Punk gets pretty

PUNK rockers wanted anarchy. They wound up with a $ 565 T-shirt.

That’s the story told in a big new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York called

The exhibit, which opened this week, traces the unlikely merger of a movement known for primal music, drug-abuse and anti-establishment yells, with the glittering world of high fashion.

The collection in the elegant halls of the Met, just down from a gallery of ancient Greek sculptures, presents a veritable time capsule of the deliberately destructive, often self-destructive musical genre.

Shaky video clips of Sid Vicious and other rockers play on giant screens. The air fills with snippets of music and pearls of wisdom from punk’s gurus.

There’s even a life-size replica of the bathroom at the famed Manhattan nightclub CBGB, circa 1975. The room comes complete with the Ramones on the loudspeakers, “DEAD BOYS RULE” graffiti and cigarette butts on the floor – something you’ll never see in New York’s smoke-free clubs today.

The authentic smell and, of course, the people are absent: they wouldn’t fit in at the Met, even if they were allowed past the door.

isn’t about gritty, revolutionary punk. It’s about pretty punk, about how a nihilistic subculture died, then came back to life as a catwalk fashion show.

The exhibit argues that punks’ love of low-cost, impromptu fash- ion statements – like a rip in a T-shirt, or a toilet chain as jewelry – was in tune with the way modern designers work.

“In a bizarre twist of fate, their do-it-yourself ethos has become the future of ‘no-future’,” say notes accompanying the exhibit.

“While the punk ethos might seem at odds with the couture ethos of made- to- measure, both are defined by the same impulses of originality and individuality.”

The scene seems a far cry from the soundtrack to the exhibit where visitors are treated to the likes of the Sex Pistols band musing on the need to “shock people” and to be “obscene and pointless as possible.”

After half a dozen rooms, the Met’s exhibit ends much in the same way as punk itself ended: with a gift shop.