430 King’s Road
This was commissioned for Punk Pistol’s extraordinary illustrated celebration of the clothes made by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood from 1975 through 1979. As well as hi-res prints of many rare items, it contains contributions from Bernie Rhodes, John Ingham and Vivienne Westwood.
For more, including great slide-shows of vintage Sex and Seds clothes, go to http://www.seditionaries.com
‘Then one day the Sex Pistols were supporting us (the 101’ers) at the Nashville (3rd April 1976) and that’s when I first saw them. I walked through the corridor, and we’d done our soundcheck and in came these Sex Pistols people. I remember looking at them as they went past: Rotten, Matlock, Cook, Jones, McLaren and coming up the rear was Sidney, wearing a gold lame Elvis Presley jacket, and I thought…
Groups in those days didn’t talk to each other, it was extremely cut-throat. You fought for gigs, but I thought I’d talk to them, and I said to Sid, “that’s a nice jacket you’ve got there, mate”. He looked at me and went, “yeah, it is. I got it down Kensington Market”. We were humans, talking.
Then I walked out onstage while they were getting their soundcheck together and I heard Malcolm going to John, “do you want those kind of shoes that Steve’s got, or the kind that Paul’s got? What sort of sweater do you want?”, and I thought, “blimey, they’ve got a manager and he’s offering them….clothes!” To me it was incredible’.
Joe Strummer, interview with Jon Savage, May 1988
In the spring of 1976, the short lived magazine Street Life printed an interview with Malcolm McLaren by Rick Szymanski – later to be better known as the tabloid pop writer Rick Sky. The article gave a brief history of the shop’s larval stages – ‘Let It Rock’, ‘Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die’ – before concentrating on its then current incarnation. ‘Sex’ was a radical retail experience, with a hustler frontman – pictured in a shirt that stated: ‘be reasonable demand the impossible’ – making claims as wild as his shock of ginger hair.
‘Sex’ was a new kind of boutique: an S&M installation, a cult generator. Szymanski shrewdly observed the shop’s oscillation between display and concealment: ‘a dark façade, under the inflatable pink mammary vinyl sign, with a cluster of people invariably outside, trying to peer in to prize open its secrets’. This mysterious, threatening come-on was amplified by the items that you could find within: ‘the rubber T-shirts, skirts and suits, leather jackets, political and sexual torn T-shirts, cock rings, masks and vinyl tops’.
What was revolutionary about ‘Sex’ was not the products that it stocked, but who bought them: the customers were not just the standard issue middle-aged pervs that you can see in John Sansom and Mike Wallington’s contemporary film “Dressing for Pleasure” (although they did provide a regular turnover) but the young clientele that McLaren and Westwood had already established during the previous four years with their pop history excavations in ‘Let It Rock’ and ‘Too Fast to Live, Too Young To Die’.
Inspired by Jordan, the assistant from Seaford who acted as the first real live protagonist for the ‘Sex’ clothes – she was the first Sex Pistol – McLaren trumpeted his ideal customer: ‘just the idea of a 16-year-old girl from the suburbs turning up in a rubber mini skirt, as a lot of them do, to the office in the morning….they become involved and socially, as well as sexually, stimulated; much more so than someone in conventional clothing’.
McLaren and Westwood sought to trample all over Britain’s carefully patrolled perimeters between private and public behaviour. During that same season, Vivienne Westwood trumpeted in Forum magazine that the idea was to take fetish wear ‘out of the bedroom and into the streets’. (What happened when you did is that you got arrested, as Alan Jones had found out in July 1975). So the pair had a whole philosophy to go with the clothes. As Szymanski observed, ‘the shop does want to present a serious rationale for its wares’.
‘I’ve always been involved with cults – the subterranean influence on people – that’s what fashion is predominantly about’, McLaren claimed. ‘I think that kids now have a hankering to be part of a movement (like the Teddy Boys of the Fifties and the Mods of the Sixties). They want to be the same, to associate with a movement that’s hard and tough and in the open like the clothes we’re selling here’. McLaren predicted ‘that one of things about his shop is the cult that it could start’.
While this article was being prepared, the Sex Pistols were still playing to a few dozen people at the 100 Club: they had just had their first bout of pictured publicity after the late April fight at the Nashville Rooms. Nowhere does Szymanski mention the group or the word ‘punk’, which was still not in general use even in the music press. The shop was bigger than the band at that point. All the more remarkable then that McLaren’s wild prophecies would prove true.
This to me is the real alchemy of ‘Sex’. With the assistance of Jordan, Alan Jones, the four Sex Pistols, and many other young fans, McLaren and Westwood turned a grab bag of ideas into a living culture so powerful that it became world-wide news in 1977 and remains iconic thirty or so years later. Pop culture is all hype, but the magic comes when the hype intersects with real desires, hopes and emotions. That’s what happened to these wild ‘Sex’ dreams in 1976 and 1977.
