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Not the usual paintings or Harrowden-inspired illustrations. Today, it’s about a different kind of art: the kind you can wear.
Digging through old files the other night for my usual little show-and-tell I like to do at the end of the week of things from years gone by, I came across a photo of myself from 2004, aged 19, wearing my first proper DIY punk jacket. I’d started it a couple of years earlier, when I was about 17, and it evolved slowly: sewing on bits, scrawling lyrics, adding and removing patches, rearranging safety pins. It became a walking gallery – a canvas you could take down the street.
Like many working-class kids, most of my clothes came from hand-me-downs, charity shops, or the mystery bin bag bundles, those random assortments of clothing in your size for your age group you got that you just had to make work. Even before I had a name for punk, I was drawing on my clothes, cutting bits off, sewing strange pieces on, making them my own. It wasn’t a fashion statement so much as survival and self-expression, the instinct to customize what you had because you couldn’t just go out and buy what you wanted.
When I stumbled into the punk world through archives of BBS textfile fanzines in the late ’90s, it felt like I’d found my people, I needed to seek out gigs / others. Reading about how punks hand-painted their shirts, wrote slogans on jackets, or repurposed old clothing felt instantly familiar. I was already doing it. This was the missing vocabulary for something I’d been practicing for years.
In that photo, the denim jacket is already battered, emblazoned with a “NEW ART RIOT” patch, a nod to the Manic Street Preachers, who, alongside X-Ray Spex, were a huge influence on me. Both bands were fierce and clever, political and poetic, and both took punk in their own direction, X-Ray Spex with day-glo and saxophone swagger, the Manics with androgyny, leopard print, glitter, and slogans. I wore my love for them on my sleeves, literally, my hand-painted X-Ray Spex “Art-I-Ficial” tee being one of my most treasured and over-worn pieces especially in my days in Una Baines's and crew's Poetic Terrorists our band at the time.
By then, I’d been painting canvases for years, but clothing was a different kind of art, portable, personal, and part of daily life. You could carry your message into the streets, through bus rides, into pubs and gigs. Every stitch, every smear of paint became part of your story.
I know a lot of my punk friends will relate to this, but it’s not just a punk thing. Goths, metalheads, skinheads, mods, ravers, everyone’s got their own way of claiming clothes as territory. The battle jacket, the hand-painted tee, the reworked charity shop coat, they’re all part of the same impulse: to mark yourself out as your own creation.
Art isn’t just in galleries! Sometimes it’s sewn into your back, frayed at the cuffs, and patched where the years have worn through. Safety pins might not be strong, but they’ve been holding our lives together for decades.