Читать книгу Vivienne Westwood: An Unfashionable Life - Jane Mulvagh - Страница 11

1971–1975

‘Be Childish

Be Irresponsible

Be Disrespectful

Be Everything

This Society Hates.’

Malcolm McLaren, script for the film Oxford Street, 1969

After two and a half miles, his optimism flagging, McLaren turned the corner into World’s End. There the fashionable King’s Road quickly degenerated into inner-urban decay, tower blocks and pubs where drugs could be scored. As he passed number 430, a figure leaning against a bamboo façade beckoned him into the retro boutique Paradise Garage.

‘Where you going, man? I dig the drainpipes,’ began Bradley Mendelssohn, the Brooklyn-born store manager, referring to McLaren’s lurex-threaded trousers. McLaren explained that he was looking for a stall where he could sell his rock ’n’ roll records and memorabilia. Bradley suggested the back half of the shop, and an ecstatic McLaren returned home with plans to set up a business with his Harrow Art School friend Patrick Casey, another collector of fifties ephemera. Ever practical, Vivienne initially greeted the idea with scepticism, but as usual she eventually went along with McLaren’s wishes.

Pooling their dole cheques and raising additional finance by selling a film camera which McLaren had permanently ‘borrowed’ from Goldsmith’s College – Helen Wellington-Lloyd also lent them £50 – the partners patched up the back of the shop and bought more stock. On the pavement outside they erected a sandwich-board, illustrated with guitars and musical notes, which read ‘Let it Rock at Paradise Garage’, and commenced trading in November 1971. On the second day Bradley failed to turn up to man his half of the store, so Casey and McLaren covered for him. After three or four days Bradley still had not reappeared, and the till was bulging. ‘What were we supposed to do with the takings?’ McLaren wondered. ‘Keep the cash in the shop, tuck it under our beds, what?’ He requisitioned the shop.

Several weeks later, Trevor Miles, the proprietor who had left his emporium in Bradley’s care, returned from a Caribbean honeymoon, walked in and discovered the interlopers. After some haggling he agreed that they could stay, provided they paid a weekly rent of £40. Miles, like many of the young boutique traders at that end of the King’s Road, was into drugs, and just wanted some extra cash. McLaren decided to sit it out and claim ‘squatters’ rights’, calculating that even if Miles resorted to legal action they would have at least three or four months in which to trade before the court hearing. But a week later McLaren arrived to find the shop locked. Their stock had been tossed out on to the pavement.

Outraged by this ‘injustice’, Vivienne turned to their shopkeeping friend Tommy Roberts. ‘Oh, Tommy,’ she wailed down the telephone, ‘the landlord has chucked all our stock out on the street and locked the shop up.’ That was illegal, said Roberts, and she should seek redress from the law. He rang his solicitors in the City and made an appointment for Vivienne to see them. She arrived dressed like a slattern in laddered stockings and a mini skirt, with her spiked peroxide hair. After the meeting the non-plussed solicitor – ‘an old-fashioned kind of bloke’, Roberts remembered – told him: ‘Miss Westwood came to see me and we had to walk to court together with her great long winklepickers, the hair, the stockings, the lot!’ ‘He loved every minute of it,’ said Roberts, ‘despite the fact that his bill wasn’t settled for years.’

Let it Rock was back in business, and now occupied the whole premises. McLaren, Casey and Vivienne (when she wasn’t teaching) scoured the unfashionable outer London markets of Hackney, Streatham, Leytonstone and Hendon for merchandise. They amassed old bakelite valve radios, which McLaren restored and displayed on the pavement, a guitar-shaped mirror, of which they had copies made, old records, fanzines, post-war ‘skin’ magazines like Photoplay and Spick, postcards of period pin-ups and retro clothing. The booty was hauled back to 430 King’s Road.

In imitation of a kitsch fifties front room, the shop was decorated with authentic Festival of Britain-era wallpaper (from a fusty DIY shop in Streatham), a period fridge painted bubblegum pink and black, teak sideboards and formica display cabinets. Rock ’n’ roll blasted from a jukebox, and fluorescent pink letters announced the shop’s name and creed: ‘Teddy boys are Forever – Rock is our business’. Besides vintage records as mainstream as Billy Fury, Little Richard and Elvis Presley, and as esoteric as Hank Ballard and Johnny Guitar Watson, complementary artefacts were sold: Brylcreem, novelty socks decorated with musical notes, plastic earrings and black leather ties with see-through plastic pockets into which were slipped pornographic playing cards. Original, often unworn, fifties clothes were bought from warehouses in the Midlands and on the south coast. Photographs of Billy Fury, James Dean and Marlon Brando were pinned like holy relics onto fake leopardskin, along with Eddie Cochrane’s autograph, sent by friends to Shelley Martin, a sales assistant at Let it Rock, but which McLaren commandeered – just as he had taken possession of Paradise Garage, the film camera, books from Foyle’s and other people’s ideas. He had little respect for the concept of physical or intellectual property, arguing: ‘Plagiarism is what the world’s about. If you don’t start seeing things and stealing because you were inspired by them, you’d be stupid.’

‘Hippiedom is dead!’ was McLaren and Casey’s clarion call. McLaren claimed that he invented retro-chic, but in fact it had emerged back in the late 1950s. There were waves of fifties revivals throughout the sixties, but it was not until 1971 that the look became more than an esoteric backwater. Trevor Miles had traded fifties Americana such as Hawaiian shirts, college jackets covered in baseball or football logos and brightly coloured silk airforce jackets and overalls, some appliquéd on the back with maps of Japan or patriotic eagles. But McLaren’s fifties revival was unique in that it celebrated the fifties of Albion, not America. Unlike Americana – the look of the middle-class college kid or the gaudy tourist – McLaren’s fifties memorabilia celebrated the working class and the jingoistic instincts of the teddy boy. McLaren himself, remembered William English, one of the shop’s customers, looked ‘home-grown and working class, not adapted, just like a real old ted’. The merchandise and the accompanying credo had little to do with contemporary fashion. Nevertheless, within two months fashion features on the shop appeared in the Daily Mirror, the Evening Standard and Rolling Stone.

Let it Rock was not only a retro shop, but also a meeting place. Like Ossie Clark and Alice Pollock’s Quorum in Radnor Walk off the King’s Road in the late sixties, McLaren created a scene in which the like-minded could hang out. Location was vital – ‘Harrow or Streatham, forget it! … That street meant those media people came,’ he remembered – along with the popocracy (Jimmy Page, the Kinks, the Bowies, Marianne Faithfull), artists, dedicated followers of fashion and the hard-core teddy boys. Like Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, Washington Square in New York and Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, the King’s Road was a magnet for the young, the curious and the fun-seeking. At that time McLaren was receptive to customers’ comments and interested in their lifestyles, and would engage them in conversation rather than subject them to the monologues that were the hallmark of his later trading style. William English was struck that Let it Rock traded ‘in complete isolation’, surrounded by hippie emporia, and felt that this made them seem ‘very fresh, interesting’. He noticed that Vivienne and McLaren clearly felt more affinity with working-class provincials such as himself (he was from Leicester) than with their London neighbours: ‘They thought there was more going on in the provinces than in London – they both said as much.’ Ben Kelly, a Northern student at the Royal College of Art, was disappointed by the drabness of London until he discovered the shop, which he described as ‘a beacon … you could become part of their life. You didn’t have to buy anything, just get the vibes. It was exciting – better than drugs, really.’

Intoxicated by the attention and the modest commercial success the enterprise was enjoying, McLaren had even less time for family than before: many of his friends were unaware that he even had a child. In the spring of 1972 his grandfather died, leaving Grandmother Rose alone in her flat, only five minutes from Nightingale Lane. When he called on her one day in early December he found her sitting in bed, bolt upright from rigor mortis. His mother, who partly blamed McLaren for not keeping an eye on the old woman, broke off what little contact she still had with him.

Within a few months Let it Rock began running out of original teddy boy clothing, so McLaren co-opted Vivienne, who had made her own clothes since she was a teenager, to run up copies. She was happy to stop teaching, as she had become disillusioned by the class sizes and the conformity demanded by the state system: ‘It was impossible to teach anything in such a large class … But the naughty children were the smart ones, they’ve got something. To get out of teaching was not a big jump. I was considered a nuisance when I was a teacher because my sympathies were with the children. If they swore at me, I didn’t care, actually. I was already unorthodox in my attitude of what children ought and ought not to do.’

