Oi! Oi! Oi!

IN THE BALMY, PALMY DAYS OF 1970S SAN DIEGO, THINGS were groovy, mellow and laid-back. Me? I was seething with alienation and rage. I had awakened as a teenager in the lamest decade imaginable. These days, everyone under 30 thinks the early ‘70s were so cute. But you try living with Seals and Croft, Quaaludes, orange plaid Herculon, orange super-graphics, orange shag, shag hairdos. I was completely surrounded by people working a stale hippie look. “This is it?” I thought. “This is my youth?” While all this was blowin’ through the jasmine in my mind, I wanted to scream, “Wake up!”

Meanwhile, over in London, a seething caldron of equally--well, OK, maybe more--enraged welfare youth, oppressed by hundreds of years of class warfare and a depressed economy, were ready to explode. Thank God for the Sex Pistols. They surfaced the same year I escaped San Diego for an Oakland art school. Pretty soon, all of us art students had short, spiky hair in a variety of unnatural hues. Not only was it a new way to infuriate our parents, but even better, it shocked people just a few years older than us.

The hair was the easy part. Back then, pre-MTV, acquiring the right punk look was largely a matter of studying album covers, concert posters and what the other kids at the clubs were wearing. If you couldn’t afford bondage wear, or weren’t ready to commit to appearing in public clad only in strategically placed pieces of electrical tape, like super-scary Plasmatics singer Wendy O. Williams, well, there were still options.

One’s old hippie clothes (Salvation Army frocks, ripped at the armpits) segued conveniently into punk. As Exene Cervenka--our Audrey Hepburn--showed us, accessorizing could be a snap! Cinch that Dust Bowl dress with an ammo belt. Steal your dog’s collar for yourself. Trade those Birkenstocks for Doc Martens. Add some torn fishnets, choppy, bleached hair with dark roots and raccoonish eye makeup. The Depraved Catholic School Girl look? As easy as getting kicked out of Immaculate Heart. The Obscene Shirley Temple pose? Fun, even if those too-small baby-doll dresses cut off your circulation. The bottom line was: mock conventional femininity with the ferocity of a rabid drag queen.

Speaking of which, of all the original punk/nervous-gender looks I’ve seen, the best and strangest ever was that of a dishwasher at a restaurant where I worked. Steve, an extremely gay ex-Mormon peroxide case, would find women’s psychedelic-print hip-hugger bell-bottoms at the thrifts and take them in at the ankle. He’d parade past my house every day on his way to work, clad in his flower-power pegged pants, crinkled white patent-leather Eisenhower jacket and baby-blue suede leisure loafers. Wow. He could have given Vivienne Westwood--fashion designer to the Sex Pistols--a run for her money, but being a speed-snorting dishwasher, he was way too screwed up for that. At least he was brave.

You had to be, in the clubs. For buffeting those pogo-ing bodies around you, a zipper-heavy, beat-up black leather jacket was de rigueur. The thrift store search for the right jacket became, for me, the Holy Grail of Punk. In the meantime, I had something almost better--the world’s most flea-bitten squirrel-fur coat. Slam dance in it, slop beer on it, sleep in it and call me a punk Holly Golightly! I wore it everywhere, until a “friend” borrowed it for his one-man tribute to Dame Edith Sitwell. Yeah, right. I never saw that coat again.

For me, the moment that punk turned into new wave in America wasn’t the day “My Sharona” hit the charts. It was the day punk went retail. Suddenly, it seemed, you could find that black leather jacket--as instantly distressed as Sid Vicious waiting for his next fix--at the mall. It took all the fun out of it.

High-end retail will always suck the joy out of everything. In the September 2000 issue of Harper’s Bazaar magazine, a spread called “Pretty In Punk” featured couture fashion inspired by our salad days. There was a laser-cut “ripped” blouse by Ungaro, a little black studded dress by Chanel, a Christian Dior ball gown in a kind of newspaper-print silk chiffon, perfect for today’s Land Rover-driving punk deb. Thank you, John Galliano, for reducing all my rage and alienation and decadent subversive fun to a nod and a wink. Well, I suppose that’s what fashion is all about, isn’t it? It’s just kind of hilarious that latex, ripped fishnets and bondage wear have found their way into the vocabulary of couture classics, where they no longer have the power to shock anyone. My advice to today’s fashion-forward youth? Find a new way to annoy, outrage and horrify me. It’s your job.