Stevie Stewart

Bodymap and the Second Wave of Punk Design

Bodymap arrived in the 1980s, formed by David Holah and Stevie Stewart, and is described as one of the brightest design teams to emerge in that decade. The timing defines the work. Punk's first explosion in the late 1970s had been raw and improvisational; by the early 1980s a second generation of British designers was turning punk's attitude into designed clothing — keeping the defiance, adding technique. Holah and Stewart worked in the spirit of punk, turning the establishment upside down with wild and unconventional clothes. Turning the establishment upside down is a programme, not just a mood: it means taking the rules of respectable dress — what covers what, what emphasises what, what men and women respectively wear — and deliberately inverting them, so that the garment itself argues with convention.

Stretch Cloth and Misplaced Emphasis

Their technical means was stretch fabric. Stretch cloth clings, so it reveals the body's shape; but Bodymap used that clinging material in a subversive way, placing pieces of fabric in unexpected places so that the emphasis was transferred from one place to another. A panel where no panel should be redraws the map the label was named for: the eye is sent to a hip, a thigh, an apron-like flap, instead of following the body's usual geography of emphasis. Dress historian Kevin Almond's analysis gives the sharpest example. The team borrowed the skirt-like apron from a pair of Seditionaries bondage trousers — Seditionaries being the punk clothing line associated with the Sex Pistols era — in an attempt to both hide and draw attention to a man's crotch. Hide and draw attention at once is a paradox, and it is the whole Bodymap method in one gesture: the apron covers, but its very presence announces what it covers, so concealment becomes emphasis.

That paradox explains why Bodymap is remembered by historians rather than only by the people who wore it. Plenty of 1980s club clothing was wild; Bodymap's wildness had an intellectual structure that a dress historian could analyse — quotation from punk's own archive, redistribution of emphasis, garments as arguments about the body. A design team whose work invites that kind of commentary has done something rarer than shock: it has made clothes that repay thinking about. The brightness attributed to the team is exactly that combination — punk energy with a designer's control over where the eye goes and what the cloth says.

Bodymap also belongs to the history of stretch fabric in fashion. Before the 1980s, stretch belonged to sportswear, underwear and dance wear — functional clothing kept out of sight of high fashion. Designers like Holah and Stewart moved stretch cloth to the centre of designed clothing, where its cling could be used expressively rather than merely practically. Once stretch was accepted as a fashion fabric, it never left: leggings, body-conscious dresses and engineered knitwear all descend from the decade in which teams like Bodymap proved that a garment could be both skin-tight and intellectually ambitious. Their wild clothes were therefore also a materials argument, and it is the argument, as much as the outfits, that kept their name in the histories.