In order to pay for the second-hand sewing machine Vivienne worked on at home, McLaren disconnected the flat’s telephone – he could use the one at the shop, and Vivienne, he reasoned, ‘was too nervous a person and was used to being alone. She didn’t like coming down to the shop and hated having to deal with the phone. It was mostly my friends anyway.’

Left undistracted in Nightingale Lane, Vivienne sowed the seeds of her new career, repairing, altering and eventually copying rock ’n’ roll clothing. She carefully and methodically unpicked and duplicated original teddy boy garments while Sid Green, an East End tailor whom she regularly consulted, made up the drape jackets in neon colours and fake fur, sequinned or lurex collars chosen by her. With the archivist’s exactitude that became her signature, she sourced authentic cloth, buttons and linings and, informed by research in teddy boy clubs, copied and recoloured the look. ‘She’s a real worker,’ says Tommy Roberts. ‘She was self-taught, taking things to pieces.’ What distinguished the merchandise at Let it Rock from the second-hand/vintage clothing sold at other boutiques was Vivienne’s perfectionism. She would restore the clothes to pristine condition, dry cleaning them, repairing the lining and replacing lost buttons with authentic originals.

Despite Vivienne’s commitment, McLaren is dismissive of her contribution: ‘The fashion industry was in my blood, not hers, especially in menswear. My grandparents were tailors. I was the Dedicated Follower of Fashion, just like Ray Davies of the Kinks sings, whereas Vivienne was someone who fell into it. I forced her.’ He held court at the shop and issued instructions to Vivienne, casting her as a love-slave to his scams, which he amplified into ‘a stand against the system’. For many years, when talking to the press he gave the impression that he was the only one involved in the shop – Vivienne did not exist.

Vivienne may have been introduced to the fashion business by McLaren, but it became, in her words, ‘a baby I picked up and never put down’. She earnestly taught herself the tailoring craft (McLaren could not thread a needle), and gradually introduced new designs. ‘She’s quite a formidable force once she sets her mind to it,’ one employee recalled. ‘She’s like a dog with a bone, and she won’t give up.’ To keep her under his control, McLaren played on Vivienne’s insecurities, constantly telling her that she would be ‘nothing but a factory worker if it wasn’t for me’, which was patently untrue.

While Vivienne toiled, McLaren and Patrick Casey reorganised the ‘art installation’ of 430 King’s Road. As Casey was homeless, he dossed on the floor of the shop, hence the musty smell customers noticed on entering. Being a ‘speed freak’, he would sleep until noon, and consequently the shop rarely opened before lunch. These unorthodox hours amused McLaren, who liked to watch the frustrated customers waiting outside (the practical and disciplined Vivienne would have opened at nine in the morning). To further whet the customers’ appetites, McLaren would capriciously announce that a pair of white brothel-creepers, a forty-five or a plastic, guitar-shaped handbag was a ‘collector’s item – not for sale’. Up to half the merchandise would be teasingly unavailable. McLaren loved to quote Andy Warhol’s adage that ‘being good at business is the most fascinating kind of art’.

Vivienne would often be summoned at seven or eight in the evening to chauffeur McLaren around in her old olive-green Mini, carpeted with disregarded parking tickets. Sometimes they would go to the Black Raven pub in Bishopsgate in the East End, the venue favoured by the ted revivalists. Dressed as one of them, in a canary-yellow mohair jumper and tight black ski-pants, or a circle skirt and stilettos, Vivienne would mingle with the crowd to research the look or solicit business for the shop. She was adept at ingratiating herself into a scene, particularly in the cause of research; she learnt their dances and shared their enthusiasms. It was when Vivienne was dancing, which she loved, that one could see the unbridled exuberance she had inherited from Dora. McLaren habitually sat in a corner, watching.

Occasionally Vivienne manned the shop, but as yet she was not comfortable with the fashionable King’s Road crowd. ‘She seemed mumsy and terribly suburban-housewifey, but surrounded by all this incredible gear, to which she didn’t seem to relate,’ one customer remembered. Vivienne would allow visitors to try on things ‘for hours, and it didn’t matter if you didn’t buy anything’. The hectoring polemicist had yet to emerge.

Given the choice, Vivienne preferred to stay at home sketching, making and thinking about clothes, while McLaren, accompanied by Tommy Roberts, toured the clubs and bars. The two shopkeepers loved to spar, McLaren dismissing Roberts’s customers David Bowie and Roxy Music as glam rock poseurs: ‘I think he got fed up with me,’ says Roberts, ‘because people used to come into his shop and ask, “Where’s City Light Studio {one of Roberts’s shops}?” He would charge them ten bob to tell them.’

Let it Rock attracted its own rock customers, including Ringo Starr and David Essex, who ordered clothes for their characters in the rock ’n’ roll tribute film That’ll be the Day (1973), and the cabaret performer Lionel Blair, who dressed the chorus line of his Saturday night television show in fifties copies. Although McLaren was the front man, Vivienne gradually became the stronger personification of Let it Rock, where she was spending an increasing amount of time. For her, the shop represented a commitment to a lifestyle which she disseminated like an evangelical preacher; whereas for McLaren it was simply the stage for a lucrative pose.

Familiarity with the teddy boys soon bred contempt. Claiming that they were disgusted by the teds’ racist and sexist tendencies – Vivienne’s sense of justice, in particular, was outraged – she and McLaren turned away from it (Casey had left the business). Ethical considerations aside, they were also running out of vintage stock, and were tired of simply copying it. Added to that, the Let it Rock look had caught on. Other local traders were astonished when, having built up Let it Rock’s reputation and profitability, Vivienne and McLaren closed the shop in early 1973. But McLaren and Vivienne shared a low boredom threshold, and they now elected, in advance of the pack, to ally themselves to another outlaw youth cult, the motorbike rockers and greasers.

James Dean, the prototypical teenage anti-hero of Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and Marlon Brando, the hoodlum biker who terrorises a small town in The Wild One (1953), epitomised disaffected American youth. In the spring of 1973, 430 King’s Road reopened as Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die (TFTLTYTD), the name having been suggested by their Saturday assistant as a tribute to Dean’s early death. Out went the drapes and brothel creepers, in came studded black bikers’ leathers, chains, motorcycle memorabilia and oil-stained second-hand Levi’s. While many of the Let it Rock clothes had had a tailored elegance, the biker gear was a caricature of fifties rockers. The look (later to be appropriated by the gay community, as epitomised by the American pop group the Village People) was rough and deliberately confrontational.

It was during 430 King’s Road’s incarnation as TFTLTYTD that McLaren and Westwood began to design slogan-printed T-shirts. They were the first retailers fully to exploit the incendiary impact of these affordable statements of defiance, sales of which were targeted at impressionable teenagers. ‘The T-shirt is anti-fashion at its simplest,’ they repeatedly declared, intentionally distancing themselves from commercial fashion. It became their core design, serving at the same time as a fashion item, a tool of propaganda and a clarion call to rebellion. In time, the subversiveness and downright scurrilousness of their slogans and designs attracted youthful buyers in direct proportion to the shock and offence they caused to the public at large.

The first T-shirts were relatively insipid, simply advertising Vivienne and McLaren’s idols – Marlon Brando, James Dean, Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley – or their affiliations – e.g. ‘Vive la Rock’. After unsuccessfully attempting to sell these bland designs at the August 1972 Rock ’n’ Roll Festival at Wembley Arena, they converted the lot into knickers. Clearly, the T-shirts needed to be stronger. Vivienne began to customise them, adding tarty marabou feathers and tiny see-through plastic windows, into which a cigarette card of a pin-up girl or a rock idol was slipped. Into others she sewed two zippers which when opened allowed the nipples to peep through. She then came up with a macabre device, evoking a voodoo curse: letters constructed out of chicken bones attached to the T-shirts with chains and spelling out the words ‘Perv’ or ‘Rock’. The bones were collected from Ricky Sky, then a waiter at Leonardo’s Italian trattoria opposite 430 King’s Road. Vivienne took the discarded chicken carcasses, boiled them to strip them of flesh and gristle, then drilled holes into the bones. Only a dozen or so of these custom-made and highly collectible bone T-shirts were made – the chicken-slaughtering heavy-metal rock singer Alice Cooper bought one – and fakes were to appear on the market in the nineties. Originals now fetch several thousand pounds, and one example hangs today in 430 King’s Road, another in Vivienne’s Conduit Street shop in Mayfair.

