Pretty in Pink (Notes on the Engendering of Baby Mia)

Baby Mia in a salmon pink cardigan

I.

Now that baby Mia is recognisably human - though still outside language - she is being colour-encoded by her parents within a traditional gender stereotype. In other words, she's being assigned a romantic and floral model of femininity (sweet-natured, sensitive, girly) and taught how to look, to act, and to think of herself as pretty in pink.   

However, like everything, the colour pink as sign and symbol is itself subject to changing cultural interpretation and reinterpretation; it has no essential character and can just as easily be tied to a model of masculinity should it become desirable or fashionable to do so. Indeed, young boys in the 19th century often wore pink, whilst their sisters were dressed in blue and white.

It wasn't until the early-mid-20th century that the colour became almost exclusively associated with girls and ladylike women - Mamie Eisenhower's decision to wear a pink dress at her husband's inauguration as US President in 1953 being a crucial factor in this latter association.

It also replaced lavender as the colour associated with male homosexuality and effeminacy; the Nazis obliging queer inmates of concentration camps to wear outfits embroidered with a pink triangle (though sadly not with matching accessories).      

Meanwhile, the Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli had created a bold and assertive new variety of the colour in 1931 - so-called Shocking Pink - made by mixing magenta with a small amount of white; a shade much loved by Surrealists at the time and by punk rockers in the 1970s looking to turn the world day-glo.

Sadly, many parents of baby girls still prefer to opt for a more muted princess pink that is more Barbara Cartland than Poly Styrene ...    

II.

Interestingly, the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), in New York, recently had an exhibition entitled Pink: The History of a Punk, Pretty, Powerful Color (2018-19), which emphasised the provocative potential of pink (not least its ability to sharply divide opinion).  

Organised by the Museum's director and chief curator Valerie Steele, the show featured approximately 80 outfits dating from the 1700s to the present, including work by Schiaparelli and a fabulous piece from the 2016 Comme des Garçons fall collection entitled 18th Century Punk.

I've no idea what kind of young woman baby Mia will grow up to be, but I do hope she'll dress like this: 

See: Valerie Steele (ed.), Pink: The History of a Punk, Pretty, Powerful Color, (Thames and Hudson, 2018).

Click here to visit the Museum at FIT website which provides full details of the Pink exhibition and a short audio tour with Valerie Steele. 

And for a (predictable) musical bonus from the Psychedelic Furs (original 1981 version): click here.

A Sex Pistol in Paris

One of the more amusing scenes in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle features Sid Vicious wandering the streets of Paris in the spring of '78, confronting locals including a policeman, a prostitute, and a young female fan working in a pâtisserie.

One is tempted to describe it as a provocative form of punk dérive - a mode of experimental behavior, theorised by Guy Debord, in which individuals aimlessly stroll through the city and allow themselves to be seduced by the attractions of urban society and random encounters with strangers. 

I'm not saying that Sid gave a shit about psychogeography - or that he needed lessons from anyone on emotional disorientation - but, as a Sex Pistol, he was well-versed by Malcolm in the art of creating situations that challenge the predictable and monotonous character of everyday life and he cuts an undeniably unique figure as a spiky-haired flâneur, beer bottle in hand, and wearing his favourite swastika emblazoned red t-shirt ...

See: The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, dir. Julien Temple, 1980: click here to watch the scenes of Sid drifting round Paris as discussed above. 

For a related post to this one on Sid's performance of 'My Way', click here. 

Bliss it Was in that Dawn to be Alive: Reflections on the Event of May '68

For all its romantic idealism and revolutionary fanaticism, there's still something about May '68 that I can neither fully renounce nor denounce.

Indeed, fifty years on, and it seems to me that there's still something glowing red and magnificent, like a burning ember, at the heart of this irreducible and indeterminable event - albeit an event which, as Deleuze and Guattari say, failed to unfold on a collective level; something which deserves not merely nostalgic recollection, but active rekindling.

For as a punk-provocateur, reared in the politics of the Situationist International, I still think that offering creative (sometimes criminal) resistance to the status quo and challenging all forms of orthodoxy is the only ethical thing to do with one's life. In other words: It is right to rebel (a slogan originating in Marx, Mao or Marcuse, but which I learned from Malcolm McLaren).

But Johnny, what are you rebelling against?

Well, against all forms of reactionary stupidity for a start. And against that long list of words which begin with the letter C and induce boredom, including: capitalism, consumerism, cliché, conformity, convention, comfort and convenience. 

I was told recently that I would never make a very good philosopher, as I'm too impatient to read slowly and too shallow to care about fundamental ideas: "You're part blogger, part comedian - always looking for a catchy turn of phrase or an amusing punchline."

That's probably true: I certainly love those fabulous slogans that were sprayed on the walls of Paris: Il est interdit d'interdire! Soyez réalistes - demandez l'impossible! And, most famously, Sous les pavés, la plage! If this makes me a Marxist of the Groucho tendency, then so be it; as someone born in May '68 it's hardly surprising after all ...


