In 1984, photographer Andrea Modica hopped on the subway to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn to visit her old school. It was a Catholic school for girls, mostly filled with Italian American students who lived in the area. She had attended it a decade earlier, between 1974 and 1978, and had scheduled a visit with her former art teacher Len Bellinger, but when she walked through the gates, the students around her really grabbed her attention.
While the party-led grooves of Saturday Night Fever and the amped up guitars of rock & roll had dominated pop culture during her years at the school, a new form of music – led by hard-edged distortion and an anti-establishment attitude – had begun to emerge, and with that, new looks for the schoolgirls. “I attended the school [between] 1974 and 1978 and took the photographs in 1984,” Modica says. “The change that interested me was how music was influencing the way girls expressed themselves. We had been interested in rock and disco, with a big schism – my group of friends in the late ‘70s was listening to rock – by 1984, punk was prevalent.”
That change was found all over their clothing, hairstyles and makeup, and despite being under the directive of a school uniform policy, they found ways to express rebellious styles of the moment. “The rules at the school had to do with good scholarship, critical and ethical thinking and adhering to the uniform,” she says. “It’s the latter that interested me the most – in the ‘70s we were ‘bending’ the rules with the uniform, and when I returned a few years later in my ‘civilian’ clothes, I was delighted to see how the girls were still finding ways to express their identity within the confines of those rules. Music and fashion continued to be intermingled.”