The bone T-shirts demonstrated Vivienne’s self-taught, do-it-yourself approach to fashion. Never happier than when sitting alone, immersed in a craft at her kitchen table, she fastidiously drilled, potato-printed and hand-stencilled garments, convinced that she was engaging in the politics of dissent. In customising standard biker wear with Hell’s Angel slogans, studs, chains, bones and talismanic rocker motifs such as the skull and crossbones, she had hit upon an approach to clothes design that went straight to the heart of excitable young fans. The formula of customising clothing with slogans became one of her enduring leitmotivs

Seething with genuine feelings of protest, fired up by McLaren’s invective but frustrated by her own inarticulacy, these didactic clothes became Vivienne’s means of carrying their vituperative opinions onto the street on the backs of their customers. Ever the schoolteacher, she crafted clothes to ‘instruct’ society, and every garment carried an almost sectarian message: the ‘Venus’ T-shirt, for example, featured horsehair, metal studs and bike-tyre sleeves, while others depicted rock idols made out of glitter. Such tub-thumping pronouncements attested fierce loyalty to a particular style of music and youth culture.

Receptive customers were thrilled by the commitment and zeal of this clothing. The French fashion designer and motorbike enthusiast Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, for example, was so taken with the unexpected juxtapositions of the collaged dadaist T-shirts and their anti-fashion amateurism that he left a note for the proprietor of TFTLTYTD which read: ‘I love the things you do. I think we have some common pensives and I would love to meet you.’ Coincidentally, he was designing clothes made from domestic rubbish – old floorcloths and blankets – scrawled with phrases from Rabelais. Keenly aware of de Castelbajac’s position in France’s aristocracy and fashion hierarchy, McLaren was determined to exploit this connection, while Vivienne was thrilled that a ‘real designer’ had praised her work. Despite their claims to the contrary, both Vivienne and McLaren responded to approval from the establishment. The Harper’s & Queen style critic Peter York, hearing Vivienne’s boasts that she and de Castelbajac were working on similar lines, remembers thinking: ‘She was clearly aspiring to be a mainstream designer.’

Several months later McLaren made a trip to Paris and, carrying a huge bottle of Johnnie Walker ‘with a label the same colour as his hair’ under his arm, called unannounced at de Castelbajac’s flat. ‘Hi, Charlie!’ he began familiarly. ‘No one’s ever called me that,’ de Castelbajac recalled, and within hours he and McLaren had become firm friends. It was the beginning of a long-lasting alliance.

In August 1973, several King’s Road shops were invited to show their wares at the annual National Boutique Show at the MacAlpine Hotel in New York. Feeling hemmed in by domesticity and the routine of shopkeeping, and tempted by a promotional opportunity and the excitement of their first trip to America, Vivienne and McLaren flew to New York. They were accompanied by Gerry Goldstein, a friend of McLaren’s from college days. The trio decorated their stall, set up in the hotel bedroom, with an array of T-shirts, teddy boy and rocker clothes and rock ’n’ roll memorabilia. Bill Haley and Jerry Lee Lewis hits were blasted down the corridors. Despite amused interest, no orders were taken.

However, Alice Cooper and Sylvain Sylvain, rhythm guitarist for the New York cult band the New York Dolls, paid them a visit. Sylvain and the Dolls’ lead guitarist Johnny Thunders had become customers of Let it Rock when they had recently visited London, but they had never met McLaren or Vivienne. Impressed by the retro-dandyism and lewd fifties pin-ups, Sylvain persuaded them to move into the Chelsea Hotel, the dank, downbeat lodgings on West 23rd Street whose residents had included Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan, Valerie Solanas, and a host of rock groups, artists and writers.

The Dolls introduced Vivienne and McLaren to the heart of New York’s rock culture. They found themselves surrounded by a narcissistic hedonism, bent on experimenting with the derangement of the senses. They were interviewed by Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine about their shop, went clubbing at CBGBs and saw performances by Richard Hell (né Myers), the Ramones and Patti Smith, whom McLaren regarded as urban poets. In particular, McLaren was transfixed by Hell and his group Television. Unkempt, degenerate and self-abusive, he wore slashed and safety-pinned clothing. His hair razored into a shag cut and his body daubed with doom-laden poetry, he treated his audience with weary contempt. It was, McLaren felt, as if the very streets of Paris 1968 had come alive in one man, his graffitied flesh like a living wall of protest.

The sardonic, glam rock Dolls – the name referred to their arch transvestism in trashy women’s clothes – fused the theatre of the absurd with classic rock ’n’ roll anarchy. They feigned sexual ambivalence in order to debunk the macho rock star image of success and sexuality. This struck a chord not only among young groupies, but also the older (twenty- and thirty-year-old) art and theatre crowd, Andy Warhol’s followers and other musicians like Iggy Pop, David Bowie and Lou Reed. Their act was knowing, louche and dismissive of their fans, but it was not political. It was in New York that McLaren grasped the potential of the disaffected youth market, becoming, according to Sylvain, ‘the Dolls’ biggest groupie’. Vivienne, however, had not enjoyed the trip, and returned to London declaring that she hated America. She never revised her opinion, later declaring that Americans were ‘barbarians’ and ‘the ultimate philistines’, and would not return for two decades.

Back in Britain, economic and social gloom was setting in. Industrial tension escalated into a series of strikes, and following repeated power shortages, a three-day working week was introduced.

Bored with Vivienne, London and the shop, McLaren promptly began an affair with Addie Isman, the wayward daughter of a wealthy New Jersey family who was working at TFTLTYTD. After nights out on the town with Addie, McLaren would return to verbal, and sometimes physical, attacks from Vivienne. Though the affair ended after a few months when Addie returned to America (where she died five years later from a barbiturate overdose), Vivienne became increasingly alert to potential sexual rivals.

Despite McLaren’s periodical departures from the Nightingale Lane flat in pursuit of sexual intrigue, Vivienne’s tenacity maintained the relationship. She now accompanied McLaren more frequently on his night-time prowlings around clubs and bars. Michael Kostiff, a Northern clubgoer and follower of Chelsea fashions who patronised TFTLTYTD with his spectacularly-dressed German wife Gerlinde, came to know the couple well at this time. During late-night drinking sessions at the Kostiffs’, McLaren would hold forth on the ideology of the shop, while Vivienne fed him questions. ‘But you know what I think about that,’ McLaren would snap. ‘Yeah, well I want to hear you say it again,’ she would reply. This was her method of learning, parrot-fashion, how to communicate the theories of others, which she would later repeat by rote, with her own idiosyncratic delivery. She was a foil to McLaren, the straight ‘man’ to his funny man. Having drunk their hosts dry, Vivienne and McLaren would raid the fridge for the last pint of milk, then leave.

The Kostiffs were taken aback that, given the severity of the recession and the duo’s avowed allegiance to ‘the people’, their aggressive didacticism precluded any empathy with or even sympathy for the poor: ‘They were big on ideas, and that’s a luxury … They were unforgiving, not vindictive, but careless … and judged the state of the country by the cost of wine or dinner at a fashionable restaurant. Bizarre – not real life!’ Michael Kostiff was struck by Vivienne’s evident obsession with McLaren: ‘She hung on Malcolm’s every word. She was quite in awe of him, {his} command of English and his art school and situationist background.’ But they were not a loving couple, rather ‘hardbitten and definitely not sentimental’ towards one another. Tommy Roberts agreed: ‘They weren’t an overtly loving couple. It was just an interesting twosome. They were strong and ambitious and doing interesting things.’

To McLaren’s mind, the presence of Ben and Joe was inconvenient, and they were dispatched to a series of liberal boarding schools. He justified his disregard for them by claiming that he was imbuing them with a spirit of independence. Vivienne, in his thrall, concurred – McLaren was always right. Since the couple could not afford their school fees, the boys would be passed from one school to another once the goodwill had run out: ‘They were always being picked up in the middle of the night and shown to another school because they {Vivienne and McLaren} hadn’t paid the fees,’ says John Rowley, a colleague and flatmate of Joseph’s in later life. By the end of the boys’ preparatory school education, the couple owed £7,000 in unpaid school fees.

Not yet ten, the boys would have to take their washing to the launderette when they were home from school: ‘Vivienne gave me such a free life that I spent most time outside,’ says Joe loyally. ‘Once I was out very late doing one of my first business transactions, swapping my padlock for a watch. I started to walk home feeling very pleased with myself, when I spotted Mum’s Mini. She had been driving around the streets looking for me, obviously worried sick. She jumped out and gave me a real clout.’

