Fashioning Indie

Popular Fashion, Music and Gender

Rachel Lifter

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350126343
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

In 2005, British supermodel Kate Moss went to Glastonbury with her then-boyfriend, indie rocker Pete Doherty. Their unwashed appearance captured widespread attention, propelling the British indie music scene and its signature look-slender bodies clad in skinny jeans-to the center of popular fashion. Using this fashionable watershed as a launching point, Fashioning Indie narrates indie's evolution: from a 1980s British music subculture into a 21st-century international fashion phenomenon. It explores the lucrative transformation of indie style, first into high concept menswear and later into "festival fashion"-a womenswear phenomenon that remade what indie looked like and provided a launching point to reimagine who the ideal subject of indie could be. Fashioning Indie is essential reading for academic and popular audiences, offering an original account of what happens when a subculture is incorporated into the commercial fashion system. As the music and fashions of festivals face increasing scrutiny in debates about diversity and inclusion, and the transformations of indie style coincide with the global expansion of the second-hand retail sector, the book offers also essential insights into the broader culture of popular fashion in the 21st century and the values that inform it.

CHAPTER 1

FROM SUBCULTURE TO HOT LOOK: THE EVOLUTION OF INDIE

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This chapter charts the evolution of indie music culture: from the inception of the British independent music scene in the wake of punk in the late 1970s and early 1980s, through the rise of Britpop in the mid-1990s, to indie rocker and tabloid star Pete Doherty’s now infamous romp across the muddy fields of Glastonbury with his then-girlfriend Kate Moss in 2005. Guiding the chapter’s narrative is the question: How did the term “indie” go from signifying a space of music production and distribution functioning outside of the control of the commercial music industry to signifying a fashionable masculine type, characterized by his slender physical frame and seemingly effortless style of dress? The chapter argues that this skinny indie man was first seen in the independent music scene of the 1980s, but was mocked for his childish stature and too short trousers. However, the widespread visibility in the 1990s of both Britpop and its American counterpart grunge created a popular cultural environment within which the skinny indie man was reimagined, first as a rock ‘n’ roll sex god and, in the early 2000s, as a fashion icon. The chapter explores, moreover, the processes of race-, gender-, and class-based exclusions through which this figure was imagined and reimagined anew.

1980s: Subculture and awkward youth

As indie historian Sam Knee puts it, the independent scene was “punk’s last gasp, if you like.”¹ Indeed, the scene was also called post-punk.² This legacy was complicated, however, by the scene’s obsession with pop music and the childlike and thus non-threatening identities that such an obsession inspired.

Punk’s heir

Punk’s influence was multifold. As David Cavanagh details in his lengthy record of the British independent scene, both musicians and label owners sometimes took on the in-your-face presentation styles characteristic of punk and its leading faces: the Sex Pistols. Cavanagh details, for example, interviews that Edwyn Collins of the band Orange Juice and Postcard Records founder Alan Horne gave in which they “poured scorn” on their interviewers.³ The altercations recall the Sex Pistols’ 1976 interview with television presenter Bill Grundy—an interview, in which Pistol Steve Jones called Grundy a “dirty bastard” after the latter made a sexually suggestive remark toward Siouxie Sioux, who stood behind the group during the live evening television interview. Similarly, Cavanagh continues, Creation Records founder Alan McGee took his band the Jesus and Mary Chain on a tour of the UK in 1985 that was, in McGee’s own words, “so bad it was good. Complete and utter anarchy.”⁴ Two of the four scheduled concerts were canceled by either the police or the local council because of the band’s reputation for inciting violence. “It was, McGee reminded everyone, just like the Sex Pistols ‘Anarchy’ tour in December 1976: an outlaw spree around the country. A game of tag with the establishment.”⁵

In addition to a pro-forma in-your-face snarl, punk bequeathed to the British independent music scene its organizational structure: the independent labels and distribution networks, from which “indie”—an abbreviation of the word independent—would take its name. As David Hesmondhalgh explains, “No music genre had ever before taken its name from the form of industrial organization behind it.”⁶ Of course, independent labels existed well before the punk period. Simon Reynolds gives the examples of Virgin, Island and Chrysalis;⁷ however, “[t]he people who started Virgin and Island, were enterprising, sure, and ‘independent’ in terms of what they did creatively. But they had the support of major record-company distribution, finance and marketing.”⁸ In contrast, the labels that emerged during the punk period were to “go it alone” … at least to a certain extent. In the place of major label distribution, Geoff Travis, the unassuming founder of the record shop and label Rough Trade, established the Cartel—an independent distribution network that supplied independent record shops across the UK with new independent music.⁹ Reynolds explains, “Unglamorous but absolutely crucial, the Cartel network provided the infrastructure for a genuinely alternative culture.”¹⁰

