Steampunk guide

It was an easy imaginative leap from Dickens’ description of ‘Coketown’ to establishing that our style for the parade needed to be steampunk.

To realise this visually however required some research, especially since I had only recently encountered the whole genre when reading Mortal Engines at home with my eldest..

A little time spent on the internet and I soon discovered that the glossy images I googled do not tell the whole story….

So here’s a sort of steampunk manifesto, cobbled together with a lot of help from steampunk magazine.

Steampunk is the misappropriation of technology.

This is the idea that technology has become something which separates us from nature and creativity, so we need to reclaim it for a more radical and inventive purpose.

Steampunk is about steam, as in ‘steam engines’.

A rejection of the cold and distant world of cybernetics. In the steampunk world machines are real, they cough and choke, and shudder. They are borne out of sweat and blood and imagination.

Steampunk is an aesthetic technological movement.

Not just about style then. Technology as a means of discovering our artistry.

Steampunk is not pure nostalgia for Victoriana.

Because that would celebrate formal and constricting etiquette, imperialism and class division.

Steampunk is punk.

A movement of coarse creatives. Inventive and enchanted liberators with a vision of the future animated by the past.

Do you get it?