JULIE BURNS
If the New Romantic scene represented anything, it was empowerment. Its dynamic, DIY approach to dressing wasn’t about high end-fashion and having a stylist (they didn’t exist then). It meant rampant self-expression, an escape from the mundane; a respite from the grey, depressing, minersstriking, Thatcherite Britain outside, a post-punk, sartorial two-finger salute to the commonplace and the conservative. What mattered to this creative coterie was having fun and maximum fabulousness. There were no rules. Individuality ruled at Billy’s and Blitz and, later, others they spawned beyond the capital. These were the places to see and be seen.
Pre-internet, invite by word-of-mouth happened where the like-minded hung out: at Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s Seditionaries and World’s End; key stalls at Kensington Market and Hyper Hyper; Johnson & Johnsons in the King’s Road, Modern Classics in Shoreditch, Acme Attractions in the Antiquarius market, then later Covent Garden’s PX. Commercially, PX came first in selling prototype New Romantic threads: they offered the first padded shoulders and Russian Cossack outfits. Steve Strange and others adopted the brand’s pioneering Byronesque-to-Buccaneers imagery long before Vivienne Westwood’s own acclaimed Romantic take at World’s End. Here, her swashbuckling pirate look as seen on Bow Wow Wow and McLaren-mentored ex-punk Adam Ant would become world-famous.