Hardcore Style: 2003 - by Patrick Klacza
Welcome to Hardcore Style, a new column in which I describe and analyze style trends in hardcore punk. The first installment shines a light on 2003, a time of transition and wild expression in hardcore.
I attended my first local punk shows in 2001 and my first hardcore shows in 2002. I was 15 years old. I dressed like Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus. I worshipped brands like Volcom, Hurley, and Quiksilver. My clothing never prevented me from moving across subcultures; I ran with jocks, punks, band kids, and norms.
I’ve always been keenly aware of how people dress. Needless to say, my first hardcore shows introduced me to a whole new way of dressing. In retrospect, it wasn’t that different from what I was used to, but it felt like it at the time. I’m going to describe what I saw. This is Hardcore Style.
To properly acquaint yourself with this moment in hxc history, consider listening to this playlist my friend, Diego, made.
Let’s begin with the most drastic difference between hardcore and mainstream style: the silhouettes. In 2003, pants and tops were still cartoonishly baggy. It was a hungover era, the tail end of the ‘90s. You’d step on your jeans until they got so dirty and frayed you needed a new pair. That’s just how it was, and I never considered that things might change.
Hardcore kids wore slim silhouettes way before that style reached the mainstream. Bootcut jeans were a big deal. They quickly became unpopular–in menswear, anyway–but man did they have a moment. I wondered where one might buy a pair of bootcut jeans, and the answer was always Express. Diesel. Lucky. Higher-end mall brands, in other words, brands that seemed cutting edge, exclusive, and above all else, expensive. I wanted a pair of bootcut jeans, goddamnit! Old Navy, The Gap, and other mainstream brands eventually caught up with this trend, and bootcut jeans became emblematic of “metrosexual” style, a pejorative term that seems quaint now but wasn’t at the time.
Eventually, bootcut jeans gave way to skinny jeans, and men from all walks of life started wearing slim, tailored, and more thoughtful silhouettes. Hardcore kids were ahead of the curve.
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In the early 2000s, hardcore kids began to ditch their XXL t-shirts. Many guys squeezed into tees that hit right above the belt and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed. What a time! T-shirts were almost always black with white print. Camo enjoyed a moment. And I remember when bands started selling black shirts with pink print. Pink! Imagine that.
At the risk of stating the obvious, belts of all sorts came into vogue during the early 2000s. (I have no idea whether punks wore belts prior to 2003.) Black belts with silver spikes, white belts with white spikes, big chunky leather belts with brass buckles, webbed belts with the Independent logo; all was fair game. I loved my spiked belt. It cut tiny holes in my shirts.
Though we may blush in collective embarrassment for actually wearing white belts during high school, I’m telling you, they were everywhere. Not just in “the scene,” not just on “emo kids.” Hardcore kids wore them, too, and so did cheerleaders and future engineering majors and clarinetists. You get the picture.
This is the Puma Roma. It’s a great shoe. It was also hardcore’s shoe of choice in 2003. The Saucony Jazz, Nike Cortez, and Adidas Samba got pretty popular, too, but it’s Romas I think of when I think of that era in hardcore. I never owned a pair.
I rocked skate shoes until 2005, at which point I finally transitioned to Campuses, Sambas, Wallabees, and Vans. But that’s a story for another time. The point is, hardcore kids wore sleeker, lower profile kicks well before they caught on with the general public. Laugh all you want at the teens moshing to Carry On and Poison the Well; by 2005, norms were dressing like them. Perhaps you were, too.
Conclusion
In the early 2000s, hardcore’s many subgenres frequently crossed paths with emo, screamo, grindcore, death metal, math rock, and so on. You’d go see a youth crew band and get treated to metalcore. Or you’d go to see a pop-punk band and get treated to four guys trying to sound like The Locust. This cross-pollination certainly affected the ways in which people dressed.
The slimming of silhouettes and expressive statement pieces (spiked belts, shotgun hair, pink screen printing, etc.) created a space for people to experiment with their style and dress in ways truer to themselves. Gender norms were subverted. Guys got to mess with color and proportion. I like to believe that this was the case, anyway. In the years that followed, however, hardcore style shifted again. It shifts constantly. Trends come and go, and hardcore at large reacted in opposition to what cropped up in the early ‘00s. Gone were the tight shirts and pants, the Castro hats and zip-up hoodies. In the next installment of Hardcore Style, I’ll talk cargo shorts, all over print, New Era hats, and Vans. In the next installment of Hardcore Style, I’ll talk 2007.
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