TOM BINNS:

WHERE THE BAD 80’S HAS A NICHE

(This piece first appeared in the New York Times in 2009).

YEARS ago, my clique habituated a Lower East Side restaurant called Hat (translated from El Sombrero for N.Y.C. natives). The enchiladas were O.K.; the main attractions were the cheap margaritas, the salsa jukebox and the nervy, unreasonable mood of the place, largely delivered by the indifferent goth waitress who always wore an enormous black turban. Hat was an oasis of counterculture that soothed feelings of general alienation and dismay by ramping them up a bit, into a pleasingly marginal sense of being beyond the strangling grip of the mainstream.

A subtle cultural revisionism gets enacted by look-makers every time they dust off an era and trot it back out into ready-to-wear. They resurrect the shapes of a decade, but leave out all the guts, glory and street cred. Boho chic brought back the hair, gauzy tunics and chewed denim of the 1960s without all the messy drugs and dissent from which they sprang.

Fashion is currently obsessed with a redux of the New Wave ’80s, which, for the most part, has also been sanitized for your reconsumption. The sleazy, over-stimulated parts were left on the old side of the fin de siècle, and only the off-shoulder Tiffany tops and “Flashdance” leggings were welcomed back to the future. But leaving all the latex, profanity and gender-bending out of the ’80s is the equivalent of plucking only the flowers from the ’60s (daisies and bell-bottoms) and turning off the power by airbrushing out Vietnam. The cultural context that built the mood of the style gets glossed in translation.

In his first boutique, on tree-lined Perry Street in the West Village, the jewelry designer Tom Binns proves he has no problem dredging all the desirable filth out of the ’80s and adding a bit of his own.

The little storefront is painted bright white, an atmosphere redolent of the bordello in “Sid and Nancy.” In the window, a black velvet torso wears a Mr. T tangle of blood-red metallic pearls and is surrounded by stuffed blackbirds.

The first display case has necklaces with long fingers of black crystals strung together like the spokes of kalimbas into New Wave Egyptian deco shapes haute-trash elegance, replete with spray-painted DayGlo orange crystals at the ends, like acrylic nail tips. Fistfuls of Japanese black Pearls in Peril are twisted together with little black chains and secured by multiple safety pins.

The Sex Pistols loom large as an explicit inspiration. Atop Swarovski crystal necklaces recalling the diamond collars worn at beauty pageants and late-’60s film premieres, Mr. Binns has hand-painted the words “Punk,” “Pretty Vacant,” “Rocker” and the anarchy “A.”

The manager, a heavily eyelinered goth princess in a black hoodie, supplied her own flavor of ’80s nostalgia, in that she seemed refreshingly uninterested in promoting the store’s products.

“So,” I asked, “if I was an alien from another planet, what should I know about Tom Binns?”

“Well, there’s been tons of editorial written about him.”

She said this rather finally, implying that I should go home and read this literature. (I did, and found that his pieces have been worn by Michelle Obama, which I found sort of worth mentioning.)

“What’s he like as a person?” I asked.

“Um ...” (Eye roll.) “He’s really different. Like, the way his head works? He loves Morrissey and everything.”

“ANNIE and FRIEND,” oil on canvas, Cintra Wilson 2021

She told an amusing anecdote about how Mr. Binns, who had been trained as a fine artist and welder, ended up in a jewelry class at art school because he noted on the first day that it was “full of birds” and he would be the only male.

I drifted over to the case containing the Tough Chic line: Harley Davidson-type silver jewelry of the variety that seems to grow organically out of the knuckles of Keith Richards cuff bracelets abloom with the usual skulls, wings and four-letter words, but distinguished by cleaner lines and sharper proportions. (The skulls have better bone structure.)

Mr. Binns professes his romantic side with big silver heart pendants impaled by safety pins and pounded through with bent nails, hung on long strings of tiny pearls ($325).

I dubbed a certain collection of mixed metaphors “When Burt Bacharach Was a Skinhead”: punk jewelry blinged up for the red carpet. Studded leather cuffs with heavy sterling fasteners had big, incongruous emerald-cut crystals stuck on them, which works surprisingly well. Sterling slave collars and spiked bangles were sleek enough to be worn with a taffeta banquet gown. I liked a set of Swarovski wrist corsages on stretchy rhodium watchbands and a silver bullet necklace, which would be ideal protection against culture’s recent vampire epidemic.

Best of show, IMHO, were a white leather shoulder bag with hundreds of spiky gold studs (at $1,850, a fine investment piece for those who can still invest) and the Future Fantastic collection, inspired, I was told, by “aliens in Africa.” Gold- and silver-plated, semicircular breastplates had illustrations of gem necklaces engraved into the metal. Barbarian sterling cuffs were etched with black snowflakes. Huge, flat gold and silver half-circle earrings like Cubist ax blades (at the nice price of $175) would look like a zillion dollars on Alek Wek or Grace Jones.

Two key pieces were bouquets of mismatched vintage rhinestone brooches welded into armored neck plates, like the collars worn by Katharine Hepburn’s Eleanor of Aquitaine.

“May I try that on?” I asked the manager, who became visibly uncomfortable.

“Is it not for sale?” I asked.

“Well ... it’s technically sort of for sale,” she stammered. “It’s ... potentially for sale. It’s up for debate as to whether it’s for sale or not.”

O.K.?

“Here’s the thing: It’s, like, $30,000, so if you feel comfortable with that responsibility, that’s fine.”

I was not comfortable with that responsibility and quickly backed away from the piece, as I might a wobbling Ming dynasty vase or a sneezing infant. I fled seconds later.

Tom Binns is good absurdist fun; a macho, roguish approach to jewelry, with a nice appreciation for the birds (both female and stuffed) and a deliberate resurrection of ’80s punk-rock misanthropy, which, like a Hat margarita, can be just the right toxin to cure certain ailments cultural, personal or both.

TOM BINNS

WOULDA BINNS A former metal artist, Tom Binns has converted his fine art talent into jewelry that is unapologetically rock ’n’ roll, with all the Billy Idol sneers and nasty attitude that implies.

COULDA BINNS There is plenty of cool, colorful stuff at decent prices, but if you must spend more, many silver items can be ordered in gold.

RUMMAGE BINNS A necklace of industrial screws, combined with multifaceted crystal globes. A rhinestone bracelet with a radiant aureole of silver zippers. A silver fork-head with pearls dangling from its tines ... the recycling Binns is divine.

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