The Toilet at CBGB and Other Emblems of Punk's Enduring Legacy

Restroom, CBGB, 2006 (Getty)

Front entry, our house, 2024

Ever since I saw my first mohawked, leather-jacketed Punk at the King’s Road in London in ’83, I have been mesmerized by this music and its culture—the fashion, the snarl, the anti-establishmentarianism. We have an armchair in our front entry area with the artwork from the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” album – which one magazine deemed “the greatest record cover of all time.” I admire Punk style and bought Joe a pair of what can only be described as pierced, Punk Rock boots for Christmas last year. 

Joe's Balenciaga Boots

Over the years, I have admired and absorbed Punk and its artifacts as decoration and deployed its iconography to try to co-opt something playful and subversive that I wanted to be a part of, even if only through consumerism.

Today, Classic Punk sounds dated—a musical era, along with Surfer Rock and Punk’s antithesis, Disco. Most punk is so old that it is the stuff of museums, including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"Chaos to Couture" at the Met

Joe and I saw an exhibition of Punk's impact on high fashion—Chaos to Couture—at the Met in 2013. Balenciaga, McQueen, and Gaultier are but three designers who drafted elements of '70s punk pioneers Vivienne Westwood's and Malcolm McLaren’s vision.

The best thing about the Met Punk exhibition was a recreation of what Talking Heads frontman David Byrne called the “legendarily nasty” toilets at CBGB. As someone who once used that restroom at 315 Bowery, I can say the Met’s curators did a good, albeit sanitized, job. It is fun thinking about the juxtaposition of the CBGB stalls and urinals with the American Wing Period Rooms down the hall at the Met.

Leather jackets on exhibit
in Vegas

In Las Vegas, Punk Rock relics comprise a new, acclaimed museum all its own—complete with a wedding chapel, bar, and tattoo parlor. I found Vegas’s Punk Rock Museum pleasingly well done, and its collection evocative.

Those remnants—the t-shirts, leather jackets, guitars, posters—tell the story of a youth movement that for about ten years, in New York and London, brought old squares to their knees and brought forth all-new manners of self-expression.

Punk still resonates across design, fashion, and current popular culture, which speaks to its enduring power.