Punk Rock T-Shirts

The first punk rock T-shirts I ever owned was a political statement. It carried a Robert Crumb cartoon, and demonstrated the wearer's support for the Oz Three in the big counter-Establishment trial taking place in the High Courts in summer 1971. It demonstrated my solidarity with the publishers of a magazine charged with obscenity. It showed I was an edgy, underground, contrarian rebel.

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It told the world I wasn't to be mucked about with. I brought it home from the Great Gear Trading Company in the King's Road, carried it up the path to our front door, leaned over the garden fence and tucked it out of sight at the base of the privet hedge. I knew my mother would be waiting inside the door to ambush me, to investigate every purchase I'd made in the outside (wicked, druggy, Sixties) world. She would not approve of an Oz punk rock T-shirt. She would go ape. I'd have to retrieve the controversial garment later, when she was upstairs watching TV, change into it at blinding speed, and zoom out the back door to catch the bus to the pub on the Common. Even crazy rebels like me knew better than to take any chances.

My mother knew, like the whole of the wartime generation of mothers knew, that T-shirts were an emblem of change and immorality. They weren't real punk rock t-shirts. They didn't "go with" sensible jackets. You couldn't accessorise them with nice things like ties or cufflinks. They weren't exactly underwear, though there was something vaguely bathroomy about them (the obviousness of your sweat, for one thing). They were neither masculine nor feminine, though they seemed to emphasise both male muscles and female breasts, and thus promised Trouble. Worst of all, they carried, not striped or spotted designs but images and words and messages on the front, and turned the person inside into a glorified billboard, a depersonalised, walking advertisement for something - often something horrid, like the Rolling Stones logo of a sticking-out tongue, or some revolutionary figure such as Mao or Che.

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All of which reasons made them the perfect outer casing for a generation caught between old subservience and new disorder. We were filled with a spirit of rebellion in 1968, we wanted to join in, but we were nice, middle-class Wimbledonites and hadn't a counter-cultural bone in our uniformed bodies. We were, however, liberated mentally and emotionally by Sixties rock music, by noise, by film and TV images - and, mostly, by clothes. Ours wasn't much of a rebellion, in that we all rebelled in exactly the same way. Shy of expressing any real individualism, we stuffed ourselves into blue jeans and punk rock T-shirts, and shook our fists at the world that had just sold our fake revolution back to us. See also punk t-shirt, and pages relate to punk rock t-shirt | more