I am 27 now, and my boyfriend, who is 30, has orange hair. Actually, last weekend my first boyfriend and my current boyfriend hooked up to take me to IKEA. My first boyfriend now has short brown hair in a crew cut but he still wears a uniform that (mostly) wouldn't be out of place in working boy culture in '70s England -- creepers, black leather boots, black leather jeans, pants and jackets by Dickies and Carharrt and Ben Davis, plaid shirts with sleeves rolled up to show his tattoos. (At his wedding last fall, he wore a vintage tuxedo he altered himself; his wife wore a pink corset and a denim skirt with a train and magenta hair.)

My first boyfriend is something of a poster boy for the blue-collar working class: He is the son of a construction worker, was born and raised in Boise, dropped out of college after one semester and works as a roofer. My current boyfriend is more black turtleneck: He is the son of a psychoanalyst and a novelist, was born in Manhattan, went to private schools, graduated from Yale and works as a novelist.

In the 13 years between my first boyfriend and my current boyfriend, I dated boys with shaved heads, boys in bands, film student boys, college boys, high school dropout boys, Idaho boys, East Coast boys, private school boys and public school boys. They all were, more or less, tall and thin, and more left than center in their politics.

And they all, more or less, had an aesthetic rooted in a movement that started when all of us were too young to buy our own CDs, a movement, in fact, that predates CDs altogether. The point here is not that I date according to type. I do but, like most things, my type of boy has changed from the time I was a teenager in Idaho to a private college student in Connecticut to a Web site editor in San Francisco.

The point is that it's deeply strange that I -- and women 15 years older than me and 10 years younger than me -- could potentially spend 25 years (and counting) of our dating lives with boys with hair spiked with gel (or egg whites, Elmer's glue, toothpaste) and dyed with Manic Panic (or Kool-Aid or Clorox); dressed in spiked leather belts (and jackets and jeans and boots and collars), with pierced ears (eyes, lips, navels, tongues and dicks).

In fact, the biggest sartorial difference between the boys I knew at 14 and the one I knew at 25 is that, by 25, they weren't so punk rawk that they had to use the egg whites and the Kool-Aid, and were willing to stop stealing their grooming aids from the drugstore and their mothers' kitchens and instead pay a top San Francisco stylist $100 to get their hair the exact shade of orangey-red that their well-formed image of themselves demands.

Punk is, for lack of a better word, a fashion classic. Its staying power gives it a great deal in common with its opposite -- khakis and Oxford cloth shirts and the little black dress and the navy blue day suit. If punk were a woman, you would say it has good bones. And, like beauty itself, this fashion fact of life has been both a blessing and a curse. Although the genesis of punk has incredibly specific historical and political roots -- and disciples of every subsequent punk offshoot will explain to you why exactly their particular subset has the most legitimate claim to being old-school punk -- the punk aesthetic was such a perfect visual cocktail of sex and politics and rebellion that it has proven itself maddeningly capable of infinite adaptations, regenerations and bastardizations.

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