Mad about the Boy (London)

I’ve been sitting on the nostalgia couch for the last couple of weeks. It is exactly a decade since I left Australia for New Zealand, and my first academic job at the Victoria University in Wellington. I was young, green and tragically try-hard. My fashion was a bit Drag Queen 101 and I applied the poly-filler principle to make up. Like an ageing Baby Jane, I assumed that more was more. A colleague at the time told me that - when I arrived - she had assumed I was a post-operative transsexual. Every now and again – after an aerobics class and under fluorescent lighting – I still approach my complexion like a DIY project requiring heavy duty sanding and a lacquer resurfacing.

There remains a lot of that style-lifing girl in me. I still believe that stronghold hair products offer a pathway to spirituality that televisual preachers will never understand. Big hair is closer to God. But design, rather than hairdressing, is the new deity for creative types. That’s O.K. Besides big hair, I have always had a fascination for big watches.

Ten years ago when arriving in Wellington, I was wearing the coolest watch I had ever seen. It was black and chrome, chunky and had two dials. I loved it so much that I brought a bag to match. The label was fashionable and obscure, and the perfect accoutrement for a wannabe Generation X-er cultural studies academic.

This was the label – and world - of Boy London. The company was formed by Stephane Raynor in 1976. Like colostomy bag belts, multicoloured mohawks and garbage bag dresses, it was a product of punk’s blading of the body politic. The shock imagery of the punks seems a distant memory in our era where Ikea has taken out a patent over the whole planet. Nearly thirty year’s ago, the Sex Pistols, released their single God Save the Queen to coincide with the Silver Jubilee. It was a far cry from the ‘safe’ rock celebrations of Paul McCartney and Cliff Richard for Elizabeth’s Golden Jubilee Concert in 2002. Bad language was replaced by Botox.

Punk emerged from the glam rock years of Marc Bolan and David Bowie. Bands like The Damned and Siouxsie and the Banshees collapsed the distance separating performer and audience, Ziggy and fan. The anger of the Pistols’ lyrics and the violence of their stage performances offered a strident critique of the ‘United’ Kingdom. The success of their ‘anthem,’ which reached number two on the British charts in June 1977, typified the way that style, consumption and resistance came together through a solid link between youth culture and popular music.

Punk – as an iconography and ideology – was unsettling. The swastikas, syringes, safety pins and garbage bags cut up history and dispatched the ‘Greatness’ of Britain with performative panache. With truth shredded, the symbols of Nazism – just like the Union Jack – were available for rewriting and reinscription. All culture was usable. It was uncomfortable and profoundly disturbing to stitch the symbols of the Final Solution into fashion. But that was the point.

Founded on London’s Kings Road, Boy London combined star style with street style, grittier than Vivien Westwood and more wearable than Jean-Paul Gaultier. Aesthetic objects were produced that were beautifully designed and able to be worn. Like so much of the punk appropriation and reinscription, Nazi eagles were recoded and rebranded as the logo of the company. This was the punk dream: pop cultural quarrying of disturbing iconography that moved transgression onto the streets. For the Boy, watches, bags, sunglasses and clothing were the basis of this mobile politics.

The packaging was also uncommon for these uncommon objects. Shut up in chrome canisters, like a sarcophagus in a tomb, opening these goods became a design adventure. There was nothing like Boy London.

The energy, adrenalin and aggression of Punk were short lived. It is a truth of popular culture as much as people, that the brightest of lights flicker and extinguish. Crushing conformity and consensus suffocate innovative imag(in)ings.

Through the mediocrity and melodrama of Thatcher’s Britain, Boy London survived. The label rode through the post-punk cultural wasteland of Spandau Ballet’s fluffy shirts, Rick Astley’s dancing and the legendary quiffs of Haircut 100. The label gained new energy, direction and popularity through Acid House and Rave culture. A disturbing ultraviole(n)t palette was added to the staunch chrome and matte black, to build a tougher style partner for the loved-up Joe Bloggs. The staunch Smiley of Boy London moved from the streets of punk to the clubs of House.

Part of the Boy’s attraction is that its designs and products are difficult to find. There is only one shop in London, appropriately located on Carnaby Street. Painted light blue and with enormous ‘Boy’ lettering on the front, the shop is a single, long room filled with their wares. From this base, Boy London has pushed into the world. English culture always means more beyond Dover than in Reading or Slough. Boy London is big in Holland, Sweden, Japan and the United States. In fact, there is no English-housed website for the company. The Digital Boy is based in California. A little shop in Camden has built colonies of style. Boy creates a London for foreigners – like me.

Years passed. Somewhere in the movement between jobs and lives, the watch and bag were lost. I now own a briefcase that – while functional – is about as sexy as a washing machine in the midst of a spin cycle. From the nostalgia couch, the sensual memory and desire for the matte black and gleaming chrome watch of my past life returned last week. This is where my story becomes embarrassing.

In remembering Boy London, I was not in a trendy designer shop fingering consumer items from the latest style guru. I was not google-shopping for virtual couture. Instead, I was in Target, buying an enormous knock-off watch that looked every inch Boy London. With some embarrassment, I can report that I received change from twenty dollars for this aforementioned item.

This is Howard’s Australia. A design that was inspired by the Nazis, po-goed through punk, jacked through House and kicked back through the 1990s can be bought in a suburban shopping mall in Perth. Now that is an interesting item on which to spend the baby bonus.

Wearing it to work on Monday, my students loved the wide cuff watch. While (trying to) discuss cultural politics, creative industries initiatives and tourism, my students’ eyes would glaze over and shift their focus, only to smilingly admit later that 'I really like your watch.' At lunch with a group of my postgraduates, I told the Wellington story and wondered aloud - what ever happened to Boy London?

Stories punted from the table. One of my students, only a few years younger than me, told us about the first time he saw a Boy London watch in his youth. He said that 'in Tasmania, Boy London was the closest thing I’d ever seen to sadomasochism.' Silence greeted this odd – but strangely appropriate - revelation. His story makes sense: the leather, the size, the pseudo-machismo of Boy London teeters on the edge of excessive masculinity. It was a coldly distant and asexual design, a dominatrix of a dial.