Punk: Chaos to Couture

The Met’s spring 2013 Costume Institute exhibition, PUNK: Chaos to Couture, examines punk’s impact on high fashion from the movement’s birth in the early 1970s through its continuing influence today. Featuring approximately one hundred designs for men and women, the exhibition includes original punk garments and recent, directional fashion to illustrate how haute couture and ready-to-wear borrow punk’s visual symbols.

Focusing on the relationship between the punk concept of “do-it-yourself” and the couture concept of “made-to-measure,” the seven galleries are organized around the materials, techniques, and embellishments associated with the anti-establishment style. Themes include New York and London, which tells punk’s origin story as a tale of two cities, followed by Clothes for Heroes and four manifestations of the D.I.Y. aesthetic—Hardware, Bricolage, Graffiti and Agitprop, and Destroy.

Presented as an immersive multimedia, multisensory experience, the clothes are animated with period music videos and soundscaping audio techniques.