Ben was left in no doubt about McLaren’s hatred for him. ‘He had no time for children,’ he remembered, although he did occasionally take the boys on adventures: ‘Once we hitch-hiked to Romney Marshes and walked right across a military firing range. Then we hitch-hiked to Anglesey and slept in a barn, and there was this dead sheep with his two back legs chopped off, and Malcolm said there was a madman about and we had to barricade ourselves in.’

Gradually, the boys became more insecure. Joseph was sent to board at Hawkhirst Court in Sussex for two and a half years: ‘They were so strict, they just had stupid rules and regulations,’ he remembers. ‘You had to open all your parcels in front of everyone; the only time you’d get a present was on your birthday. She sent me a Chinese writing set. I’ve still got it … I didn’t really like Malcolm, but I didn’t hate him,’ he continues. ‘Once he gave us about fifty comics and a great bag of sweets that kept us going for about five hours.’

For a time Joe boarded at A.S. Neill’s radically liberal Summerhill in Suffolk, but even to McLaren’s mind ‘it was too wild and too free’. He was next sent to St Christopher’s. McLaren only realised how lonely Joe was when he came home from one of his schools. He would tease his son by pretending that he, Malcolm, was the King of Portugal (his great-grandparents had been Portuguese Jews), and that Joseph was therefore the heir to the throne. When a letter marked ‘Royal Mail’ came he’d say, ‘It must be for you, Joseph.’ But despite his entertaining games, the children knew that they were insignificant to McLaren, and that their mother remained under his influence.

They loved their mother, and were fiercely proud of her unorthodoxy. Ben describes her around 1973 as wearing ‘really short skirts and having blonde spiky hair. I remember going round to see boarding schools and the other kids were looking up her skirt and I was embarrassed.’ If he thought comments by other pupils were disrespectful, he would hit them: ‘I love my mum and I loved her then. I used to fight people. They’d say, “Ooh, I like your mum.” ’

While many of McLaren’s friends dismissed Vivienne as no more than his mealy-mouthed and doting girlfriend, those who took the trouble to talk to her soon realised that she was a powerful woman who harboured a keen ambition. Gene Krell, a Brooklyn-born stylist and retailer who had worked as a doorman at the Salvation nightclub in Manhattan, and who married the Warhol Factory singer Nico, came into the fashion world as joint owner of the New York and London glam rock boutiques Granny Takes a Trip. His ground-breaking style was a riposte to the seriousness of the Mod scene. By 1973 he was running the London shop (in 1996 he became fashion editor of Condé Nast’s Vogue Korea). Krell, and Granny Takes a Trip, were the epitome of what McLaren and Vivienne hated – dandy glam rock shopkeepers and their upper-class hippie clientele. But Krell’s transsexual dress, such as black hennaed hair fastened up with combs and white powder makeup, turned heads. He favoured gem-coloured velvet suits, footwear from Gohil, a bespoke cobbler in Camden Town who made patchwork suede Cuban-heeled boots for the ‘in-crowd’, and garish forties print shirts (made out of material from Pontins, a delightfully dated department store in Kensington). Alternatively, he would wear a multi-coloured kimono printed with overblown chrysanthemums, his three-inch nails adjusting his unruly squid-black tresses.

Krell was intrigued by the angular creature dressed in a leather, chain-hung mini, with spiked hair, skull earrings and lips painted like a Mondrian grid in three blocks of colour, who occasionally helped at TFTLTYTD (the artist Duggie Fields was inspired by Vivienne’s strange make-up to paint an acrylic portrait featuring the tricoloured lips). To Vivienne, other designers and shops were not merely commercial competition, but rival gangs on which to declare war. Didn’t they understand that Billy Fury was more significant to the history of pop music than Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones? Krell would listen amazed as she berated Anthony Price for the glam rock frocks and sharp suits he sold at his King’s Road shop Plaza, scoffed at the glitter clothes sold at Alkasura nearby, and dismissed Krell’s merchandise, to his face, for its apolitical decadence. A playful quarrel would ensue, until Vivienne bluntly conceded to Krell, ‘Though I hate your look, I really like you.’ A lifelong friendship was founded on Krell’s admiration for her strength, anarchy and candour, and her love of his loyalty and New York street humour.

Vivienne was clearly beginning to outgrow the shyness that had previously hindered her. ‘She was certainly not in Malcolm’s shadow,’ Krell remembers. ‘She looked so visually stunning, whereas he looked like a nerd – a boring rockabilly guy.’ Immersed as she now was in the fashion pack, Krell found Vivienne’s fiercely anti-fashion stance unique. Despite McLaren’s claims to be ‘the voice of disenchanted youth’, it was commerce and a love of being in fashion that drove him, whereas Vivienne actually believed the propaganda of their cause.

Vivienne’s extreme dress and heartfelt haranguing of her customers were beginning to attract attention. On 7 December 1973 West One magazine selected her, together with Nell Campbell (nightclub hostess and star of The Rocky Horror Show), stylists Louise Doktor and Shelley Martin, and the green-haired Rae Spencer-Cullen (aka the dress designer ‘Miss Mouse’) as one of the ‘London Belles’ with the strongest style. John Bishop photographed her for the magazine dressed as a proto-punk in a zippered T-shirt, fishnets and spiked hair. Asked about her ambitions and views, she replied that she wanted to be like a gorilla, her favourite food was brown rice and vegetables, her favourite book was Summerhill by A.S. Neill and her favourite song was ‘There’s No One to Love Me Now’ by Shaweez. Vivienne’s first appearance in print fuelled her ambition. At a fifties revival concert given by the Shananas, when the band invited someone from the audience up on stage, Tommy Roberts remembers that Vivienne was up there in a flash, ‘no messing about, and I knew then she wanted fame. She knew what the game was. She’s clever. “She’ll get what she wants,” I thought.’

The arrival of the New York Dolls in London in November 1973 galvanised McLaren once again, and he devotedly followed them from gig to gig. In January he accompanied them to Paris, where he introduced them to Jean-Charles de Castelbajac. The seeds of punk were apparent in their antics – the rock star cliché of smashing guitars, pouring vitriol on the audience and the press – and their accessories, such as the swastika. Enthralled by the rock world, McLaren nurtured his fantasy of becoming the next Larry Parnes, the Jewish impresario who had managed Billy Fury. To that end he befriended Gloria Jones, the common-law wife of T. Rex’s Marc Bolan, and the New Musical Express journalist Nick Kent, and started casting about for a band.

By the spring of 1974, class-ridden, economically depressed and seemingly leaderless England was in crisis. Prime Minister Edward Heath called an election on the single issue ‘who governs Britain?’ Not you! came the overwhelming reply. In this anti-authoritarian political climate, McLaren cranked up his antics. Now bored by youth cults, in April 1974 he closed TFTLTYTD. In New York he had witnessed the extremes of the permissive society. It was there that David Bowie had first openly paraded his bisexuality: ‘He would never have had the balls to do that unless he’d been hanging around with Iggy {Pop} and Lou {Reed}, because they represented this place across the ocean where things were changing, so fuck all the English hypocrites,’ said his wife Angie.

The gradual liberalisation of society set the scene for McLaren, who calculated that one thing that was sure to antagonise the sexually-repressed English was the apparel and artefacts of sexual fetish. Vivienne and McLaren had first toyed with fetishistic dress when Ken Russell had commissioned them to customise their biker leathers with explicit sado-masochist and Nazi imagery for his musical biopic Mahler. (Shirley Russell, the director’s ex-wife and the film’s costumier, says that neither Vivienne nor McLaren did any work on Mahler. The leather-studded S&M costume was designed and made by Lenny Pollock.) Now, in the late summer of 1974, they reopened the refurbished shop under the name ‘SEX’, brazenly spelt out above the door in huge, spanked-flesh-pink letters cut out of padded PVC, which resembled a malleable Claus Oldenberg pop art sculpture. Naked, headless mannequins were piled, orgy-fashion, on top of one another in the window. Customers passed under the lintel – sprayed with Rousseau’s aphorism ‘Craft must have clothes but Truth loves to go naked’ – and into a sexual romper room. Sheets of elastoplast-pink surgical rubber, as soft and powdery to the touch as a condom, hung down the walls, which were sprayed with quotations McLaren had lifted from pornographic literature, including Valerie Solanas’s vitriolic ‘SCUM Manifesto’ and Alexander Trocchi’s School for Wives and Thongs.

