Society is founded upon Cloth.Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus
The inventory is short and everybody can recite it. A leather jacket, black. Studs. Spikes on the forearms. A bullet belt, sometimes two, crossed. An inverted cross or a pentagram on a chain. Boots. Hair long and left alone. Nothing with a colour in it and nothing with a manufacturer's name showing.
The interesting part is that almost none of it was invented by the people wearing it, and the one item that was invented arrived from Brazil. Everything else in the visual language was assembled out of pieces already lying around, and the assembly is the work. Read as a list of objects the wardrobe is derivative. Read as a set of decisions about what to keep and what to leave out, it is the most argumentative thing anybody in the genre put on their body.
Where each piece actually came from
Take the jacket first. Black leather has been the uniform of every disreputable music since the fifties, and by 1982 it was so thoroughly the property of biker culture, punk and the new wave of British heavy metal at once that it carried no specific meaning at all. Studs and spikes came in through British punk in the late seventies and early eighties, hammered into denim and leather by hand, and they came into punk from motorcycle wear before that. Bullet belts are military surplus. Motörhead and Venom put them on stage in the late seventies and early eighties, and the Norwegian bands who wore them in 1992 were copying a photograph of somebody who had copied an army store.
The inverted cross and the pentagram arrive the same way, out of the first wave, out of Venom and Mercyful Fate, out of a decade of horror film advertising before either. Long unstyled hair has been standard in metal since about 1970 and signifies nothing more precise than a refusal to go to a barber for the reasons other people go.
| Item | Where it came from | Arrived in black metal |
|---|---|---|
| Black leather jacket | Motorcycle wear, then rock and roll and punk | Inherited whole from the first wave |
| Studs and spikes on a jacket | British punk of the late seventies, hand set | Inherited, then exaggerated |
| Bullet belt | Military surplus, via Motorhead and Venom | Inherited whole |
| Inverted cross, pentagram | Horror film advertising, then Venom and Mercyful Fate | Inherited, used with less irony |
| Long spiked forearm gauntlet | Nothing in punk or biker wear has it | Fixed by the Sarcofago sleeve of July 1987 |
The one new item, and where it came from
The single component with no clear ancestor is the forearm gauntlet with long spikes standing off it, and it arrives fully formed on the back of Sarcófago's I.N.R.I., released through Cogumelo in July 1987. Nothing in punk has it. Nothing in motorcycle wear has it, for the obvious reason that it would be lethal in a fall. Its ancestors are pictorial rather than sartorial, somewhere in the medieval and fantasy imagery that heavy metal had been mining since the seventies, and the band that put it on a record sleeve was working four thousand miles from the scene that made it standard.
What the gauntlet does is the whole point. A four inch spike on the forearm makes a guitar harder to hold, a bass harder to reach across and a drum kit close to unplayable. It is equipment that degrades your ability to do the job you are dressed for. Nobody put those on to be comfortable, and the cost is not a side effect of the statement, it is the statement.
The argument was with death metal, not with the public
Through exactly the same years the neighbouring genre was moving in the opposite direction. Death metal in the early nineties drifted towards ordinary clothes, shorts and trainers and somebody else's band shirt, the dress of people who had come to play rather than to appear, and that drift was itself an argument about craft and seriousness. The two scenes were not addressing the general public. They were addressing each other.
Seen that way the exaggeration stops looking like adolescence and starts looking like a reply. One side said the music is the point and the clothes are irrelevant. The other side said the clothes are a position and refusing to take one is also a position. Both were right about the other and neither budged, and thirty years later you can still identify which argument a band came out of by looking at a photograph with the sound off.
Nobody could buy any of it, which was the safeguard
The wardrobe held its meaning for as long as it could not be purchased. Studs went into leather with a hammer and a punch. Bracers were cut from offcuts. Bullet belts came from surplus counters. There was no supplier, no size chart, no catalogue, and the hours spent making the thing were the entry fee, exactly as the hours spent finding the records were.
That protection lasted until roughly 2015, and then it went in eighteen months.
Sold back, twice, inside eighteen months
In March 2015 H&M put a heavy metal line into its shops carrying logos for bands called Mortus, Motmros, Blast, Grey, YVAEH, Lany and Crepuscular, none of which existed. A collective calling itself Strong Scene Productions, with Henri Sorvali of Moonsorrow and Finntroll among those claiming responsibility, then invented the bands the shirts were advertising: biographies, press photographs, images of demo tapes, recorded songs, and in several cases deliberately repellent politics attached to the fictional members. The world's music press ran it as fact for about a day.
Metal culture is more than just cool looking logos on fashionable clothes.
Henri Sorvali of Moonsorrow, quoted in Vice, March 2015
Then came the other direction. Justin Bieber's Purpose tour merchandise of 2016 was built around a logo by Mark Riddick, a graphic artist whose previous clients include Autopsy and Dying Fetus, developed with the designer Jerry Lorenzo, and it went on sale through Urban Outfitters from 5 August 2016 in London, New York and Los Angeles at between twenty five and sixty nine pounds a piece. Not a parody, not an accident, and not badly done either: the lettering is competent underground metal lettering, drawn by a man who does it for a living.
Corpse paint cannot be sold, because nobody buys a face. A logo needs a band behind it, which is why the shop had to invent some. The clothes needed nothing at all.
Why the clothes went first
Rank the four components of the code by how easily each detaches from the thing it signifies and the answer explains everything that happened after 2015. A painted face cannot be retailed. An unreadable logo cannot be sold without a band to attach it to, which is precisely the hole H&M fell into. A borrowed nineteenth century painting has no resale value once it is off the sleeve. The wardrobe has no such problem. It is objects, the objects have sizes, and objects with sizes have a market.
So the clothes were always the softest part of the position, and it is worth noticing that the bands who held everything else hardest were the quickest to stop bothering with them. What could not be detached and sold at all was the writing, because a lyric has no resale value and no size chart, and that is where the genre kept the part of itself it was least willing to trade. Those are set out in black Metal Lyrical Themes.
