Original Punk styles

The original punk fashions of the 1970s were intended to appear as confrontational, shocking and rebellious as possible. This style of punk dress was significantly different from what would later be considered the basic punk look. Many items that were commonly worn by punks in the 1970s became less common later on, and new elements were constantly added to the punk image. A great deal of punk fashion from the 1970s was based on the designs of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, as well as the dress styles of punk role models such as the Ramones, Richard Hell and the Bromley Contingent. Punk style was influenced by clothes sold in Malcolm McLaren's shop SEX. McLaren has credited this style to his first impressions of Richard Hell while McLaren was in New York City, supposedly managing the The New York Dolls (Note: In the documentary Punk: Attitude, David Johansen said McLaren was never their manager, and that he only designed clothes for them and booked them one concert; the Red Show.)

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Deliberately offensive T-shirts were popular in the early punk scene, such as the infamous DESTROY T-shirt sold at SEX, which featured an inverted crucifix and a Nazi Swastika. These T-shirts, like other punk clothing items, were often intentionally torn. Other items in early British punk fashion included: Anarchy symbols; brightly-colored or white and black dress shirts randomly covered in slogans (such as "Only Anarchists are pretty"); fake blood; patches; and deliberately controversial images (such as portraits of Marx, Stalin and Mussolini) were popular