Much of the imagery on the clothes strongly resembled the work of the fifties American artist Eric Stanton, who produced a series of drawings depicting women trussed up in black leather and rubber bondage wear, including faceless rubber hoods, like tethered birds of prey. Labels sewn on to the shoulders of the SEX clothes like epaulettes bore subversive quotations such as: ‘The dirty stripper who left her undies on the railings to go hitch-hiking, said, You don’t think I have stripped off all these years just for money, do you?’ One particularly shocking T-shirt featured a naked pre-pubescent boy provocatively smoking a cigarette – this at a time when the BBC had caused a storm of controversy with a documentary called Johnnie Go Home, about a teenager who ran away to London and ended up working as a rent boy. Another bore a graphic image of a naked black man with a large penis.

‘French lingerie’ (as coy department stores called it) in black or red lace, scissored open for easy access to the sexual organs, left customers in no doubt what game they were expected to play. Displayed on gymnasium exercise-bars alongside the more familiar tools of sado-masochism – whips, chains, nipple clamps, handcuffs and black thigh-high boots – was exotica bought from sub-culture catalogues, such as skin-tight black rubber eyeless masks, the hermetic seal broken only by a tiny breathing tube. These were worn with bodysuits constructed out of two ‘skins’ of rubber that could be inflated, pressing so hard against the body that they denied it any sight or sound. The focal point of the surgically bleak shop was a huge, grubby double bed laid with a rubber sheet.

‘Pornography is the laughter of the bathroom of your mind,’ customers were told as they were goaded to disappear behind a screen and dress up in the garb which hung challengingly round the shop. McLaren was greatly influenced by the American ‘skinflick’ director Russ Meyer, whose films such as Supervixens and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls were not explicitly pornographic, so much as crammed with camp excess. McLaren and Meyer were two of a kind.

Some of the merchandise, bulk-ordered from catalogues such as ‘Scandalous Lingerie & Glamour Wear’ from Estelle Lingerie in Walthamstow, which was sent to Estelle’s customers in unlabelled, brown-paper parcels, was customised by Vivienne with marabou feathers, lace and leather. Once again, this was not designing, but editing and customising available clothing. Vivienne was not, as yet, a fully-fledged designer.

The couple’s attitude to sex was aggressively missionary rather than joyously practised. Like a hectoring Miss Jean Brodie, Vivienne lectured her customers as if in the grip of a disciplined commitment to an idea, rather than a sensuous delight in erotica. She allied herself to McLaren’s campaign ‘to annoy English people … by attacking sexual attitudes, trying to undermine the puritan, philistine basis of our culture’, later describing this as ‘our first innovation’.

In the context of the time, when sexuality was not freely discussed in any but the most liberal company, to promote what McLaren dubbed ‘rubber wear for the street and rubber wear for the office’ was astonishingly provocative. Harper’s & Queen was the only fashion magazine even to refer to SEX’s wares, in an anonymous column by Peter York, who jocularly advised readers to avert their eyes when passing 430 King’s Road – it was just too shocking.

It is easy to forget just how grey and depressed London – even the King’s Road – was in the mid-seventies. Marco Pirroni, the lead guitarist and songwriter of Adam and the Ants, remembers: ‘Every day seemed grey, and you still had fog in those days. In my mohair, I’d pull the sleeves down over my hands to stop the cold. You got addicted to the shop. There was nowhere else you wanted to go. Everywhere else was a let-down. It was so tactile; the smell of the rubber, the clothes felt good.’

Viewing the merchandise of SEX from the perspective of the late 1990s, the outrageous edge has been blunted by more explicit images in film, rock videos and fashion, such as the late Gianni Versace’s sanitised hooker clothes. But in the context of the relatively naïve mid-seventies, its impact was shocking. SEX attracted curiosity, controversy and custom, and its infamously libertarian crusade was underscored by a series of explicit T-shirts. Classic white T-shirts were bought from Tommy Roberts or imported in bulk from New York in the luggage of Terry Doktor or David Ireland, who later worked at the shop. Never one to leave a classic alone, Vivienne believed that the simple T-shirt could be improved – further simplified. She sat for hours deconstructing it, seeking ways to reduce it to its essence. In the end, she settled on the most basic form. She cut off the arms, ripped the shoulder seams open and knotted them back together, giving the garment the make-do feel of the knotted-hankie ‘hat’ favoured by the working-class British holidaymaker. Painstakingly researching and experimenting, Vivienne took three days to design a pared-down T-shirt. She cut two simple squares of cotton jersey, and sewed them roughly along the shoulders and down the sides. There was no attempt at attaching superfluous sleeves. It is unlikely that someone with an art-school or pattern-cutting training would have done that. It looked particularly sexy on women, who would provocatively gather the cotton in folds to cup their breasts. After a while, her confidence growing, she turned the T-shirts inside-out to flaunt their home-made scruffiness. The ripping, the customising and the hands-on craft showed that she and McLaren were attacking capitalist modes of production and consumption, and their customers were instructed to live up to the do-it-yourself ethos and the rhetoric printed across their chests.

At first the reconstructed shirts were hand-printed under McLaren’s instructions, and after 1975 screen-printed up by his old friend Bernie Rhodes, later to be manager of The Clash, with images and text. Vivienne did not devise the copy on the shirts at this stage. ‘She was never someone who could articulate any idea or thought,’ says McLaren. ‘She did not have any ideas. She did not think of herself as being creative, but she was phenomenally good with her hands. She was a great little researcher. She would find a way to make an idea work.’

Vivienne researched into the background of fetish clothing, and became enthralled: ‘I had to ask myself, why this extreme form of dress? Not that I strapped myself up and had sex like that. But on the other hand, I also didn’t want to liberally understand why people did it. I wanted to get hold of those extreme articles of clothing and feel what it was like to wear them.’

It is a common misconception that Vivienne was, or ever has been, interested in street or youth culture per se. Rather it was the dress and deeds of any vociferously or militantly sectarian, curiously-dressed or subversive group that fascinated her and stimulated her to spend hours in libraries and museums researching their social and dress history. The groups could be Samurai warriors, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Shakers or sado-masochists, it did not matter; more important was the chance to study and then emulate the manufacture of their garments.

One of the earliest SEX T-shirts, devised in the autumn of 1974, was a tribal manifesto pinning Vivienne and McLaren’s colours to the mast. Entitled ‘You’re gonna wake up one morning and know what side of the bed you’ve been lying on!’, they listed on the left over a hundred ‘Hates’, starting with ‘Television (not the group)’ and including Mick Jagger, parking tickets, Vogue, ‘The narrow monopoly of media causing harmless creativity to appear subversive’, the head of the Metropolitan Police, Nigel Weymouth (upper-class proprietor of Granny Takes a Trip), designer Ossie Clark, the rag trade, Bianca Jagger, ‘Old clothes, old ideas and all this resting in the country business’ and the suburbs (incidentally, the source of most of their custom). In short, the fashionable establishment, the law, the lazy and inert, and all forms of commercial and passively received entertainment. On the right their ‘Loves’ included Eddie Cochrane, Christine Keeler, SCUM, Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs, the 1930s Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Durutti, Joe Orton, the band Kutie Jones and his SEX PISTOLS, musical journalist Nick Kent and imagination. In short, rockers, sexual adventurers, rebels, renegades and examples of the do-it-yourself ethos. Peter York was immediately impressed by the T-shirt as ‘a very sophisticated insider/outsider thing’. It became a standard editorial device in magazines, to distinguish their caste from others.

Bored once again with Vivienne and dreary London, McLaren decided that he wanted to ‘get the hell out of England’, and in November 1974 he announced that he was leaving for New York – never to return. He had set his sights on managing the New York Dolls, with whom he was still obsessed, and chasing Addie Isman, who had returned to the States. In his six-month absence, Vivienne went out with other men, including playwright Jonathan Gems, a decade her junior. Gems was attracted to Vivienne’s sci-fi looks, which to him evoked ‘the blonde Aryan in Metropolis’. Her outrageous creations – be it rubber bondage gear or sexually explicit T-shirt – were now her everyday attire, worn to the launderette, the supermarket and the shop, as well as out on the town at night.

