up up and awaaaaay in my beautiful my beautiful balloooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnn...

Where? What page? What were you wearing?

Mike, I think Yohji Yamamoto must have been stalking you, or one of the other Japanese designers I love, because I have in my folder where I keep images of clothes I dream of owning a picture of a beautiful black jacket with hundreds of safety pins decorating it.

I so remember how swiftly you saw punk fashion appearing in Vogue (I think I remember seeing some really edgy work as early as 1980, maybe earlier in Vogue), for thousands of dollars a throw, doing what some of y'all were doing just for much bigger bucks and with better fabric (in some cases).

The look is hot.................. Pink and black leopard Hello kitty slippers.. a white wife beater ... omg... very hot..... wow..... uhhh huhhhhhhhhhhhhh ; )>

Luckily in my punk fasion heigh day I was assistant manager at a thrift store in Mountain View,and when I wasn't asleep on someones couch I would crash at the store,and change my clothes off the rack.I would have to set up about 5 or 6 of the alarm clocks we had on sale to make sure at least one would go off at the right time,then I would get out by 7 am,ride the 22 to eastridge mall,catching more sleep with a walkman blasting punk in my head,get something to eat,and catch the ride back and more sleep...which would get me back to the store in time for my shift at 11,but more than once I awoke to the manager standing over me telling me I wasn't supposed to be sleeping there.

Anyhow,I favored the fuzzy garish mohair orange and green sweaters with a leather jacket I had torn the sleeves off of thrown over the top,and those nifty towncraft 60s short sleeve button up shirts with ugly paisley and such patterns,and my favorite pair of pants of that period was a pair of sta prest levi slack type pants,they were pegged and fit snug all the way up the leg,and when I washed them(which as you can imagine wasn't daily)the perma press crease down the front of the leg would reapear.I also had a great collection of boots and shoes I scored there,I kept a big box of clothing in the loft over the office for the stuff I really liked,the other stuff I tired of I would put back at some point.My other accesory was a multitude of black and red cat collars that seemed to get donated a lot on each wrist.

To supplement my income I would snag any of the art deco or antique looking stuff I had an eye for a few doors down to the little antique shop and sell it.I would also come across such rarities as first issue John Lennon poetry books(which I sold to a girl who then defaced them by writing her name in ball point on the inside covers)and 13th floor elevator albums and such.

Those were some good times.

My black Chuck high tops looked so painfully new for so long that I stopped wearing them and when I moved to L.A. somehow left them in the back of the car for ages. One day I noticed that the blinding L.A. sunshine had bleached them to a marvelous vintage grey appearance. Sigh. Wish I had worked that out while in Berkeley.

Maude wrote: "
And what about the makeup?....Gawd it was fun to put on all that face paint...would take me at least an hour or so...Dark purples and blues and greens...and black lipstick...and liner...and pale faces....with dark dark blush...making face all the more angular.... "

Yeah, it was fun! Post-punk, I went to beauty school and became a makeup artist for a time.
Jellin was a hairdresser.
I think a lot of punks went into the beauty biz, since we had learned how to be so creative that way. Of course many more became musicians and other types of artists.

It's old hat now, but punk was quite a breakthrough in artistic terms. Radical really.