There's an exhibition at the Design Museum in High Street Kensington dedicated to the New Romantics and the club scene of Blitz and Billy's and Le Beat Route. On a recent visit to London I checked it out.
I thought it was well done, informative, and fun - worth a visit for sure (it's running until March 2026).
But, but, overall it did rather confirm my Secret Thesis about glam, which applies equally to all the neo-glam echoes (New Romantics / Futurists, Romo, electroclash).
Which is that the sonics are more enduring than the sartorials.
(Okay that doesn't work with Romo but with the others, definitely).
Take the tunes by Visage that you can hear-see in the videoscreen area.
Not only do "Fade to Grey" and "The Damned Don't Cry" sound better than their videos look, but New Romantic music generally has aged much better than New Romantic style - judging by the clothes displayed on mannequins in this exhibition, or the graphic design of the magazine covers and spreads framed or glass-cased for your discerning eye's delectation.
As for the disparity between how Bowie and his accomplices sound on "Ashes To Ashes" and how he's togged up in the video...
Bowie and choreographer Toni Basil hanging with his progeny, scouting for talent maybe for the "Ashes to Ashes" promo
Actually, in truth, the Visage promos weren't so bad - "Damned Don't Cry" especially is budget-Visconti stylish. And even "Vienna" by Ultravox, which I hadn't liked at the time, sounds and looks quite grand in its gauche way.
But overall the gap between the visuals and the aurals reinforced my Undeclared Thesis. With glam and its descendants, the clothing / coiffure / cosmetics, once shocking or startling, very soon becomes:
a/ dated
b/ revealed - more often than not - as garish, over-done, and even surprisingly tatty.
Almost timelessly elegant... almost...
"I'm so weird"
Again, this zany zany spread above reminds me of the "Slave to the Rhythm" video
Whereas - and granted I couldn't design my way out of paper bag - this is a bit of a mess. I suppose it must have seemed like an energy-burst at the time.
In contrast, this pair of flyers are just "huh?"
Draft for Robert Elms sleeve note to Spandau Ballet's Journeys to Glory.
Now I had assumed the exhibition was in tandem with the Elms book Blitz: The Club That Created the 80s. But it seems the Design Museum have their own book / catalogue they are touting: We Can Be Heroes: The Blitz Club - Where Style Was Born, co-authored by Blue Rondo man Chris Sullivan and Graham Smith (although there is an intro by Elms, along with no less than three forewords - by Boy George, Gary Kemp and Steve Strange (from beyond the grave??)). As for the exhibition itself, that was curated by Michelle Thom.
Probably the best thing visually in there was a contemporary work - a simulation of what it would have been like to be amidst the bustling poseurs at Blitz, as the club gradually fills up. Improved mightily by its sort of faded-by-time, mists-of-memory effects.
There's a sort of doubling of retro, or of nostalgias, effect looking at this simulacrum because the original club Blitz was - immediately before being taken over the poseur posse - a 1940s / WW2 themed club, hence the propaganda poster decorations.
I wonder if the proprietors straight up nicked the idea from the 1976 episode of Rock Follies that features a Forties revival club called The Blitz, with air raid wardens as waiters, rationing-style food (cold spam, potato pie, tripe and no onions), gas masks, etc, and in which the Little Ladies perform as The Victory Girls singing songs about the war effort and how Glenn Miller's plane has gone missing. From about 36.52 mins in.
A virtual Rusty Egan on the wheels of steel
Unlike a similar diorama I saw of CBGBs in a New York museum that notably failed to reproduce even a scintilla of the squalor of the original venue, with the ersatz Blitz there were ash trays with actual cigarettes in them - well, one cigarette that had been lit but evidently not smoked. Still, points for effort on the historical veracity front. Even the most stylish of clubs were rank places, chokingly thick with cig smoke, drink spillage staining the tables and sticky on the floor....
Talking of simulations...
Blitzblogger!
They have this clever machine that takes your picture and makes you look like a New Romantic
In this rendering, I resemble more a Buggle.
The interloper!
After feeling my bitchery build up inside and form itself into a future blogpost as I walked through the exhibits, I was secretly touched to find myself included among the gift shop offerings, even though there's only one chapter in Rip It Up that touches on the New Romantics
Shock and Awe would have sat better in this context, in truth - despite its Secreted Thesis.
I LIKE the tat. It's funny - you position it as a failure on their part, and I suppose they would agree because they were reaching for some annihilating 'perfect' fusion of high-octane glamour'and uncut artiness/alien-ness, but to me as a confirmed 'naturalist', the seams and failures are what make it interesting.
ReplyDeleteThere's a photo that I've always loved of two teenage girls outside of a Hawkwind free festival in the early-mid 70s - dressed in perfect glam-biker, leather and eyeshadow and glitter, smoking a cig out in a field. It tickles me in the same way the Cockettes do with their mountain man beards caked in drag - the juxtaposition, either leading to contrast or reconciliation...
The whole glam/new romantic continuum represents the attempt to escape from Britain while remaining in Britain, which is where the pathos lies. I think it has greater effect overseas, where the bathetic elements of Britishness also have an alien quality, so the pathos is absent.
ReplyDeleteI think Jean-Paul Gautier's entire oeuvre was a paean to New Romanticism.
Would you say punk fashion has aged similarly badly? Perhaps it's worth noting that at the Sex Pistols Bill Grundy interview, Siouxsie Sioux looks much more New Romantic than punkish (would that be the earliest instance of a recognisably New Romantic look?). I suppose one distinction between glam/New Romanticism and punk/grunge is that people continued dressing in the latter styles after the movement had passed. Mind, that could just mean that you can always rely on jeans.
ReplyDeleteMy answer to that would be yes, many punk looks have aged every bit as badly. There is a very clear Glam-Punk-New Romantic continuum, with Siouxsie Sioux as one of its leading figures. Didn’t she first emerge to micro-fame as one of the faces of the Bromley contingent of Bowie fans?
DeleteOne of the factors I think Simon under-estimates in his thesis is that very often the Glam kids / Punks / New Romantics were often not trying to look “good” in a conventional sense. They wanted to stand out from the herd, to surprise and often to shock. It’s a measure of their success that they can still have that impact, 45-plus years later.
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DeleteHippie-era styles, by contrast, have aged remarkably well. If you look at photos of the crowds from Monterey Pop and Woodstock, with a few slight adjustments they could have been taken this summer.
DeleteI would say that the glam element of fashion got steamrollered by punk, and the standard punk uniform (t-shirt, jeans, boots, leather jacket) was already a benchmark of sartorial style. Hell, that how I dress every day.
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