That’s why British Punk begins at 430 Kings Road. Not because McLaren was the movement’s ‘author’: he wasn’t. But he was – with Vivienne Westwood – the shop’s conceptualiser. The pair picked up all kinds of outre concepts from the late sixties and sought their practical application using bored teenagers as their living experiments. In that way, as his art tutor Theodore Ramos observed, McLaren ‘became a true impresario. A catalyst precipitating an action’.
The story therefore of 430 Kings Road between 1971 and 1979 is both the story of Punk and the clothes that precipitated this cultural revolution. The latter have not received the attention that they are due: disappearing into the netherworld of sale catalogues and private collections, or relegated to second place in favour of Sex Pistols graphics and memorabilia. By presenting as comprehensive a 430 Kings Road collection as possible, this book should redress the balance.
The clothes are fabulous. Quite apart from the iconic significance that they now hold, they were always stunning. I bought comparatively few but the Anarchy shirt, the multi-coloured mohair sweater and even the studded boots had the power to stop traffic, to start arguments, or to make you feel – as was the intention – heroic. By putting them on, you agreed to participate in a kind of living, performance art installation even if, in certain cases, the attention that they aroused was not always sympathetic.
There were several phases in 430 Kings Road, of course, but they share many common attributes and all build up to the final point. In Szymanski’s article, McLaren pointed forwards: ‘we’ll try to make our clothes more seditious and militant and not so unpractical’. With the Seditionaries collection – unveiled by Johnny Rotten’s wearing of the full bondage suit for the Sex Pistols’ 3rd September 1976 date at the Chalet du Lac in Paris – McLaren and Westwood moved from past into future time, accelerating towards the world’s end.
But first, they had to go through a stage of:
Research and Development
The various stages of the World’s End shop offer a programmatic history of postwar youth cultures. McLaren’s interest had been piqued during the tortuous process of conceptualising his never completed ‘Oxford Street’ film, which changed from being a fairly down-the-line pro-situ critique of consumer alienation into a celebration of the British rock’n roller Billy Fury. McLaren became obsessed with Fury and his glamorous svengali Larry Parnes to the extent that fifties style took him over.
The result was ‘Let It Rock’, a shop marked by its careful invocation of authenticity. It was so successful that Britain’s Teddy Boy tribe, notoriously violent to any deviation from the fifties’ tablets of stone, gave them their full seal of approval (this would cause problems later on). 430 was decked out like a coffee bar-cum-fifties front room – the shop as hang-out – with vintage magazines and memorabilia from the period. Wearing the gear that they sold, McLaren and Westwood infiltrated the Teddy Boys like a couple of radical youth workers.
Their knack was to combine original fifties items with brand new reconstructions – in particular, beautiful velvet collared jackets in fleck material, some of which the Sex Pistols would wear five years later. Other items, like the ‘chicken bones’ T-shirts, were a bit too far out for the Teds, and were picked up by the musicians and stylists riding the contemporary fifties retro wave. McLaren and Westwood were operating in the same time frame and reference as Tommy Roberts in Mr. Freedom, but their clothes had a harder, delinquent edge.
Ever restless, the pair went further into rocker and zoot styles: the logical extension of the Edwardian look and one origin of the punk leather jacket and the source of those fabulous, baggy pinstriped trousers that Johnny Rotten wore during 1976 (before the Sex Pistols’ look got flattened out). They made clothes for Ken Russell’s “Mahler” – the Rheinmadchen fantasy sequence – and began to sell fifties’ flecks and mod, ‘Wemblex’ shirts. When however their competitors at Acme Attractions began to sell similar goods, it was time to move on.
They had learned:
Craft and Attention to Detail
Through their activities in the early seventies, McLaren and Westwood had immersed themselves in youth cults. They knew that cultists demanded a high, almost impossible degree of sartorial correctness. Fashion was a passion that could only be sated if everything was in place, right down to the last detail. When they began to move out of popcult past into fetish material, they swapped one demanding clientele for another. The flowering of their craft and attention to detail can be first seen in the early, 1975 ‘Sex’ clothes.
The first element was their source material. Gay pornography, Alex Trocchi’s Olympia knock-offs, and, I’m afraid, that dubious picture of the young boy smoking. Like the Lettrists – with whom the pair were familiar, thanks to Bernard Rhodes and the illustrations of Left Bank lettrists displayed on the walls. As the shop became more radical and politicised, quotes from Valerie Solanas and the Situationists were sprayed on the walls of 430, and found their way onto the pair’s first undisputed masterpiece.
The Anarchy shirt showed that the pair, having served their apprenticeship in the seventies retro culture, had finally escaped the past. Beginning with an old shirt, say a Wemblex stripe with rounded collars and pin holes: very 1963 – the pair would dye it, stripe it, stencil it, and then stick on various symbols: a piece of silk with a situ slogan like ‘A Bas Le Coca Cola’, a small applique of Karl Mark, a swastika flash. The result was an explosion of information, a concatenation of oppositions and paradoxes, that directly presaged Punk.
