{"id":16596,"date":"2021-06-01T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-06-01T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=16596"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:14:31","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:14:31","slug":"no-couture-for-you-punk-fashion-and-cruella","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/no-couture-for-you-punk-fashion-and-cruella\/","title":{"rendered":"No Couture For You: Punk, Fashion, and Cruella<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A lurid green light strobes across a crowd of displaced aristocrats as a distorted bassline insinuates its way over the soundtrack. The camera whip-pans to reveal a makeshift runway built across a fountain. A platinum-blonde vocalist doing his best karaoke-night Iggy Pop impersonation shimmies to the side, revealing a line of models in identical black and white wigs. Each gamine presents herself to the camera in an outfit made from a combination of couture-worthy textiles and trash; here, an evening gown made from discarded newspaper and silk tulle, there a trash bag recycled into a cocktail dress with a ripped collar and snakeskin belt. That<\/em> must be the woman of the hour,<\/em> you think as each model sneers down the lens and steps to the side. Finally, she appears at the end of the queue, resplendent in a spattered coat dress that looks like it was made from dalmatian pelts. She strides towards the camera in her stiletto boots, a smirk playing on her perfectly made-up red lips, before throwing her head back and letting out a devilish cackle. The scene cuts to black. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s easy to see why director Craig Gillespie and costume designer Jenny Beavan would draw inspiration from the British punk scene for the costumes in Cruella<\/em>. The punk aesthetic\u2014with its body-conscious silhouette, exaggerated makeup and hair, monochromatic black palette slashed with primary colors, 1950s vintage details, and casual use of bondage gear\u2014has been an inspiration for both couturiers and those looking for a cheap Halloween costume. Glance past the aspects of the early punk look that make for easy parody, however, and you\u2019ll see a visual counterpart to the political statements in songs by the Clash and the Sex Pistols. How does a 1970s youth movement that opposed the military and the excesses of the British monarchy end up in Disney\u2019s big summer tentpole movie? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first movie to depict the nascent punk scene in the UK was Jubilee,<\/em> Derek Jarman\u2019s second feature. It opens in 16th<\/sup>-century England, as Queen Elizabeth (Jenny Runacre) consults with her astrologer (Richard O\u2019Brien) and the spirit guide Ariel about time-traveling to the London of 1977. Instead of discovering a new era of enlightenment, however, the Queen happens upon a city in ruins, with gangs of petty thugs roaming the streets. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Based on the film\u2019s aesthetic, much of the budget seems to have gone into the framing scenes in the Elizabethan era. The Queen wears a gown and headpiece that looks straight out of Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger\u2019s court portrait<\/a>, which makes a jarring contrast with the costumes set in the 1970s. The gang of nihilists and assassins that\u2019s the primary focus of the 1977 scenes is dressed in clothes they might have brought from home, like the graffiti-covered flight suit Mad wears in the first flash-forward. Jarman also satirized the Anglomania of the Jubilee year through the character of Amyl Nitrate (Jordan), a historian and schoolteacher who serves as a kind of narrator in the opening scenes. In the first musical number, impresario Borgia Ginz (Orlando) introduces her as \u201cEngland\u2019s entry into the Eurovision song contest<\/a>.\u201d As she lip-syncs a pop reggae version of \u201cRule Britannia\u201d, she dances provocatively in a shift dress made from a pair of Union Jack flags that barely cover her crotch or her rear end. The tattered, faded flags look like the patriotic bunting popular in 1977\u2026 after it had been left to the elements for a few months. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Viewers could interpret the contrast between the high production values of the framing scenes and the low-budget scenery and costumes of the 1977 scenes as an implicit critique of Queen Elizabeth\u2019s Silver Jubilee, which happened just as England was coming out of a recession. You could also read Amyl\u2019s irreverent performance as a spoof on the unconditional patriotism that came with the Jubilee celebrations. Jarman\u2019s apparent political leanings, however, complicate this interpretation. Describing him as \u201calmost a monarchist\u201d, production designer Christopher Hobbs<\/a> said that the director \u201clonged for an England that was the England he believed in, which probably had never existed in that sense.\u201d Viewers could also read Jarman\u2019s anger and irreverence as being directed not at the excesses of the Royal Family or the circumstances that caused the recession of the mid-1970s, but rather at the punks who \u201cwere tearing this wonderful country to pieces and rebelling on it and stamping on it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Like Jubilee<\/em>, the American feature film Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains<\/em> was made in what writer Jake Fogelnest describes<\/a> as \u201cthe six months that it made sense to make that movie.\u201d The film depicts the rise and fall of the Stains, an all-female punk band who become a pre-internet viral sensation when they open for British punk trio the Looters and cheesy metal band the Metal Corpses. When Corinne \u201cThird Degree\u201d Burns (Diane Lane), the 16-year-old lead singer of the Stains, ends up on the evening news after a member of the Metal Corpses dies, she gains a large following of angry teenage girls who identify with her message of \u201cdon\u2019t put out\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Fabulous Stains<\/em> is set in rust belt America, but it has a British punk imprimatur in the form of former Clash manager Caroline Coon, who is credited as a \u201cspecial consultant\u201d on the film. One of Coon\u2019s responsibilities was to create a look for Corinne and her bandmates\u2014and, by extension, her fans. The costume she designed looks like Vivienne Westwood\u2019s provocative early work, taken to its logical extreme. Lead singer Corinne \u201cThird Degree\u201d Burns (Diane Lane) wears black underwear under pantyhose, with a bright red see-through blouse \u201cand no bra on underneath\u201d as a newscaster in the film observed. In the 2000 documentary Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains: Behind the Movie<\/em>, Lane would say that the outfit made her feel vulnerable (\u201cyou could see my nipples<\/a>!