Fashion has long traded on the cool cred of many a subculture—we, as an industry, don’t lack in ways to co-opt ideas or manners of dress that once might have gotten your ass kicked. But few scenes have yielded such an evergreen fascination as punk rock. When the Queens Museum’s retrospective of the band, “Hey! Ho! Let’s Go: Ramones and the Birth of Punk” bows this Sunday, you can bet that a handful of fashion types will be among those making the trip to New York’s Flushing Meadows Corona Park to take in an ambitious visual history, three years in the making, of the borough’s most famous group, who grew up just a stone’s throw away in Forest Hills. And why not? With the help of coconspirator and visual architect Arturo Vega (who died early on in this show’s creation but had a hand in its genesis), the band forged one of the most tenor-setting aesthetic vocabularies in music history.
Before denim came readily pre-shredded, the Ramones teamed their torn pairs with graphic tees, Prince Valiant mops, and, most characteristically, motorcycle jackets. The Beach Boys may have donned canvas slip-ons, but the Ramones have the distinction of being one of the first bands to wear lace-up sneakers on the regular. The look was all laid out from the word go: the cover of their Sire Records debut, which will turn 40 on April 23. That stylistic vernacular is well documented in the show, deftly mapped out over the course of four large rooms by Queens Museum guest curator—and downtown New York figure in his own right—Marc H. Miller.
Fashion’s relationship with rock is a long and moderately fraught one. A tangential but arguably key aside: The industry’s “punk problem” is something I grapple with a lot lately, as a fashion writer for whom rock—punk specifically—has occupied the bulk of my headspace since I was a preteen, the chief aesthetic touchstone of my life so far. And while I’m fairly well versed in the genre’s more esoteric far corners, the Ramones occupy for me a place of adulation above any other band I can think of. To be faced, during the Fall ’16 collections, with a T-shirt scrawled with the word PUNK paired with artfully ripped jeans only served to underscore my latent guilt that I am professionally part of the problem. The fact that that tee will retail for somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 is, by my count, nothing short of depressing.
It’s not to say that fashion is incapable of channeling punk’s particular ethos. Junya Watanabe’s clothes often neatly embody it without feeling costumey, and Vivienne Westwood—well, she’s purely, enduringly punk rock; both designers were key in the Met’s 2013 show “Punk: Chaos to Couture.” But on the far opposite end of the spectrum, John Varvatos has assumed the former home of the Ramones’s most hallowed haunt, CBGB, and at a certain point, for a cool $118 you could buy a tee by Varvatos bearing the band’s name in blocky letters resembling their iconic font. Even when I posted about this exhibit to my personal Instagram, someone commented to the effect that it would be wrong for Vogue to showcase even punk’s most famous of groups—the general idea being, I suppose, that a bastion of capital-F fashion has no business putting the spotlight on punk’s even most famous of bands. Fair enough.
The Ramones, though, never shied away from stylistic matters. “Johnny was heavily influenced by Brian Jones[’s fashion sense],” recalls his widow, Linda. The band’s most staunchly no-nonsense member (and rock’s most famous Republican) and onetime military school kid, he would venture from Forest Hills into Manhattan to shop at Granny Takes a Trip. In one early photo of the band on display in “Hey! Ho! Let’s Go,” he’s still wearing metallic stretch trousers, a lingering bit of his glam-rock look. But for all his love of glitter and platforms à la the New York Dolls, it was Johnny who led the charge to codify their look. From his posthumous memoir, Commando: “We figured out that it would be jeans, T-shirts, leather jackets, and the tennis shoes, Keds. We wanted every kid to be able to identify with our image.” After all, the coasts—let alone Middle America—of the mid-’70s were going to be a tough sell on four tough-looking, long-haired guys from Queens. Their weathered Perfectos are on display, right alongside a shrunken tee from Forest Hills High, Dee Dee’s graphic Buckwheat tank, and Joey’s amber-tinted glasses and fingerless studded glove. Even fashion’s savviest marketing minds would be hard-pressed to rival the split-second recognition of the band’s logo, dreamed up by Vega, and today almost as universal as the Nike swoosh.
Miller and cocurator Bob Santelli of the Grammy Museum tapped more than 50 lenders for the show, from Linda Ramone to legendary Ramones tour manager Monte Melnick. Indeed, in an exhibit where the emotional factor is generally pretty high (or so this die-hard fan found it), fingerprints of friends and family are all over the place—in some cases literally. Punk magazine’s Legs McNeil headed to Flushing to scrawl the lyrics to “Pinhead” on a wall (echoing his “punk manifesto” in Washington, D.C., circa spring ’78); John Holmstrom, Punk cofounder and the illustrator responsible for art featured on the Ramones records Road to Ruin and Rocket to Russia, created a map of the band’s world that will be handed out to visitors. Joey’s brother, Mickey Leigh, loaned countless pieces, among them a drawing in colored pencils of the lanky frontman by their mother, Charlotte. Elsewhere, famed artist Yoshitomo Nara completed a new work for the show, and Shepard Fairey contributed his portraits of Joey, Dee Dee, and Johnny, adding one of drummer Tommy to round out the original lineup. Fairey’s works are the sole other occupants of the final room of the show, along with a large projection of the band at perhaps their most blisteringly brilliant, ringing in 1978 on New Year’s Eve at London’s Rainbow Theatre.
Naturally, it’s not the only video featured in “Hey! Ho! Let’s Go.” Guests are treated to medium-spanning works, in addition to Nara’s and Fairey’s, by the likes of Mark Kostabi, Matt Groening, and Daniel Clowes. Among the points driven home by the effecting show is the fact that there’s hardly a corner of the zeitgeist the Ramones didn’t touch at one point or another with their unmatched brand of power.
Not bad for four guys from Forest Hills.
“Hey! Ho! Let’s Go: Ramones and the Birth of Punk” will run from April 10 to July 31 at the Queens Museum.
