It’s uncanny how you could point at something, let’s go with ‘Punk’ for instance, and roughly get the same definition. However about 35 years after its death, Punk is the exact opposite of what it used to stand for. Is Punk wearing a fabricated, brand-labeled flannel shirt, or is it dressing however you want, being who you are, and being absolutely unapologetic about it?!

Obviously if you ask someone who experienced Punk in the 70’s during its high point; they’ll paint quite a different picture than most under 25-year-olds today would. Back then; Punk was all about youth rebellion and artistic statements. Very strongly underground, radically left wing, a progressive movement. An opinion that was meant to go beyond capitalism and mainstream ideas. The ideologies in songs, the unusual accessories and outfits, they were all based on stating ‘Look, we don’t want to look just like everybody else. We don’t want to be normal. We want to be something that the bourgeois society cannot swallow.’

The Punk impact on fashion, music or any kind of art is the mere reflection of an attitude. A consciousness of class-based politics and a belief in doing it yourself, seems to have turned into doing what everyone else is doing, because rebellion is the ‘in’ thing to do now. But if punk was, and is, based on the idea of being opposed to everything authoritarian and trendy, isn’t it kind of ironic to see it be the trend? The opponent of the norm, an image of rebellion becoming what’s normal and marketable and indeed, quite anti-Punk.

When musicians and fashion designers took Punk’s boldness and carried it into their lines and right in to the centre of everyone’s attention, it turned from ‘the alternative’ into something very much commercialised. In fact, it became so acceptable that there was a theme for teenager to go through a Punk phase for a few years, consuming whatever the capitalist system’s feeding them under the umbrella of Punk products, and then go back to the normal lifestyle that they were never that distanced from anyway. So in shorter words, what happened was Punk, became Pop.

Meanwhile today’s Punks, drunken with the idea that shouting at their parent is ‘rebelling against an authoritarian figure’ or ‘courageous’. They stand in punk gigs, all looking the same, completely blended into the mainstream. Youth subcultures today have become carriages on a speeding train called consumer society. Long gone are the muddy Doc Martens, it is now ‘in’ to wear worn-out converses. However, as the few remaining young people not constantly obsessed with what others think of them, join in a mosh pit, it’s possible to hear a young Punk say, ‘I can’t. My boots are amazing!’. I guess it is possible to see this new materialist punk as a rebirth, but punk might as well prefer to die instead. On the other hand, there are people that have completely different definitions of punk as well, such as a CSM fashion journalism student ‘Well, the irony is in my opinion, that punk isn’t really about clothes or music at all, there are seminal moments in punk history of course, which are all so amazing but it’s more about an attitude. Like some people are really punk but you would never know.’

By Defne Saricetin