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.