Every seller of antique clothing faces the same problem: what to do when the good stuff runs out, as it always does. With a bank of knowledge that spanned thirty or so years of youth cult style, McLaren and Westwood confronted the problem and solved it by using the past as a source element for a radical bricolage that evoked strong visual reactions at the same time as it sourced extremist politics, aesthetics, and the furthest out sexual fetishes.
This was clothing designed for:
Confrontation and Polarisation
In her June 1976 interview for ‘Forum’ – then Britain’s best known sex magazine – Vivienne Westwood, always the more belligerent of the pair, claimed that ‘we really are making a political statement with this shop by attempting to attack the system’. High ambitions for a clothes shop, and dismissable except for the evidence: a riot of clothes that attempted to trash as many boundaries and taboos as possible. McLaren and Westwood were determined and tenacious: nothing and nobody was spared.
They had given warning. ‘Sex’ had been launched, to all intents and purposes, by the T-shirt ‘You’re gonna wake up one morning and know what side of the bed you’ve been lying on!’. Produced in collaboration with Bernard Rhodes – who bailed when he saw the content of some later ‘Sex’ T-shirts – this sartorial manifesto reproduced the oppositional format of Wyndham Lewis’ infamous “Blast”. In the ‘(Hates:)’ were the liberal media and the pop aristocracy of the day, while in the ‘(Loves:)’ were ‘Kutie Jones and the Sex Pistols’.
By 1976 and the heyday of ‘Sex’, McLaren and Westwood were moving on a series of broad fronts. Their ammunition included: scurrilous pop gossip (the untrue allegation that Brian Epstein died as a result of S&M practices), outrageous gay imagery (the black football player, the cowboys), expose items like the Cambridge Rapist T-shirt (which precipitated Rhodes’ exit) extremist politics (Marxist and Nazi imagery, situationist and ultra-feminist slogans), S&M and paedophilia (the smoking boy T-shirt that precipitated Rhodes’ exit).
Certainly, to enter ‘Sex’ in 1976 was an intimidating experience. As a Londoner, I was used to running the retail gauntlet: trying to buy dub albums in Shepherd’s Bush market or Wemblex shirts from Acme Attractions demanded a certain persistence. But Don Letts was, ultimately, fairly eager to please. No such accommodation from the ‘Sex’ crowd, whose hostility to the first time entrant prompted thoughts of a real S&M shop, where you went in to get beaten up by the assistants. Such was the masochism of Britain in 1976.
Encouraged by the success of the shop and the Sex Pistols’ rapid rise, ‘Seditionaries’ was the pluperfect incarnation of 430 Kings Road. The designs – the bondage suit, the muslin shirts, the parachute tops, the mohair sweaters – were a culmination of the pair’s thorough grounding in research and practical application. They were completely modern – so much so, that no couturier has yet surpassed them – yet worn out everyday by teenagers on the streets of Britain. Rarely has a pop cult been so well dressed.
The provocation had moved into a different phase. The best Seditionaries clothes did not need slogans or words to make their point: they just were. At the same time, the pair’s political polemics moved up a notch. Just as the Sex Pistols announced their arrival with “Anarchy in the UK”, the new shop gave pride of place to photographs of the shattered city of Dresden: the city flattened by Allied bombers in March 1945 within such a fiery holocaust that the controversy as to whether it was a strategic necessity or a war crime continues today.
However, just as the Sex Pistols reached their peak with the “God Save the Queen” single in the early summer of 1977, so did the shop begin to wear itself out. As Punk became mediated, it became more and more violent, both without and within: 430 was often besieged by Teds who felt that McLaren had pissed all over their sacred costume, while the shop’s position on the route to Chelsea football ground meant regular and extreme aggro. (This was before the dire sport/ music crossover that besets today’s popular culture).
The provocation was taken up. At the same time, as the children of punk began to swarm at World’s End, the shop’s elite status was eroded. It made an attempt to go more mainstream with a mail-order leaflet, but it was caught in the classic success trap: greater production meant abandoning to some degree the craft and exclusivity that had helped to make the clothes so outstanding. At the same time, its owners must have began to wonder whether, just like Frankenstein, exactly what their experiments had unleashed on the world.
1978 was a grim year within Punk time, and ‘Seditionaries’ reflected the mood. Some of the new designs – like Vivienne Westwood’s rant against Derek Jarman’s “Jubilee” or the “She’s Dead, I’m Alive, I’m Yours’ shirt produced after Nancy Spungen’s death – seemed indicative not of transgressive radicalism but a mean spirit and a lack of humanity. McLaren and Westwood had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, but the qualities – of craft, detail and surprise – that had made their work for number 430 so special were disappearing.
The whole scene was “all played aht”.
It was time for a change.