It was clear to Gems that Vivienne was lonely and ‘desperate to get involved in things. She felt left out.’ On their first evening out together he took her to his new play, The Dentist, at the Royal Court in Sloane Square. Coming out of the theatre, Vivienne was silent. Gems assumed that ‘she must have hated it, but then she admitted that she had only been to the theatre once before, to see Oliver!, the musical.’ They moved on to a pub, where Vivienne ‘picked up two sailors, which left me humiliated. What she used to do was get really drunk and pick up a guy – just like a man picks up a girl – and she was always into tough types.’ On another occasion, Gems invited her to see Nicholas Nickleby by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre, but he had to cancel the arrangement. For weeks, Vivienne ignored his calls. Gems asked a colleague of hers what was wrong. ‘You don’t treat Vivienne like that – it’s like a terrible sin!’ she explained mischievously. Vivienne, says Gems, regarded herself as ‘the diva, the queen, and I’d always been a supplicant to her, which is why she liked me. But as soon as I did anything assertive, I was dumped.’ Gems had been useful to Vivienne. He had introduced Vivienne to the world of bourgeois theatre culture, and his girlfriend Jean Seel, a fashion graduate of the Royal College of Art and a designer for the boutique Alkasura, had gone round to Nightingale Lane on many occasions to teach her to cut patterns. But now he was no longer a compliant acolyte, she had no use for him.

In 1975 Vivienne also met Nils Stevenson, an art student who worked on a stall in Chelsea’s Beaufort Street market, a few hundred yards up from 430 King’s Road. He was attracted by Vivienne’s ‘dynamic and uncompromising attitude’, and describes himself as having had a crush on her. She would drive to Richmond, where he was living in ‘a posh house owned by a big-time drug dealer’, and they would go clubbing together. ‘She was awfully naïve about sex,’ he recalls. ‘Snogging her was like snogging a schoolgirl. She didn’t quite know what to do.’

Though Vivienne had become the powerful embodiment of McLaren’s latest wheeze, her role was to be dramatically superseded by an unflinchingly tough shop assistant. The punk icon and actress Jordan, née Pamela Rooke, made her first pilgrimage to TFTLTYTD in 1973 from Seaford, a sleepy Sussex town with a large retired population on the south coast of England. She was to become the most eccentric and original character of the punk movement, and usurped Vivienne as its female icon, much to her chagrin.

Jordan’s short, sexily curvaceous figure (the antithesis of Vivienne’s spiky physique) had been ballet-trained, enabling her to maximise the impact of her modest five foot four inches height. Expelled from school, by 1973 she had created a look, largely culled from charity shops, that was part Bowie, part fifties rocker. She would team, for example, a gold lamé skirt held out with stiff net petticoats with a circle-stitched, conical fifties bra (worn with nothing over it) and gold winklepickers. Her toilette was fastidiously complicated, taking at least two hours to complete every morning. Dramatic strokes of black kohl defined her eyes, recalling the feline maquillage of Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra, and in contrast to her white peroxided hair, which was swept up like spun sugar into a brittle beehive. A whiff of acrid hairspray hung in the air behind her click-clacking steps.

This astonishing composite was a triumph of artifice over nature. Mainstream fashion was promoting a healthy, natural, outdoor beauty, but Jordan had no truck with such insipidity. Throughout 1973 she made regular pilgrimages to 430 King’s Road, acquainting herself with Michael Collins, a homosexual drug addict who managed the shop from 1972 to 1982. Determined to land a job at the cult boutique, she preposterously reasoned that in order to do so, she should train at Harrods. So, despite her appearance, she served as a sales assistant on the fashion floor of the Knightsbridge store, calling in at SEX on her way home to Seaford. ‘I went to talk to Michael for ages, and I remember being really precocious, and I tried to sell myself to get the job,’ she recalled. Collins fobbed her off, but a few days later he summoned her to start work that afternoon. Jordan became the physical personification of the store in its next two guises – sexual fetish and anarchic punk – and was to be cast as the celluloid icon of punk in Derek Jarman’s bleak 1978 film Jubilee.

Unlike Vivienne, Jordan was not beholden to McLaren. She dressed sexually in order to educate and arouse, rather than to act as his billboard. She would combine, for example, a T-shirt sloganed ‘Venus’, the Roman goddess of love, with black knickers and ripped black stockings held up by suspenders against her bare thighs. Every morning, in this state of virtual undress, she proudly boarded the commuter train from Seaford and headed into London. ‘I was constantly being harassed or hit,’ she remembers with deadpan candour. ‘Men would slide too close to me, and one woman threatened to hit me as my clothes were upsetting her child.’ Observing the verbal and sometimes physical savaging that Jordan endured every day, one considerate British Rail conductor allowed her to travel alone in a first-class compartment. ‘Jordan would take on anybody,’ remembers Ben Kelly. ‘Robert Plant {the rock star} had a go at her standing there in rubber and underwear – that was a big mistake! Don’t try it, she’s much too sharp for you. She had a cutting tongue … Men worshipped her.’

Just as the infant Vivienne had bemoaned the arrival of her sister Olga, she now viewed this independent and handsome female as a threat to her centre-stage role. Jordan’s first impression of Vivienne was of ‘an imposing figure who was rather cautious about me’. This was an understatement. ‘Intimidating’ is the word most often used by those who visited SEX, and it was Jordan, rather than Vivienne, who most powerfully instilled this atmosphere. Standing by the rubber-dressed bed, clad in a studded leather bra, girdle and stilettos, her hair topiaried and lacquered up six inches above her crown, she would knowingly scan the customer through thickly kohled eyes, without a hint of humour or solicitation. What had you come to buy? A spanking? A harangue? A humiliation? ‘If you want the epitome of imposing and intimidating,’ she says, ‘that’s what I was. People had to have courage to walk into that shop.’

To be fitted for a bespoke rubber bodysuit demanded bravery. The customer was invited behind the screen, where Jordan or Vivienne took numerous measurements. Men and women from all walks of life – prostitutes, bankers, truckers, fashion-victims – underwent the ordeal. One day Jordan was behind the screen with ‘a proper businessman’ who was frantically struggling, in a puff of talcum powder (used to ease the body into the rubber), to get his naked body into his new skin when his elbow knocked down the screen. ‘He’d only got it up to his knees. Yeah!’ says Jordan. ‘He was really embarrassed.’ The shop was crowded with sniggering youths.

Alan Jones, a customer and later an assistant there, says that a number of customers became so excited by the merchandise that they would disappear behind the screens to masturbate. The staff found this quite acceptable. Once a customer trying on a rubber mask began crying out for help. ‘You go, Jordan,’ said Vivienne. ‘No, you go.’ Eventually Vivienne went to the man’s assistance, and from behind the screen came whimpers and slapping noises as he tried to unzip his face. When Vivienne emerged, flustered and sweating, the two dominatrixes lost their icy pose and burst into giggles. ‘But it was never at these people, because we were selling these clothes for a reason. It was serious and a whole new world,’ says Jordan. Like Vivienne, she hoped that the gear would provoke a sexual revolution in England, as the repressed discovered the power of deviance.

One regular middle-aged customer, always dressed in a three-piece suit, had a worryingly ruddy face, the veins throbbing through his blood-reddened flesh. Was it stress, high blood pressure or an impending heart attack that caused this flush, the staff speculated. One day while undressing him, Jordan discovered that under his collar and tie he habitually wore a band of rubber around his throat which practically garrotted him. Restriction was his kick. For such aficionados, ‘it wasn’t a passing thrill, they were just genuinely interested in the clothes. It was serious to them. They weren’t leering perverts, and most of them were heterosexual, not homosexual. It might be a sweeping statement, but homosexuals were more into the leatherwear, and the rubber wear was really a specific heterosexual market.’

Utterly uninhibited about either sex or her far from perfect body shape, Jordan became a cult figure, and her following flocked to the shop to admire her performance. Every day she would look different, like a living art object. She hand-painted bold stripes onto a plain Oxford cotton man’s shirt, for example, and pinned communist and Nazi emblems onto her clothing – ideas which were copied and developed by Vivienne. Boys from the council estate opposite the shop had Jordan’s image tattooed onto their arms. One of her keenest admirers was the television newsreader Reginald Bosanquet. After a liquid lunch he would typically arrive with a bouquet for Jordan, purchase a few items for ‘his girlfriend’, then stagger down the three steep steps out onto the King’s Road.

A coterie of strong women gravitated to SEX either as customers – Siouxsie Sioux (later lead singer of the Banshees), Margi Clarke (television presenter), ‘Little Helen’ Wellington-Lloyd (artist), Gerlinde Kostiff (club proprietor) and Toyah Willcox (singer and actress) – or as staff – Jordan, Chrissie Hynde (lead singer of the Pretenders), Debbie Wilson and Tracey O’Keefe. Living up to the shop’s theme, some of the other, transient young assistants allegedly supplemented their wages by working as prostitutes. But their overtly sexual gear was not worn to pull men – ‘We just thought of it as fashion.’

Vivienne, however, did not support her female associates, but regarded them with suspicion. She and Jordan were the most ferocious females in the pack, but Vivienne was jealous of Jordan’s sexual power. In pique, she could treat other female staff with condescension, masked as mothering, and on a number of occasions, feeling threatened by or envious of their sexual attractiveness, she attacked and eventually sacked them. She and Chrissie Hynde once went to a Roxy Music concert together. When Bryan Ferry came onstage with a group of backing singers dressed in sexy US Army uniforms Vivienne leaped to her feet and yelled, ‘You sexist bastard!’ She was thrown out by bouncers, but Hynde chose not to leave with her. To Vivienne, this was tantamount to treachery, and Hynde was summarily dismissed, Vivienne pointing to the door and melodramatically declaiming: ‘Go with the flow, and it’s going that way.’

Nils Stevenson remembers many similar banishments by Vivienne and McLaren: ‘Adam {Ant}, Marco {Pirroni}, Nick Kent and me were all banned from the shop. It was about your commitment; that was what was awfully attractive about them. It was 100 per cent or nothing.’

Jordan says, ‘Vivienne’s always been very different with men and women, and I used to think she just looked at people’s exterior and what they dressed like too much. But I also think it’s to do with how she can mould someone. I had my own mind and vision about how I looked and dressed, I wasn’t someone she could mould, and she just likes to treat people like a project, the way she did with Debbie and Tracey and {later} Sarah Stockbridge. She’d send them to Keith of Smile to have their hair done and then have photos of them taken.’ Looks alone could prompt Vivienne to employ people. Bella Freud, daughter of the painter Lucien Freud, longed to join her sister Rose on the staff of 430 King’s Road. She was turned down until 1976, when Vivienne happened to notice her in a nightclub with her hair shorn, and employed her on the spot.

In 1975 Vivienne boasted to Jordan, ‘Me and Malcolm are eccentrics,’ but Jordan had begun to notice how calculating Vivienne could be: having seen the admiration Jordan and McLaren received for being different, she determined to work on her own image. Simon Barker too never believed that Vivienne was naturally eccentric: ‘She just copied Malcolm and developed this persona; but it wasn’t her.’

Meanwhile, in New York McLaren had found the Dolls in a miasma of narcotics and alcohol – their drummer Billy Murcia had died, and the band was going nowhere. With the help of Marti Thau, the owner of Flip, the New York and London chain selling American second-hand ‘classics’, McLaren inveigled himself into the Dolls’ circle as their unofficial and unpaid manager. A new look and new songs were needed to turn these boys into a successful band, McLaren decided. Their image rather than their music excited him, and he wanted to exploit them, to project onto them his Maoist/situationist notions. The Dolls, for their part, had no interest in politics.

Johnny Thunders, the band’s guitarist, had just written a song called ‘Red Patent Leather’, and it was from this that McLaren – acting more as the band’s ‘haberdasher’, according to New York rock photographer Bob Gruen, than their manager – took his sartorial cue. Deliberately playing on American Cold War fears of ‘Reds under the bed’, McLaren styled the band in PVC jeans and red T-shirts, and photographed them against a massive red backcloth printed with the hammer and sickle. McLaren sent the group’s measurements back home to London, and Vivienne ran up the clothes. Even a tenuous link to McLaren was worth working for, she felt. By February 1975, the new-look Dolls were ready to perform again. It was a disaster. After several fruitless months of struggle in New York, McLaren decided to launch them in Britain. In May he returned to England, Vivienne and an opportune scandal.

Michael Collins, the manager of SEX, had been interviewed by the Metropolitan Police following information that the notorious criminal known as the Cambridge Rapist, who eviscerated his six, mainly student victims after raping them, had bought his full-face leather mask with the word ‘Rapist’ on the forehead from the shop, and was living in London. McLaren decided to exploit the rumours that he had bought his mask from SEX – something Vivienne was loath to do. ‘I was sure it was one of our customers,’ he says, ‘so I phoned Scotland Yard and they came to interview me and I wound up in all these newspapers holding the mask and smiling at it. It caused so much publicity that we were inundated with people coming to buy more of them.’

He also asked Vivienne to produce a Cambridge Rapist T-shirt, which showed the notorious leather mask over the words ‘It’s Been a Hard Day’s Night’. (The caption recalled an earlier sexual scandal, the death in 1969 of the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein following a bout of drugs and sado-masochism, though this was never proved.) Marco Pirroni remembers Vivienne justifying the shirt to him by saying: ‘He was a customer and we thought he should be protected, so we did the T-shirt because ultimately no one is innocent.’ This proved to be a publicity stunt too far. ‘Wearing something on a shirt was a way of endorsing it – you only wore things you were a fan of,’ one customer pointed out. Vivienne was furious about the ‘bad publicity’, but McLaren insisted that all publicity was good publicity.

With hindsight, Vivienne now praises McLaren for his manipulative skills: ‘My reaction was the normal, I’d say stupid, reaction because it had no fantasy to it. Imagine, I wouldn’t have anything to do with the press!’ She was not to forget the lesson, learnt at McLaren’s feet, of opportunistically toying with the press and defying the public’s sense of propriety.

The look purveyed by SEX was hardening, and becoming more intimidating. ‘It was sadistic,’ says Michael Kostiff, ‘with a smoked-glass door that was closed. You couldn’t see into the shop. Friends would say, “Can I come in there with you?” particularly as it had SEX in huge pink letters above the door. It was very shocking at the time.’ Teenagers flocked to SEX in search of any item that would anger their parents, teachers, elders and the public at large. Adolescent girls paraded down the King’s Road in Cambridge Rapist T-shirts, cocking a snook at horrified passers-by. ‘I thought it was fucking great,’ McLaren declared, ‘all these kids buying the shirts and going down the local disco wearing ’em. Those ideas really invigorated kids. They saw them as slightly shocking, and that was all that was important, to be shocking, to annoy a few people because they felt so lethargic.’ Favouring neither sex nor drugs as an antidote to his boredom, McLaren got his kicks from voyeurism, the outrage of mainstream opinion.

By the summer of 1976, according to Alan Jones, who had now joined the staff of SEX, the shop was taking quite a lot of money, but it was never banked – Vivienne and McLaren simply used it to live and to make more clothes. When two tax inspectors arrived at 430 King’s Road one day, Vivienne whispered urgently to Jones, Michael Collins and Jordan, who were serving, ‘Just pretend you’re customers!’

Jones, who later became a critic specialising in horror films, styled himself in an aggressively homosexual manner. Wearing tight black leather jeans and black see-through rubber T-shirts from SEX, he would apply stage blood to his arms and chest and strap a hypodermic syringe to his arm. Before the curtain went up on the first night of the musical A Chorus Line at the Drury Lane theatre, he was approached by the manager and informed that the performance would not begin until he removed his swastika armband.

The first SEX T-shirts had been printed by hand on Vivienne’s kitchen table with a child’s printing set and stencils. Each was hand-stamped, and many were customised – with marabou feathers, horsehair, lace, studs or shoulderpads cut from rubber tyres – and hand-inscribed with fabric dye. The later T-shirts were screen-printed. As the months passed, other villains joined the Cambridge Rapist in the rogues’ gallery of anti-heroes and rebels celebrated on cotton. Whether the eighteenth-century highwayman Dick Turpin, Charles Dickens’s Fagin and his Artful Dodger, or modern mass murderers and terrorists, all were lauded as freedom fighters who attacked the confinement of the moral majority.

The irreverent ‘Mickey and Minnie’ and ‘Snow White’ T-shirts attacked the Disneyfication of childhood. In Vivienne and McLaren’s eyes, the American entertainment industry had robbed children of their imagination and left them dependent on a commercially-driven cartoon culture. ‘Mickey and Minnie’ showed the Disney icons fornicating, Mickey’s ear defaced by an anarchist symbol, while Snow White was surrounded by sexually excited dwarfs.

McLaren sought scandalous material from every source – political, sexual, social. Probably the most notorious of SEX’s shock-tactic T-shirts was ‘Two Naked Cowboys’. Face to face in Stetsons and boots, naked from the waist down, two men stand with penises drawn – dangling so close that they almost touch. Alan Jones was arrested in Piccadilly Circus in August 1975 for wearing the shirt, and on 7 August the police raided the shop and McLaren and Vivienne were arrested.

