Build your own bondage trousers

Levenshulme antiques market today

When I set out to speak to women about punk, I (naively perhaps) never imagined that we would spend so much time talking about clothes. 

Once you get to the early-mid 1980s, the time period when I would perhaps have encountered my first punks on the streets of Greater Manchester, there would have been a definite punk ‘look’ and things had become very uniform and codified. In the early days of punk, certainly pre Grundy, it was a gloriously creative time for street fashion and people were largely making it up as they went along.

Possibly because girls were more likely to be being taught how to sew in school back in the mid-late 1970s, girls and women did have the basic skills needed to take in a pair of trousers and turn them into drainpipes. Even if they didn’t, there were other ways to customise and make clothes, including buying up cheap secondhand stuff and customising and re-purposing it. I had been aware that this was going on in the 70s, but I don’t think I appreciated the scale of DIY fashion in the punk era until I began speaking to people.

Charity shops and army surplus were regular ports of call for my interviewees, but I did also meet and interview someone who’d made her own pair of bondage trousers because you could buy the straps etc from local market stalls and just sew the relevant bits onto a suitable pair of trousers. Taking a pair of scissors to clothes also proved to be a decent shortcut to punk fashion, much to the horror of at least one parent. 

I also love that, at a local level, major cities and towns had their own punk boutiques selling cheap knock offs of whatever they thought punk was at the time, and that this would have provided a specific set of local reference points and fashion evolutions that would have interacted with the local punk scene in a number of interesting ways. To give an example of this, it is possible to build up a picture of the variously named punk shop at Levenshulme Antique Market through the pages of Manchester’s legendary City Fun fanzine. The shop clearly went through a number of phases and iterations, depending entirely on the prevailing fashion winds blowing through Manchester between 1978 and 1984, including punk and the 1950s revival of the early to mid 1980s.

But I think my favourite, or most ironic, punk fashion discovery came when I found out that the chains used to customise Zandra Rhodes Conceptual Chic collection, ie her couture take on punk, were the same chains previously used to deter shoplifters in her London shop. 

I bet that went down really well with the punks down the front at a Sham 69 gig.

Sitting in the library reading Mental Children

I find it hard to imagine that when hundreds of young punks put pen to paper back in 1976 (and after) to create their fanzines that they ever envisioned that they would one day find their hastily xeroxed works archived for research purposes in libraries around the country.

Maybe that’s come as a surprise to those of you reading this as well. But, for me, it was an absolute godsend when it came to researching punk.

There are a number of libraries and archives around the country that include punk fanzines in their collection. One of the largest I was able to access was in the British Library at St Pancras in London, and the great thing about the British Library is that anyone can easily apply for membership (though not online anymore, alas...) and apply to access their archives. All you need is the money to travel to London, the time to trawl through the archives, and good organisational skills. I became a big fan of the British Library reading rooms over the years, and also of the culture around research and researchers at the library. 

It’s best to arrive early, before the library and reading rooms open in the morning. Because people have evidently come down by train for the day, trekking from all over the country via Euston station, there is always a queue to be let in. Recognising this, BL have established a cafe immediately outside the library that opens before the library does, providing researchers with breakfast and coffee. Once the doors open, and everyone has been bag checked, there’s a mad rush downstairs to the lockers where everyone leaves all the prohibited items and belongings they can’t bring into the reading rooms, and bombs it back upstairs to get to their reading room of choice. 

When I first used BL, I didn’t have a clue which reading room would be best to use, so I ended up being placed in Rare Books and Music, which suited me, but must have looked very odd to the people studying esoteric books and music manuscripts, occasionally looking up to see me engrossed in scruffy fanzines with titles like Mental Children, Guttersnipe and More On. 

Another archive I used extensively was the Working Class Movement Library in Salford, mainly because it had an almost entire run of City Fun, the legendary Manchester punk and post punk fanzine that featured Liz Naylor and Cath Carroll amongst its alumni. Lynette at the WCML invited me to do a talk about punk fanzines at one point, which then led (directly or indirectly) to a commission to talk about punk fanzines in Manchester and Riot Grrrl in Birmingham. This was in the early years after 2010; all such funding for such activities has, obviously, long since dried up.  

A fanzine that I was always sorry I never got access to was Sharon Spike’s Apathy In Ilford, which was in the Jon Savage archive at Liverpool John Moores university. I did approach the university, asking for access, but was told I couldn’t have access unless I could produce either a contract with a publisher or a letter from an academic supervisor, neither of which I had. I think access to this collection might have changed now as JISC says the collection is open for consultation, and you just need to ask them, so maybe I’ll try again at some point. Though it is possible that I might get rebuffed again.

The restrictions around access imposed by Liverpool John Moores is in strong contrast to the access rules and regulations at both BL and the WCML in Salford. BL might be formal and codified in its access arrangements, but it will let everyone in as long as they apply in the proper way and abide by the rules. By contrast, WCML is run on socialist grounds and everyone is welcome, the staff are friendly, and the atmosphere is very informal. 

In a related note, it was once possible to get access to many university archives and collections both as an academic/student and, often, as a member of the public. It’s always worth checking individual library websites to see if they still offer this. Certainly pre Covid it was often possible to get visitor access as a member of the public to university libraries, just as it was possible to get access via SCONUL as an member of university staff, an academic or a student (Oxford and Cambridge excepted that is). During the Covid years everyone restricted access to their own students and staff, so there may be some hangovers from that in respect of access.

I regularly used to gain access to London Metropolitan University Library as a visitor. I could have gone through SCONUL at the time, because I was on the library staff at another UK university and had the right to full Band A membership, which would have given me borrowing rights. I chose not to do this because I was going in to look at Spare Rib, a selection of women’s glossy mags from the punk era, Shocking Pink, and some Riot Grrrl fanzines, so it didn’t seem worth it when I could get the access I needed as a member of the public. All of these items were in the Women’s Library archive, which has now transferred to the LSE library collection as a result of cuts during the financial crash and austerity. It does look like it would still be possible to get access to these collections, though I might have to explain that I’m an amateur and unaffiliated researcher and see what they say.

I am, in case you haven’t figured it out by now, a big fan of the public getting access to libraries. Whether that is for pleasure or for research, and whether it’s academic libraries and archives, or public libraries. I am a firm believer in throwing the doors open and letting everyone in. I would still have it that you have to apply for access to archives, but I’d make it easy to do so, and make the process more user friendly than it currently is. 

You never know what you’re going to come across in an archive, and I think it’s really important that as many people as possible are able to access their cultural past, whether it’s punk fanzines or Chartist and Suffragette tracts and newspapers, or Shakespeare folios. Everything is important to someone. 

Photo by CrowN on Unsplash