This “hard-headed network of post-punk companies”¹¹ underpinned the musical output of a range of acts in the UK throughout the 1980s: fledgling musicians who would go on to sign major record deals, such as The Smiths and The Cure; mediocre musicians who would never be offered major record deals; and musicians who wanted to produce music without the commercial restraints that would be placed on them if they were to sign a major record deal. As Geoff Travis noted to Cavanagh, “We were a new generation of people and we wanted to do things our own way. And we also wanted to deal with music whose reason to exist was nothing to do with its commerciality. All that mattered was whether or not the record gave you a thrill.”¹² Such sentiments were shared by bands and label employees as well as by writers for the weekly music press. As Roger Holland wrote in the July 5, 1986 issue of Sounds, “The concept of an independent record label, properly defined, is of a body run without undue regard for market forces. One which is unwilling to compromise its integrity simply to make a few quick bucks.”¹³ Indeed, it was by linking the themes of “independence” and “integrity” that the indie scene marked its own worth. As Hesmondhalgh explains, “indie proclaimed itself to be superior to other genres not only because it was more relevant or authentic to the youth who produced and consumed it (which was what rock had claimed) but also because it was based on new relationships between creativity and commerce.”¹⁴ Daniel Miller, founder of the Mute label, recounted to Simon Reynolds, “none of us knew what we were doing! We were huge music enthusiasts, though, with a strong idea of what we liked and what we wanted. I had no business grounding whatsoever. But all of a sudden you realized you could have access to this industry that had always seemed very mysterious.”¹⁵ He continued, “The record industry went from being pretty closed, which it was even during the first wave of punk, to totally open. And that encouraged a lot of people like me and Tony Wilson [founder of Factory Records]—not obvious record-company people by any means—to get involved and make our dreams come true.”¹⁶ The ideology of “anti-commerciality” also fuels contemporary accounts of the British independent scene of the 1980s. For example, writing in the mid-2000s, former NME journalist John Harris remembers, “In the scratchy, shambolic guitar music that defined the 80s left field, there was a clear sense of the rejection of all kinds of dominant cultural norms: the slick commerciality of the 80s mainstream, ambition as defined by sales figures and chart positions, and the swaggering masculinity that united the likes of Simon Le Bon, Spandau Ballet’s Tony Hadley and—ironically—Wham!’s George Michael.”¹⁷

There is a slippage within Harris’ words, however. He does not root indie’s rejection of the mainstream in the institutional structures provided by independent production and distribution networks organized and run by music industry outsiders, but rather in “scratchy, shambolic guitar music” and forms of alternative masculinity. His words reveal—to borrow from Hesmondhalgh—the slippage between “institutional” and “political-aesthetic” definitions of indie,¹⁸ wherein the former refers to networks of production and distribution and the latter refers to what Matthew Bannister has characterized as “mainly white, male groups playing mainly electric guitars, bass and drums.”¹⁹ Reynolds explains, “In the mid-eighties most chart pop was glossy, guitar-free, black-influenced, soulfully strong-voiced, dance-oriented, hi-tech, ultra-modern.” In contrast, “Indie made a fetish of the opposite characteristics: scruffy guitars, white-only sources, weak or ‘pale’ folk-based vocals, undanceable rhythms, lo-fi or Luddite production, and a retro (usually sixties) slant.”²⁰ Hesmondhalgh explains: “While many musicians, fans and journalists had increasingly turned to pop and black musical traditions, such as electro and hip-hop, as fresh sources of inspiration in the early 1980s, indie was constructing a canon of white, underground rock references.”²¹ Both Reynolds and Cavanagh identify the NME’s compilation C86 as solidifying these sonic borders around this new definition of “indie.” The mail-order cassette featured twenty-two bands signed to independent record labels. Cavanagh writes, however, “As the NME’s advertisements for C86 mentioned no particular genre, ‘C86’ became the genre,”²² and, because the cassette heavily featured boy groups with guitar-based music, the term “indie” came to signify “a helter-skelter, jangly racket performed by four or more pale boys with hurt feelings.”²³ As early as 1988, music journalist Keith Cameron addressed this inconsistency between independent production and what Reynolds calls indie’s “distinct sensibility.”²⁴ Discussing for Sounds the contradiction of Australian soap-opera-actress-cum-pop-star Kylie Minogue’s success on an independent label, he wrote, “So, just in case you’re confused: […] Kylie Minogue isn’t an indie ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 From subculture to hot look: The evolution of indie
• 2 Skinny boys and Parisian runways: The commodification of indie authenticity
• 3 Wellies, fringe, and individual style: The commercial rise of festival fashion
• 4 Prints, paints, and crop-tops: The emergence of Afro-diasporic festival fashion
• 5 Beyond Retro and the pop ragtrade
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright