for punk fashion, which always had an
eye on haute couture,” he said. “Vivienne Westwood is a true
craftsperson, the gold standard in the business. If you are involved in the
manufacture of clothing and invention of new style, this sort of show is
always on your horizon.

“This trajectory was always there. It was a look, a statement. Fashion
plunders history, tribes and ideas and that’s what this exhibition reflects.”

Mr Bolton has assembled an impressive roster of talent from punk’s roots to
current couture to collaborate on the show, with Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten),
Richard Hell (the Sex Pistols’ role model with US band The Heartbreakers)

and British punk journalist Jon Savage writing preface essays for the
hardcover $45 glossy coffee table tome accompanying the show.

Indeed, the catalogue allows Lydon to throw a revealing new light on one of
punk’s most enduring style symbols. “Before I joined the Sex Pistols,
the safety pin was a necessity because I couldn’t sew,” he writes. “But
basically, the safety pin goes back to being two years old. My mother, when
she put on my nappy — in those old days diapers were cloth napkins — she
stuck the safety pin into my penis!” And if that comment is not jarring
enough for the esteemed echelons of the Met, then the final display in the
show may well be. It features a mannequin, its middle finger thrust upwards,
in a gesture known universally as “flipping the bird”. How punk.