The year is 1974, sitting at 430 King's road in Chelsea, Vivienne Westwood and then boyfriend Malcolm McLaren’s shop saw a new rebrand to their now infamous ‘SEX’ boutique.
Inside the store was decorated with graffiti from Valeria Solana's ‘SCUM Manifesto’ with chicken wire on the walls, and a deep red carpet and rubber curtains. It matched the clothes that Westwood and McLaren were selling, SEX sold a lot of fetish and bondage gear with an array of Westwood’s politically driven clothing that she was starting to develop a name for at the time.
Around this time, in New York, the first prototype of punk started to appear, giving us artists like Television, The Ramones, and Patti Smith. McLaren was infatuated with this new wave, having just managed the New York Dolls and played a huge part in bringing it over to the UK. When he returned, he started taking interest in the regulars at SEX and came to manage a new band – as we now know them: The Sex Pistols. You see, the shop had become a meeting ground for alternative people to meet and form a community, and when the Sex Pistols took off, the boutique became a focal point of the punk scene.
Westwood took homage to the 1950’s ‘rocker’ look which was synonymous with leather jackets full of patches and badges, and motorcycles and slicked back hair, but this time revitalised with the S&M and bondage style of clothing that she was stocking in the store. This created an ‘anti-fashion’ aesthetic that is still synonymous today with the punk image. Westwood also styled her looks with safety pins and razor blades, nudity, and brash makeup for the girls that was a shock to the system compared to mainstream culture in the 70s.
Whilst we commend taking such a jump that quickly during the 1970s, the arrogant nature of punk did cause quite a lot of controversy. Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious was often pictured wearing swastikas on his clothing for the shock value of using the symbol. It was an effort to separate us from them, and to channel the difference between the common place ideology to everything that punk truly stood for. Mclaren himself and Sid’s partner Nancy Sprugen were both also Jewish, which I think is something incredibly important to recognise here but does, overall, just fall at a pretty poor attempt at shock factor which didn’t get their message across at all.
Encompassing Jamie Reid’s iconic Queen portraits, Westwood tailored her clothing to look more distressed, and it quickly became one of the main iconographies of the original punk wave.
I think what’s most telling about why Westwood had so much influence over the aesthetics of punk – it was all DIY. She could inspire others to express themselves through the ‘cut and stick’ appeal that a lot of her graphic work did have. It looked messy and unappealing, and thats exactly what punk was, it fit in perfectly, contorting what was expected of the youths of the 1970s to the absolute dichotomy of itself.
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