\u201d), but Corinne\u2019s wide strides and bristling posture gave her a combative appearance that would resonate with her new fans\u2014many of whom showed up to Stains concerts dressed in similar outfits<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jubilee<\/em> and Fabulous Stains<\/em> were relegated to arthouse screenings and late-night cable broadcasts, but Sid & Nancy<\/em> became a dorm room poster movie before the concept had a name. After making Repo Man<\/em>, which welded half-assed heist movie shenanigans to the LA punk scene, Alex Cox wrote and directed a fairly straightforward chronicle of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen\u2019s doomed relationship. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like Caroline Coon, and like some of Jarman\u2019s collaborators, Cox was well-steeped in the first wave British punk scene\u2014he graduated from Bristol University in 1977 and had a casual friendship with the Clash. You can see how this influenced the costumes in some of the details missing from other films of the era, like the striped or colorblocked mohair jumpers Johnny Rotten wears. Cox and costume designer Catherine Cook showed the bondage straps and harnesses Sid Vicious casually dons throughout the film, but the figure who put Sid in light bondage gear isn\u2019t in the movie. Instead of alluding to the Sex Pistols\u2019 formation at Vivienne Westwood\u2019s clothing store Sex, Cox implies that Nancy got Sid to wear light fetish gear through her dominatrix roommate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jubilee<\/em>, Fabulous Stains<\/em>, and Sid & Nancy<\/em> all center on performers, but how did the teenage punk fans dress? We get some idea from the protagonists of John Cameron Mitchell\u2019s coming-of-age movie How to Talk to Girls at Parties,<\/em> which remixes the star-crossed teenager plot for the punk era. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In its opening credits scene, you get a rare sight of a male character primping for the camera. In addition to the gestures you\u2019d expect from a teen boy\u2014like spitting on his reflection\u2014Enn (Alex Sharp) carefully adjusts the badges on the lapel of his school uniform jacket and loosens his tie so it hangs just right over his open collar. This feels grounded in a real experience, in a way that the boobs shirt Enn\u2019s friend John (Ethan Lawrence) wears does not. (Putting aside that it\u2019s a designer piece<\/a>, how would he sneak that past his parents?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The boobs shirt\u2014and the general fetish-adjacent aspects of punk style\u2014have an interesting counterpart in How to Talk to Girls at Parties\u2019<\/em> alien race. The Stellas, a group of aliens visiting England, are clad in brightly-colored latex body stockings with cutout-like black spots over their breasts and crotches. The actors\u2019 clipped speech and jerky movements give them a defensive-yet-deadpan quality that suggests the \u201cwhat are you<\/em> looking at?\u201d attitude with which many punk women accessorized their more provocative outfits. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The lineage of these punk movies can be seen throughout the second half of Cruella<\/em>, in which the title character (Emma Stone) finally embraces her dark side. You can see Enn\u2019s altered school uniform in a safety-pinned blazer the young Cruella wears in an early montage, and the narrow silhouette and graffitied eye makeup of Cruella\u2019s motorcycle ensemble suggest Mad\u2019s flight suit from Jubilee.<\/em> The fluffy black sweaters Estella wears in her antagonist\u2019s atelier suggest Johnny Rotten\u2019s pullovers in Sid & Nancy<\/em>. Cruella\u2019s black-and-white hair and elaborate eye makeup gestures back to Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains<\/em>, while Jasper\u2019s (Joel Fry) porkpie hat and corduroy jacket look like something Paul Simonon had worn in the same movie. Even beyond the hat tips to previous punk films, director Craig Gillespie and costume designer Jenny Beavan got the do-it-yourself attitude towards fashion right. The garbage truck dress, with its newspaper peplum and bin-liner train, suggests the trash bag dress Belinda Carlisle wore at early Go-Go\u2019s gigs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the Cruella<\/em> team evoked the aesthetic of England\u2019s first-wave punk scene, they don\u2019t engage with the political subtext in that specific era of punk. Since Disney wants to appeal to the widest audience\u2014and offend as few people as possible\u2014side-stepping the circumstances that led to the popularity of punk is understandable from a business standpoint. A few of the major fashion moments in the film, like the military uniform and tiara Cruella dons to taunt the Baroness at one of her fashion shows, seem like they were cut and pasted from another film that depicted the monarchy at all, never mind engaged with it. A Disney movie about the Queen\u2019s Silver Jubilee would be in bad taste even now, over 40 years on, but the filmmakers want to just use the symbolism without considering its meaning. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the closing credits sequence began, with its collage ransom lettering and unironic use of Union Jack iconography, a line from Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains<\/em> popped into my head: \u201cYou could have really been something\u2026 but right now, you\u2019re just two white stripes.\u201d\u00a0\"\"\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cCruella\u201d rather clumsily attempts to appropriate the feel and style of punk-era London. Let\u2019s look at four films that captured it better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":607,"featured_media":16599,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381],"tags":[162],"class_list":["post-16596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/607"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16596"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22280,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16596\/revisions\/22280"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}