Fashion Terms — the Apparel Search fashion terminology directory
Fans of dark cabaret and Gypsy punk often imitate the costumes of 1920s music hall, sideshow and burlesque performers. Women such as Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls sometimes combine fetish wear such as garter belts, fishnet stockings or corsets with dress clothing such as a top hat and tailcoat, or with traditional Romani dress such as shawls, hoop earrings and colorful skirts. Men often wear vintage bowler hats, battered fedoras and tweed cloth vests combined with street punk staples such as drainpipe trousers and heavy boots, and some artists — Martyn Jacques of the Tiger Lillies among them — wear white makeup inspired by French mime artists and the Emcee from Cabaret.
Fans of dark cabaret and Gypsy punk often imitate the costumes of 1920s music hall, sideshow or burlesque performers.
Women such as Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls sometimes combine fetish wear such as garter belts, fishnet stockings or corsets with dress clothing, such as a top hat and tailcoat, or traditional Romani dress such as shawls, hoop earrings or colorful skirts.
Men often wear vintage Bowler hats, battered fedoras, tweed cloth vests with more typical street punk fashions such as drainpipe trousers or heavy boots.
Some artists, including Martyn Jacques of the Tiger Lillies, wear white makeup inspired by French mime artists and the Emcee from Cabaret.
Learn more about various punk fashion styles from the main page of this section.
Most punk styles build their look from everyday clothing pushed to an extreme. Dark cabaret starts somewhere else: from the stage. A top hat and tailcoat, a corset worn as outerwear, fishnet stockings and garter belts are performance garments with a century of music hall and burlesque behind them, and wearing them offstage keeps a theatrical charge in ordinary dress. The Romani elements — shawls, hoop earrings, colorful skirts — belong to the Gypsy punk side of the style and to the folk instrumentation and traveling imagery of its music.
The punk half of the blend shows in how the costume is worn: battered rather than pristine, vintage rather than new, and grounded by drainpipe trousers and heavy boots straight from street punk. The bowler hat and tweed vest are thrifted and worn hard, not preserved. That tension — Weimar-era elegance handled with punk roughness — is the style's signature, and the white mime makeup completes it by turning the face itself into part of the performance.
The 1920s — specifically the costumes of music hall, sideshow and burlesque performers, mixed with dress clothing, fetish wear and Romani dress.
Vintage bowler hats, battered fedoras and tweed cloth vests, combined with more typical street punk clothing such as drainpipe trousers or heavy boots.
From French mime artists and from the Emcee character in Cabaret. Martyn Jacques of the Tiger Lillies is a noted wearer.