Abstract
The New Romantics of Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s became a collection of pop stars who profoundly affected popular culture. This label applied to Boy George, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, and Adam Ant among others. Like the original Romantics, the New Romantics didn’t choose their own name and were a disparate group crowded under a unifying label. Yet at the same time they also shared with their namesakes an acknowledgement and exploration of the created nature of the self, a sense that they were struggling with and against repressive hegemonies, and a renewed focus on the place of the individual, themes examined here through similarities of dress. Taking a historicist and cultural studies approach, this chapter explores the ways in which the New Romantics connected to the Romantic movement.
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Notes
- 1.
Quoted in Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984 (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 322.
- 2.
See, for example, Neil Nehring, “‘Everyone’s Given Up and Just Want to Go Dancing’: From Punk to Rave in the Thatcher Era,” in Popular Music and Society 30, no. 1 (Feb. 2007): 1–18; Simon Frith, Music for Pleasure (New York: Routledge, 1988); and Michael Bracewell, England is Mine: Pop Life in Albion from Wilde to Goldie (London: Flamingo, 1998). Bracewell does admit, however, that “the post-punk fade into New Romanticism would remagnetize London to produce a period, eventually, of effervescent creative hot-housing, giving rise to a new wave of independent design, publishing, and video art” (209–10).
- 3.
On the connection between the goth movement and the Romantic Gothic, see for example Charles Mueller, “Gothicism and English Goth Music: Notes on the Repertoire,” Gothic Studies 14, no. 2 (2012): 74–88; Lauren M.E. Goodlad and Michael Bibby, Introduction to Goth: Undead Subculture (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007), 1–38; and Ansgar Jerrentrup, “Gothic and Dark Music: Forms and Background,” World of Music 42, no. 1 (2000): 25–50.
- 4.
“Popular Music Genres,” A Companion to Popular Culture, ed. Gary Burns (London: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2016), 137.
- 5.
Simon Frith, “Pop Music,” Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, ed. Simon Frith (New York: Cambridge UP, 2001), 94–95.
- 6.
“I heard you making patterns rhyme/Like some new romantic looking for the TV sound.” Duran Duran , “Planet Earth,” in Duran Duran, EMI 1981, 1981, compact disc.
- 7.
Kurt Loder, “Rolling Stone Random Notes,” The Tuscaloosa News (July 17, 1981), 6.
- 8.
William Wordsworth, Preface, Lyrical Ballads (London: J & A Arch, 1798), i–ii.
- 9.
Haines, qtd. in Graham Smith, We Can Be Heroes: London Clubland 1976–1984 (London: Unbound, 2012), 63.
- 10.
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan (New York: Penguin Classics, 1982), IX.24.
- 11.
Qtd. in Smith, 9.
- 12.
Andy Beckett, When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 2.
- 13.
Qtd. in Smith 71; qtd. in Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again, 301.
- 14.
Martin Rushent, qtd. in Reynolds, 302.
- 15.
Leonard Nevarez, “How Joy Division Came to Sound Like Manchester: Myths and Ways of Listening in the Neoliberal City,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 25, no. 1 (2013): 58.
- 16.
Decca Aitkenhead, “Adam Ant: ‘To Be a Pop Star You Need Sex, Subversion, Style and Humour,’” Guardian Online, February 19, 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/feb/19/adam-ant-sex-style-humour. Accessed November 1, 2015.
- 17.
See, for example, Savage, 122, and Smith.
- 18.
For more on the Macaronis, see Peter Macneil, “Macaroni Masculinities,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body, & Culture 4, no. 4 (2000): 373–403.
- 19.
Adam Ant, “Adam Ant in Session: How I Wrote … Stand and Deliver,” Guardian Online, October 27, 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/music/video/2011/oct/27/adam-ant-session-stand-deliver. Accessed November 1, 2015.
- 20.
Stan Hawkins, The British Pop Dandy: Masculinity, Popular Music and Culture (Liverpool: Ashgate Press, 2009), 75.
