Buying clothes is easy now. You can order online and have them the next day. There are sweatshops and health-and-safety-complying factories all geared up to switch production to some new colour, style or length at any time of the year. High street store Zara can have a turnaround as short as two weeks from a designer’s idea to the garment rails in the shop. You can buy men’s trousers for £8 at Primark.
But in the era that generated punk, fashion was very slow-moving. Designers would work months ahead, production would be booked and there was no way of stopping supply if the garments in question turned out to be unpopular.
So with no Internet in the 1970’s and ’80’s, if you lived in a small town, you would be expected to source your clothes from the Freeman’s or Great Universal catalogues. And presumably you could get trendy hairstyle tips, too.
For young would-be punks, you could get a mail-order T-shirt and bondage trousers (£12.95 in 1980), but I thought this was commercial guff, mainly because it was pretty expensive. Instead, I had to take a more creative approach. I looked to jumble sales, borrowing clothes from the older generation and winding up the sewing machine.
The location? Newark cemetery. That’s what we did for fun on a Saturday back then.
Ruth PO!
Hi Ruth, someone pointed me in the direction of this blog, great to read it, it has been a very enjoyable couple of hours. FYI, as they say, those Newark Cemetery photos were taken in early 1983. By coincidence, I recently came across the album with them in while tidying the attic. I still take a lot of photographs in cemeteries, a punk thing perhaps that deserves more scrutiny. Or maybe not!
Well, well – thank you for taking those photos way back then!