Rick Owens Spring/Summer 2010

The influence of industrial culture and its rivethead fans is all over fashion’s ends and margins right now. Yup, we’re officially in a man-machine-with-boots-on kinda moment.Check out Paris-based American designer Rick Owens’ collection above – it’s all military shorts, backpacks, boots and skinheads. Meanwhile, Londoner Gareth Pugh’s menswear debut meant loads of black, pins and gunmetal, while artist Matthew Stone soundtracked the show with the ultimate industrial band Nitzer Ebb’s “Join in the Chant”. Go on, don’t be shy, join in: “Lies! Gold! Guns! Fire! Books! Burn! Judge!

Industrial style worships strength, militant imagery and intense style and music – something that Anglo-Japanese label Komakino (who I go on about all the time) are all over at the moment. They are using loads of black leather and even parading brown shirts on show for autumn. Twenty-five-year-old Russian designer Gosha Rubchinsky’s stuff is all harsh spikes and reworked uniforms.

Industrial fashion has roots in the late eighties and early nineties, but the music goes back to the seventies, when anti-stylists Throbbing Gristle’s Industrial Records gave the whole thing a name. Pop historian John Savage, author of Re/Search Magazine’s Industrial Culture Handbook, identified industrial music’s characteristics as: “shock tactics, organisational autonomy, extra-musical elements, and use of synthesizers and anti-music”. Germany’s industrial top dog musicians Einstürzende Neubauten used jackhammers and bones on stage, even drilling a hole right through the floor during a performance at London’s ICA, inciting a riot in the process.

Still from Nitzer Ebb's "Join in the Chant"

Industrial fans only developed their look after bands like Test Dept jumped on the super strong graphics of Russian futurism. Laibach were a controversial Yugoslavian group who pissed everyone off by using Stalinist, Nazi, and futurist iconography and symbolism. Then Nitzer Ebb had their Produkt – which meant all adverts, fliers, record sleeves, letterheads, T-shirts, etc. – shared a collective identity that was heavily influenced by Russian constructivist art, Italian futurism and totalitarian imagery. Basically, it was meant to look like a revolution was taking place (and not necessarily a good one).

Fashion loves a bit of totalitarianism, partly because it’s an industry based on making everybody think the same thing, but more because communism and fascism were excellent at graphics and have a bigger-is-better attitude. Industrial, unlike punk, is all about hard work and struggle, not hedonism and nihilism. Punk’s ‘no future’ is replaced in industrial culture by a call to fight for the future.

The flight jackets and Mohicans worn by electro industrial acts like Belgium’s Front 242 and Canada’s Frontline Assembly at the peak of their powers illustrate the rivethead style perfectly.

Industrial finally became a mass phenomenon in the early nineties with the multi-platinum selling success of Nine Inch Nails and Ministry. In 1993, Re-Constriction Records released a compilation, Rivet Head Culture and Chemlab called an album track “Rivethead”. Oh, by the way, a Rivethead used to be an Americanism for a factory worker. Makes sense, right?

How to get the rivethead look:

Grinders

Combat boots, tanker boots, jungle boots, knee-high military dress boots, steel-toe boots like Dr. Martens and Transmuters, Gripfasts or Grinders. Anything as timeless as the combat trouser eventually comes back no matter how wrong it is. Military style’s being revived, as is battle dress uniform in black or urban camouflage. Your trousers are probably already tucked into your boots, and your cuffs rolled at the bottom, but come summer, and you’ll need cut-off shorts too. On top, any heavily graphic, aesthetically dark tees will do, as well as vests, flight-jackets, leather jackets and bulletproof tops.

Hair gets dyed black or bleached, shaved bald or undercut, shaved and harshly combed into a gelled side-parting or styled into a Mohawk. If the people packing out the bars you’ve been going to don’t already look like this, you either don’t live in Europe or you need to upgrade to a better bar.

Back in the day, accessories included masks (like respirators or gasmasks), helmets and welding or military-style goggles. Leather gloves and military and work-wear style stuff like nails, screws, cords, cables, cogs, chains, gears and even computer parts were also big.

Start thinking Tank Girl, boys and girls.