The New Edge : Fashion: Technology meets style in the world of cyberpunk, where shock value and insolence are <i> de rigueur.</i> It’s a collision of futuristic materials and past trends.
Marcello Capalbo is a modern-day Spiderman. Garbed in a print of huge white spiders on black, he gyrates to techno-music awash in strobing lights that seem to send this army of arachnids creeping from the hem of his pants to the top of his cap.
He is center stage at a massive rave party in San Francisco called Psychedelic Apocalypse--billed as “a playground for the mind.” It is here that 35-year-old Capalbo, a self-described “computer nerd” who works for lawyers by day, transforms himself into a nighttime “cyberpunk,” a de facto term for a subculture of computer-centrics who are anti-authoritarian, self-directed and virtual-reality based.
“You know why I have to wear this, don’t you?” asks Capalbo, who wears a Van Dyke and four silver hoop earrings. “Because I’m creepy. “
Welcome to the world of cyberpunk, where shock value and insolence are de rigueur.
Cyberpunk fashion is an outgrowth of a quasi-intellectual movement that generates from Berkeley, San Francisco and the Silicon Valley, but borne by mail order and tourists returning from the Bay Area, it has infiltrated even such conservative regions as Orange County.
“I think it’s really great, the stuff I bought, at least,” said 19-year-old Tom Stanley of Irvine. He got the shirt with Day-Glo faces of Charles Manson. His mother, Toni Stanley, bought the T-shirt imprinted with an Albrecht Durer gold-on-black 16th-Century woodcut. “It’s the most intriguing looking T-shirt I’ve ever had,” she said.
Larry Smith, 23, of Huntington Beach said he wears his shirt to work now and then and it takes people a while to realize that the white pattern on the black fabric are sperm. “I do get comments here and there,” he said.
The milieu of cyberpunk is rooted in specific literature, films, television, music and magazines.
Cyber fashion is a raucous collision of futuristic materials and past fashion trends. Men in self-concocted silver spacesuits and women wearing thigh-high stockings imprinted with smiling sperm are not uncommon at cyberpunk parties.
Ameba, a San Francisco-based clothing manufacturer and store, is the creator of Capalbo’s skin-crawling attire. The 6-year-old company makes sporty clothes out of 20 different prints that shock, provoke and poke fun at societal phobias and mores. Its designs are worn by the musical group Psychic TV, Madonna and her dancers, and Todd Rundgren.
Ameba’s prints are inspired by cyberpunk’s icons and cheekiness: turn-of-the-century mystic Alistair Crowley (cyberpunk hero); Albrecht Durer’s 16th-Century wood carvings, and Charlie Manson (“the archetypal, scary, madman killer”).
Mark Metz, 29, co-owner of Ameba and a producer of a robot performance art group called Survival Research Labs, says the cyberpunk movement is “catching up with us, because we have been making these bizarre prints for a long time.
“We use the images for shock value, but not entirely. . . . Half our line (provokes) pretty wild reactions from people. But the other half is stuff that people love because it is nice to look at, like the Durer print and the op art. It’s eye candy.”
In the past, Metz has received cool receptions in Los Angeles and New York, but the fashion establishment is warming to Ameba’s alternative chic. Early next month, the line will be featured in a fashion show at the Palladium in New York. As for L.A.. . .
“We got doors slammed in our faces all over L.A. They all thought the stuff was too radical. But we’re coming back,” says Metz.
More often than not, the cyberpunk take on fashion is pure technology: Clothes and accessories built from computer and electronic parts.
An early pioneer is artist/designer Melissa Panages, better known as Famous Melissa and Company. The San Francisco-based designer began making clothing and jewelry out of discarded computer chips and electronic parts in the late ‘70s, when a friend found a vial of chips under a freeway pass. A virtual computer illiterate, Panages saw in the gold and fiberboard parts what she says was “the aesthetic side of technology,” the sheer design beauty of circuit boards, connector pins and encoder wheels.
It was then that she began, drilling, pounding, heating and linking the gold, steel and fiberboard components into among other things clothing, a sizable American flag, and an assortment of jewelry, none of which brings to mind the computers whence it came.
“I think as an artist,” says Panages, 35, “you have to take the viewer someplace they haven’t been before. I am taking million-dollar hardware that is being thrown out and redefining it into something aesthetic instead of technical. It opens the doors up for people to see what is inside the computer that sits on top of their desk.”
What Panages has created is a computer chip chain-mail that is a little like “Road Warrior” meets goddess Athena. Fashioned into kimonos, low-cut blouses, and curvaceous-fitting dresses, the black, gold and steel colored chips look medieval. The jewelry ranges from Chanel-like drop pearl earrings to charm necklaces that spell out “computer.”
“What I do is pure technology but it deviates from the norm by taking it out of context,” says Panages. “I rip computers apart and redefine them. It is the evolution of the sequin.”
And for the 21st Century, Panages and her electrical engineer husband are making jewelry with light emitting diodes activated by an electronic micro-switchboard affixed to the back. A prototype brooch looks like something from “The Jetsons.”
“Our slogan for the ‘90s is going to be ‘Diodes are a girl’s best friend,’ ” says Panages. (To the techo-illiterate diodes are small, red glass light sources used for on and off switches in radios and stereos.)
Another maker of techno-jewelry with an inherently cyberpunk twist is Allison Stern Design. Stern, who studied architectural design at UCLA, worked for architect Frank Gehry six years ago when she fused architecture with technology to create a design she calls, “archi-techno.”
“While I was working for Gehry, my stereo broke,” says Stern, 28. “So I was in an electronics store and was attuned to the aesthetic of raw industrial materials when I bought amp fuses so beautiful that I decided to make earrings from them. I started wearing them. People kept asking me where I got them, so I knew I had a market for them.”
Not a technological purist, Stern uses mixed metals with electronic and computer parts to create jewelry designs reminiscent of art deco. By layering brass, silver and brass patina in geometric shapes, she creates pins, boxes, earrings and necklaces that, in some cases, look like miniature three-dimensional structures.
Capacitors (storers of electricity), silicon wafers (used inside integrated circuit chips) and resisters (devices that restrict the flow of electricity) lose all semblance of their technological origin in Stern’s hands.
A brooch’s centerpiece is a geometric silicon wafer with tiny silver prongs extended from all four sides of the green, blue and purple iridescent center. Resistors accent the corners of the wafer, which is set in a silver diamond shape. The piece looks totally, utterly non-electronic.
“Our clothing and maybe the whole cyberpunk thing is saying you don’t have to just do bookkeeping with (your computer) or just wear Macy’s clothing,” says Metz.
“It’s almost the beginning of the next century. There’s no more Cold War. Nothing to fight about. Just peace and products. Technology can make it so we can all have everything we want.”
Steve Emmons contributed to this story.