- 21.
Johanna Drucker and Emily McVarish, Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide (New York: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009), 120.
- 22.
David P. Jordan, The King’s Trial: The French Revolution v. Louis XVI (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1979), 149; Marilyn Butler, “Romanticism in England,” Romanticism in National Context, eds. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (New York: Cambridge UP, 1998), 39.
- 23.
Joe Stuessy, Rock and Roll: Its History and Stylistic Development (London: Prentice Hall, 1989), 32.
- 24.
Aitken head, “Adam Ant”; Ant, “Adam Ant in Session.”
- 25.
Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London: Virago, 1985).
- 26.
Ant, “Adam Ant in Session.”
- 27.
Haw kins, 76.
- 28.
Adam and the Ants, “Stand and Deliver,” in Prince Charming, CBS Records 85268, 1981, compact disc, lns. 5–6; “Prince Charming,” in Prince Charming, CBS Records 85268, 1981, compact disc, lns. 1–2.
- 29.
Anne Hollander, Seeing through Clothes (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975), 228; Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, 184.
- 30.
Ln. 7.
- 31.
Nick Duerden, “Martin and Gary Kemp: We Complement Each Other,” The Guardian, April 19, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/apr/19/martin-gary-kemp-spandau-ballet. Accessed November 12, 2015.
- 32.
Qtd. in Smith, 40.
- 33.
Peter Cochran, “The Life of Byron, or Southey was Right,” in Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Frances Wilson (London: Macmillan Press, 1999), 63–64.
- 34.
Haw kins, 77.
- 35.
Jerome McGann, “Hero with a Thousand Faces,” in Byron and Romanticism, ed. James Soderholm (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 157.
- 36.
Aitken head, “Adam Ant”; Ant, “Adam Ant in Session.”
- 37.
Holl ander, 127.
- 38.
Ibid., 225–26 for more on these sexual implications in the Regency period.
- 39.
Haines, qtd. in Smith, 63.
- 40.
Wilson, 61.
- 41.
For more on this, see Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979).
- 42.
Jon Savage, Time Travel: From the Sex Pistols to Nirvana: Pop, Media, and Sexuality, 1977–96 (London: Vintage, 1996), 122.
- 43.
Sav age, 12.
- 44.
“There is no such thing as society” is probably Thatcher’s most repeated pronouncement, although it is in fact a misquotation.
- 45.
Sav age, 122.
- 46.
Neh ring, 6–7.
- 47.
Ibid., 15.
- 48.
Brac ewell, 207.
- 49.
But ler, 64–65.
- 50.
Qtd. in Smith, 52.
- 51.
Rip It Up, 302.
- 52.
It is impossible to overestimate the influence of David Bowie on the New Romantics. For discussions of Bowie’s impact on the popular music that followed him, see Esther Zaplana, “Breaking the Mold: Male Rock Performance, Glam, and the (Re-)Imagination of the Male Body in the 1960s and 1970s,” in Embodying Masculinities: Towards a History of the Male Body in U.S. Culture and Literature, ed. Josep M. Armengol (New York: Peter Lang, 2013), 63–82; Nick Stevenson, “Talking to Bowie Fans: Masculinity, Ambivalence and Cultural Citizenship,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 12, no. 1 (2009): 79–98; David Shumway and Heather Arnet, “Playing Dress Up: David Bowie and the Roots of Goth,” in Goth: Undead Subculture, eds. Lauren M.E. Goodlad and Michael Bibby (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2007), 129–42.
- 53.
Kemp, qtd. in Smith, 73.
- 54.
William Wordsworth, The Prelude, in Poetry and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013), 11:108–09.
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Bernhard-Jackson, E.A. (2018). “Bliss was it in that shirt to be alive”: Connecting Romanticism and New Romanticism through Dress. In: Rovira, J. (eds) Rock and Romanticism. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72688-5_3
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