A meeting was held between Vivienne, McLaren, Jones, Nils Stevenson and Gene Krell at the Portobello Hotel, where Jones worked as the night porter. Stevenson remembers that Vivienne and McLaren promised to back Jones at his trial, but they failed to turn up on the day. With no supporters in court, Jones pleaded guilty and was fined £30. Nicholas de Jong, then the court correspondent of the Guardian, asked him afterwards why he hadn’t defended himself and taken a stand about creative freedom. The case made the front page of the Guardian the following day, and a number of letters in support of Jones were written to the editor. Jones remains bitter about the whole incident: ‘They didn’t even pay the fine! I got the shop a lot of publicity, but it did fuck-all for me!’

After a second, farcical court hearing in November, in which the judge insisted that the space between the cowboys’ organs be measured in court with a school ruler, Vivienne and McLaren were charged with ‘exposing to public view an indecent exhibition’ and fined £50. They continued to sell the T-shirts one at a time from under the counter, hiding the rest of the stock in a flat above the shop. The police conducted surprise raids but never found them, because the flat was accessed from the next-door building.

Toying with the theme of sex, Vivienne came up with a strangely surreal design: a pair of naked female breasts printed on a T-shirt’s chest. The confusing sexual image, and the shocking displacement caused by seeing it worn by a man, was to reappear in her collections a decade later. SEX clothing was not usually erotic.

By turning S&M gear into a defiant fashion, removing it from the privacy of the bedroom and flaunting it in a juvenile, ‘Up yours!’ manner in the street, Vivienne and McLaren robbed it of erotic mystery and turned it into combat gear for a post-permissive sexual liberation adolescent army. Passion ended in fashion. The couple’s very language was confrontationally righteous rather than alluringly seductive. Nils Stevenson remembers that because the clothes sold at SEX were so ‘kinky’, many people assumed that Vivienne and McLaren must have had a ‘particularly sexual relationship, and that being into a particular kink or perversion bound them together’. Only later did he realise how sexually naïve they both were, and that what they actually shared was an ability to be obsessed by another person. Vivienne became intrigued, for example, by one client who was a prostitute: ‘It was a strange world to Vivienne, and she became really besotted by her and what she did to her clients.’

When feminists argued that SEX’s sado-masochist accessories degraded women, Vivienne hit back with the rhetorical question, who was being degraded? Certainly not her dominatrix troops. The threat – if not the delivery – of sexual ravaging by these teenage harridans challenged traditional views of the man’s role as sexual aggressor. ‘We’re not just here to sell fetish clothing,’ Vivienne claimed in the pages of the sex magazine Forum, ‘but to convert, educate, liberate … we want to take it out of the bedroom and onto the streets.’ For McLaren, profit and amusement were the motives, but Vivienne believed that their campaign would irrevocably alter English attitudes to sex.

It was not to be. The SEX manifesto had little appeal beyond the shop’s loyal young following, and it encountered the same aversion as the Rational Dress Movement, founded in 1884 to promote healthy and appropriate women’s clothing, had done a century earlier. A political manifesto pinned onto a new style of garment rarely persuades the public to adopt it. It took the alluring oils of the Pre-Raphaelite painters and, more powerfully, the exotic Eastern promise of Diaghilev’s orientalism to entice fashionable women to loosen their robes, discard their unhealthy corsets and live a little. Vivienne and McLaren’s support for Valerie Solanas’s violent rampage against the opposite sex was hardly libido-boosting, as the opening sentence of her ‘SCUM Manifesto’ suggests:

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complex automation and destroy the male.

Many of the young – and most of those attracted to the shop were still adolescent – were asexual, homosexual or sexually unsure. Their naïve and playful dressing-up lightened the image of the darker context which McLaren and Vivienne were dabbling in. Simon Barker, then a shy suburban teenager from Bromley who shopped at SEX, explains: ‘We did want to shock, but not in a tacky way. We were really into looking great – we felt great. We didn’t want to look the same as everyone else … People used to call us street theatre, and we just thought everything else was boring.’ McLaren and Vivienne’s designs may have been calculated to challenge received opinion, but the kids just wanted to annoy their elders and have a good time. The look was simply the precursor to punk, a singularly asexual style.

McLaren claimed that one of Vivienne’s breasts had deflated after Ben’s birth, making her ‘very self-conscious about that when she was naked’. Whether this was true or not, by now Vivienne’s physical self-confidence was blossoming. In the name of free speech and free action she would totter around the shop on high heels, dressed in a totally see-through skin-tight pink rubber T-shirt or négligée, while McLaren, more timidly dressed, sat watching the customers. No one, however, was as fearless as Jordan. While Vivienne never, to Simon Barker’s recollection, wore see-through rubber in the street during the day, preferring to dress in leather or PVC jeans and a T-shirt, ‘like a tomboy’, Jordan dared to wear the most outrageous SEX gear as if it was normal clothing in her day-to-day life: ‘Jordan thought she looked great, and she could cope with the admiration and the abuse. She was so sure of herself. I don’t think Vivienne would have coped with that.’ Barker recalls that on the one occasion when Vivienne did turn up at his flat dressed outrageously in a rubber bodysuit, ‘she kept going on about it as if it was a big thing. Vivienne didn’t go out like that a lot. Jordan did.’

Will England, a student at the London International Film School, photographed Vivienne in the shop early one summer morning in 1975 while McLaren was out of town. She posed in front of a piece of fetish sculpture, a nail-studded leg (by Lawrence Daniels, later to become a multi-millionaire by patenting the holograms used on credit cards) draped in a black chain-hung T-shirt trimmed with horsehair tails and menacingly stretching a ‘blind’ black rubber mask. To England’s surprise, Vivienne ‘volunteered to wear the pink rubber bodysuit – she was not at all shy’, and followed his directions like a chillingly blank mannequin. It was an exhibitionist pose, not one that, despite Vivienne and McLaren’s claims to the contrary, indicated a liberated attitude.

A woman dressed in this gear, Vivienne argued, was courageously exploring sexual self-determination. This was a poor argument. In the mid-seventies, fashion was under attack from the feminist movement. Fashion, it was argued, simply pandered to the stereotypically sexist image of women. In protest, some feminists adopted an extreme form of asexual, workaday dress.

Neither Vivienne nor McLaren was a feminist, and the appropriation of Vivienne’s work by certain writers and commentators in the movement was ill-considered. Ted, rocker and biker uniforms were patently macho and focused on men: their gangs’ attendant women were dressed and treated as sexual chattels. Like a Hell’s Angel woman, Vivienne’s adoption of subversive S&M dress was not remotely feminist. Simon Barker argues: ‘Vivienne throughout her career has made women sexy by making them in control of their sexuality rather than suppressing it or playing a passive role. That’s what the feminists hate most about Vivienne, because it’s much more threatening to them and their beliefs when women want to take control of their sexuality … But Vivienne put them in control of those things, and they wear them for themselves and for the power those clothes give them. They can deliver or not, but the choice is theirs.’

This is a strength accorded to Vivienne’s work by others, rather than a motive that she herself fixed upon. She was, and has remained, in thrall to a series of manipulative men, from whom she has tolerated disrespect and abuse because she was convinced that it was only through these men that she could transcend her background and make something of herself. One employee remembers Vivienne telling her: ‘Malcolm used to kick me and kick me. I think he just wanted to kick me right out of his life. Men get away with so much, don’t they?’ At the same time, Vivienne failed to develop profound friendships with her own sex, casting weak young women as dolls to be dressed up, and strong ones as sexual and intellectual threats. To view her as a feminist, even a maverick one, is rash.

In the mid-eighties, elements within fashion and feminism encouraged a détente, epitomised in 1985 by the action taken in Paris by the feminist bookshop Maison des Femmes, which devoted its windows to the work of the French designer Sonia Rykiel. Reappraising Vivienne’s work, some journalists have attempted to appropriate her antics and clothes to the feminist cause, but they fail to understand (easy to do, since much of her thinking is fractured and inarticulately communicated) that her pronouncements were essentially not liberating. She simply wished to please McLaren, to practise his sensationalist creed and to attract the public’s attention, just as she had done as a teenager by wearing her marguerite earrings.

But McLaren’s youthful pranks had turned nasty, and he was prepared to go further. Since the New York Dolls had collapsed, and Richard Hell refused to join McLaren’s planned London version of the band, the self-styled Fagin had to find his own street urchins to perform his situationist pranks. They had been lurking in the background, approvingly listed under ‘Loves’ on the ‘What Side of the Bed’ T-shirt in the autumn of 1974 under the name Kutie Jones and his SEX PISTOLS. Into the limelight stepped four working-class teenagers. The aspiring impresario’s first step was to abbreviate their name to the more threatening ‘Sex Pistols’.