Notes 

Deleuze and Guattari, 'May '68 Did Not take Place, Two Regimes of Madness, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (Semiotext(e), 2007, pp. 233-36. 

As I say above, for Deleuze and Guattari May '68 was (is) a pure event; i.e., an unstable condition without cause that opens up a new field of possibility or becoming. It might be quickly co-opted, but there's something in it that can never be outmoded; thus May '68 is, in a sense, still unfolding now/here. One is tempted to say something similar of punk - which is why the slogan punk's not dead is, technically correct (if not for the reasons that many adherents of the movement believe). And it's why even Joe Corré, despite his uniquely privileged (or accursed) position, cannot declare its passing; no matter how much shit he burns nor how many piles of ash he assembles in a Mayfair art gallery.  

On Revolutionary Fun (A Message for May Day)

If you make a revolution, writes Lawrence, don't act with ascetic militancy in the name of some grand ideal, or in order to seize control of the economy; make it simply for the pleasure of gobbing in the eye of those who would assert authority and the anarchic joy of upsetting the old order.

As a manifesto, this will doubtless strike many terrorists of theory interested in preserving the pure order of politics and the serious business of revolution, as puerile and irresponsible; the sort of romantic tosh that only a poet can get away with.

Nevertheless, it rather nicely anticipates the poststructuralist thinking that flourished prior to, during, and after the festive upheaval of May '68 and, indeed, encapsulates the insouciant nihilism of punk as conceived by a Situationist-inspired Malcolm McLaren in the mid-late Seventies.    

What unites Lawrence with Deleuze and ties Anti-Oedipus to Never Mind the Bollocks, is a perverse refusal to conform to the accepted way of doing things as prescribed by tradition (be it a literary, philosophical, or artistic tradition); they challenge and change the terms of the debate and shift the zone of combat, discrediting old idols in the process.

But above all, these figures and these works show us that we do not have to be sad or self-serious in order to be radical. Thus, paraphrasing Lawrence if I may: If you want to torpedo the ark, don't do it in ghastly seriousness, don't do it in deadly earnest - do it for fun.


See: D. H. Lawrence, 'A Sane Revolution', in The Complete Poems, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts, (Penguin Books, 1977). 

Oh Bondage Up Yours! (A Slice of Punk Nostalgia)

A model for Vivienne Westwood wearing an Exhibition Tartan Bondage jacket 

and Lyon Tartan Bondage trousers (Anglomania, A/W 2015)

viviennewestood.com 

I'm not entirely convinced by the Nietzschean notion of eternal recurrence, but it's certainly true to say that within the fabulous world of fashion everything comes around again; yesterday's daring new looks so outmoded today will be marketed as avant-garde all over again tomorrow. 

Even designers who think of themselves as radical and revolutionary, invariably return to their old designs and recycle ideas. So it is, for example, that Vivienne Westwood is once again flogging her tartan bondage lines first seen all those years ago at Seditionaries. 

Of course, ripping garments out of their cultural and historical context robs them of their fetishistic power and subversive potential; transforming clothes for heroes into items of fancy dress for those who long for a past they didn't experience, or those who vainly wish to relive their youth. 

But, well, there you go: even ageing punks are prone to nostalgia and a certain wistfulness; just like the old rockers and hippies before them whom they so scorned. It's nothing to be proud of, but nothing to really feel so ashamed of either. 

Indeed, when I saw one of the models on Westwood's website wearing her mismatched tartan bondage jacket and trousers, even I couldn't help remembering with a certain poignant joy those years gone by when I would hobble around the streets of Soho still thinking of myself as a sex pistol and still fiercely loyal to Malcolm and his project of pop-cultural provocation:

Portrait of the artist as a young punk (1985) 

On the Political Importance of Making Lists

The list often acts as a manifesto and call to arms: divided into dialectical categories of things loved and things hated, such lists are exemplified by the early McLaren/Westwood t-shirt design entitled: 'You're gonna wake up one morning and know what side of the bed you've been lying on!'

For Malcolm, punk was a form of blackmail and a type of terrorism. It forced a generation into making a fateful choice: you were either for the Sex Pistols or against them - and if you were for them, then your commitment had to be absolute: there could be no passers-by and no part-timers in this revolution. 

Much the same type of list was drawn up by Roland Barthes. However, unlike McLaren, Barthes didn't want to bully anyone with his list or display his penchant for fanaticism and provocation. In fact, with his list of things liked and things not liked, he was attempting to provide grounds for a model of negative liberalism:

"I like, I don't like: this is of no importance to anyone; this, apparently, has no meaning. And yet all this means: my body is not the same as yours. Hence, in this anarchic foam of tastes and distastes ... gradually appears the figure of a bodily enigma, requiring complicity or irritation. Here begins the intimidation of the body, which obliges others to endure me liberally, to remain silent and polite confronted by pleasures or rejections which they do not share.
      (A fly bothers me, I kill it: you will kill what bothers you. If I had not killed the fly, it would have been out of pure liberalism: I am liberal in order not to be a killer.)"

                    - Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard.