When Romance Wasn't Dead

“They made you feel like normality was a sin.” Reminiscing on nights out in 80s club, Blitz, a Guardian writer describes how it felt to mingle with the outrageous New Romantics. With their flamboyant outfits and kaleidoscopic make-up the New Romantic movement was a backlash at the uniformity and conscious scruffiness of punk. Where the punk movement signified the necessity of safety-pinning clothes back together through financial austerity, the New Romantics flew the flag of resilient culture right in Thatcherism’s face. It was about dressing up, being glamorous and subverting expectations, despite a troubling political climate. In a time of bleak Conservative government, the New Romantics splashed around the club scene in a whirlpool of blazing colour and androgynous garments, standing for the concept of liberation and experimentation. Heralding Vivienne Westwood as their main influence the movement strove to immortalise Bowie’s ‘heroes just for one day’ lyric as a fashion philosophy as they painstakingly reinvented their styles for each night out. With the notoriously hard to please Steve Strange on the door of Blitz, who was known for turning people away if their style wasn’t adventurous enough, this was a movement about being as far out and fearless as possible. Think pirate shirts, lots of lace, but most of all big, bold hair. 

In short, the New Romantics were about challenging expectation and pushing boundaries and whatever your take on the extreme nature of their looks, it was a movement that cleared the way for many more bold steps in the fashion industry. Their ‘anything goes’ attitude has inspired many designers since and whilst I am definitely more of a punk myself, any movement that gives people the confidence to express themselves without inhibition deserves its space within culture. 

With David Bowie heralded as the King of this movement, its driving concept was to divert from the explosive rift punk had left in music history and return to the glam rock of the early 70s. Therefore, the main influence when it came to hair was the spiked orange mullet of the galactic Ziggy Stardust. In a cultural movement that preached the ethos of ‘no limits’ where better to draw inspiration than an alien rock superstar?  Contrasting boldly with punk’s grounded, political lyrics and rejection of excess, the New Romantics wanted decadent, decorative beautifying and nothing makes a statement more than a cosmic red hairdo.  But they didn’t stop there. If you wanted to be a Blitz kid, you needed to rely on more than imitation to get past Steve Strange. Scarlett Cannon, model and muse of the movement, claims that she had to have a completely different hair style for going out every single week, whether that entailed bleaching it blonde, cropping it or her most famous look, the crucifix fringe, a style where she shaved all her head except for her black fringe which she cut into the shape of a cross where it hung down on her forehead. When you look at the photographs of Scarlett Cannon from this time it’s easy to mistake her for a punk because of the rebellious nature of her looks, but this was a period in music and fashion history where boundaries were being blurred, fragmented or utterly decimated to make way for new horizons. Therefore, a lot of the movements themselves weren’t secular, they were static and figures like Siouxie Soux moved between the punk and goth aesthetic (both labels which she herself rejected), clearly picking up some New Romantic embellishment along the way (mostly that geometric eyeliner). Whilst pioneering punk bands, such as the Clash would stay true to the punk ideology of stripping back to basics, other bands and their followers would take the DIY element and run with it. Where to punks DIY meant creating your own record label with barely any money, to the New Romantics it meant creating your own dress out of scraps of recycled coffee bags. They applied this attitude to their hair too, backcombing it, crimping it, dyeing it, adding braids, little plaits and beads, with no need to go to the hairdresser, often recreating looks from Vogue with a pair of scissors in the bathroom. With many criticising the New Romantic movement as the ‘death of the rock star’ as the worshipping of Bowie gave way to pop bands such as Duran Duran, much of its fashion derived from the commercialised areas of punk. No matter how the New Romantics professed their distaste for punk, Vivienne Westwood was at the spearhead of both punk and the New Romantics, renaming her 70s shop, SEX, as Seditionaries: Clothes for Heroes in 1976. Whilst this initially still sold clothes of the punk aesthetic (such as bondage trousers and fetish garments of rubber studded with spikes) Westwood began to veer away from this look and in 1981 she ran a collection called Pirate. Drawing inspiration from Romantic poetry, highwaymen and buccaneers it featured oversized shirts, sashes and frilled cuffs. This is the style that inspired many of the Blitz kids’ more ostentatious ‘peacocks’ who wanted to use the nightclub scene to parade a more glamorous look. Hand in hand with this went hair that was backcombed as high as could be or shaved in zigzags along the brow, anything to be that little bit extra. Of course, one of the main focal points behind big hair was to challenge gender stereotypes. Often both men and women would sport similar hair styles and paired with a mixture of boxy clothes, flowing materials and lots of jewellery there were no distinctions between what men and women wore. 

This was published in TrashTalk, an independent print fashion magazine.