Glam built costumes. Punk built confrontation. Post-punk did the strangest thing of the three: it put on an overcoat and went to work.
By Florencia Macri, Creative Director — Come On
Researched and edited with AI assistance.
Every movement in music that matters arrives with a wardrobe, and most of them arrive with a costume.
Glam built personae you could see from the back row — platforms, sequins, character names, faces painted into masks. Punk built a wardrobe designed to provoke a reaction on a bus before it ever reached a stage. Both are theatre, and both work.
Post-punk did something harder to describe and much harder to sell.
It wore ordinary clothes.
Overcoats. Macs. Plain shirts. Trousers with a crease. Short hair, badly cut, of the kind you get from somebody’s mother. The clothing of somebody on the way to a job in a grey northern English city in 1979 — because in several cases that is exactly what it was.
And it became one of the most influential wardrobes of the last fifty years.
The man had a day job
The detail that explains the whole aesthetic is unglamorous and very well documented: Ian Curtis worked at an employment exchange in Macclesfield, helping people find work, and he kept the job while the band was recording.
He did not dress like a frontman who had adopted a working man’s look as a concept. He dressed like a man who had to be at an office, because he had to be at an office.
That is the inversion at the centre of post-punk style, and it is why it has aged better than almost anything around it. There was no costume to take off at the end of the night. There was no separation between the person on stage and the person in the queue. The clothes did not signal look at me. They signalled there is nothing here to look at, which — worn by somebody performing the way he performed — became far more unsettling than any amount of glitter.
Refusing to dress up is a decision about power. It says the work does not need help.
The coat was already borrowed
Look closely at the coats in those photographs and they are not fashion garments. They are inherited ones.
The trench coat entered civilian life as military kit. Waterproofed gabardine outerwear was developed by British firms — Burberry and Aquascutum among them — and the trench took its name and its details from officers in the First World War: the storm flap, the belt, the D-rings, the shoulder straps. It came home with the men who survived and became a coat you could buy in a shop.
The mackintosh goes back further, to a Glasgow chemist, Charles Macintosh, who patented a method of bonding rubber between layers of fabric in 1823. It exists because of rain — specifically, the rain that falls on that part of the world for most of the year.
So the post-punk overcoat is a military garment and an industrial invention, bought second-hand, worn in a city built by cotton mills, by people with no money and enormous discrimination.
That is the same operation as the camouflage jacket and the same operation as the biker jacket. A garment engineered for one purpose, acquired cheaply long after that purpose expired, and made to say something its designers never considered. It happens over and over in this history, and it is never an accident. It is what people do when they cannot buy meaning and have to make it.
What happens when you take the costume away
There is a technical reason this wardrobe works, and it is worth naming because it is the reason we can still build clothes from it.
When a garment carries no theatrical information, everything else becomes visible: posture, proportion, the cut of a shoulder, the length of a sleeve, the way somebody stands. A sequinned jacket does the work for you. A grey overcoat does not. It has nowhere to hide, which means it has to be right.
Ordinary clothing, made properly, is harder than spectacle. It is also the only kind that survives leaving the venue.
And there is a second effect, which is about context. Put an austere coat on somebody in a landscape of colour and volume and it does not read as neutral — it reads as refusal. The clothes did not change. The room did. This is exactly how the veterans’ fatigues worked, and how the borrowed jacket worked, and it is the most reliable trick in the entire history of subcultural dress: do not invent a new garment, change the sentence around an old one.
Later, when the survivors became New Order and the city moved into the club, the wardrobe did not become more theatrical. It became more anonymous — sportswear, anoraks, dressing like the crowd rather than above it. The refusal deepened. It did not reverse.
Which brings us to the capsule
This is the argument behind everything we release under the Joy Division and New Order licences, and specifically behind the two coats.
The Love Trench is not costume piece and is not built as souvenir of a band. It is outerwear, drawn from the vocabulary above: military-derived, cut for a real body, made to be worn in bad weather for years. The Joy T-Shirt carry the same logic downward — the ordinary garment, made properly, carrying a reference for those who can read it and reading as plain to everybody else.
Everything here is officially licensed, produced in small runs, and made without gender or age in mind. If you want the reference framed and hung, we understand — but this was always clothing for going outside in.
Dressed for the weather. Not for the stage.
The capsule
Made without gender or age in mind. Produced in small runs. Officially licensed.
- Joy Jacket — outerwear from the post-punk vocabulary, cut for a body standing up.
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Love Trench — the military-derived coat, kept long, kept serious.
- Joy Division T-Shirt — unisex regular cut.
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Joy T-Shirt (Pink) — a pop, Y2K-leaning adaptation.
Officially Licensed Collections · Join the list — early access to every drop.
Frequently asked
What did post-punk musicians actually wear?
Largely ordinary clothing: overcoats, macs, plain shirts, trousers, short hair. It was a deliberate reversal of glam’s costume and of punk’s confrontational dress, and in several cases it reflected the fact that the people wearing it had day jobs. Ian Curtis worked at an employment exchange in Macclesfield while the band was recording.
Where does the trench coat come from?
From military outerwear. Waterproofed gabardine coats were developed by British firms including Burberry and Aquascutum, and the trench took its name and its details — storm flap, belt, D-rings, shoulder straps — from British officers in the First World War before passing into civilian wardrobes.
What is a mackintosh?
A waterproof coat made from fabric bonded with rubber, from the method patented by the Glasgow chemist Charles Macintosh in 1823. It is one of the founding garments of British outerwear and a permanent fixture of the northern English wardrobe, for obvious meteorological reasons.
How do you dress post-punk without it looking like a costume?
By keeping it ordinary. The wardrobe is built on plain, well-cut, mostly dark garments that carry no theatrical information, which is what makes it legible. One reference, worn without explanation, does more than a full outfit of them.
Is Come On’s band clothing officially licensed?
Yes. Every garment released in an officially licensed collection is produced under authorisation from the rights holder — Warner for Joy Division and New Order, Hi Five Entertainment for Bauhaus, and separate agreements for the rest. Licensing is slower and more expensive than not doing it, and it is the only honest way to use something you love.
Come On is an independent clothing brand rooted in counterculture, inspired by punk and surrealism. Made in small runs.
We take cues from punk, post-punk, new wave, indie music, cult cinema, pop culture, and our own fantasies, reaching into the emerging glitch rock and techno artists. A little nostalgic, a little offbeat, always unapologetic.
We keep it real, surreal, and a little chaotic. Just the way we like it.
NO RULES TO GET DRESSED. FOLLOW CULTURE, NOT THE ALGORITHM.