Let It Rock
In 1971 the King’s Road location was known as Paradise Garage run by Trevor Myles and Bradley Mendelsohn and had sold clothes to people such as Iggy Pop (leather jacket tiger print panels Raw Power) and had people like Clapton coming in. It was ostentatious with its fluorescent green corrugated outside exterior, petrol pump and Mustang covered in tiger stripe.
Myles buggered off to the Caribbean in a love triangle and in a fortuitous event Mendelson rented out the back of his shop to McLaren, his friend Patrick Casey and his partner Vivienne Westwood,
With Mendelsohn a no-show, McLaren took over the shop which was how Myles found it when he returned. There was some altercation but in the end McLaren, Westwood and Casey had 430 Kings Road. This they then painted black and renamed Let It Rock after the Chuck Berry song.
This was the start of the pair’s linking of fashion, youth rebellion and music and actively courting the Teddy boy (teds) youth subculture that had persisted into the Seventies from the fifties. Steve Jones would go and hang out there and Roberta Bayley was an assistant for a time. Roberta would go back to the States and become key in the American punk scene producing iconic photos and record covers for the likes of The Ramones and Heartbreakers.
The shop was done up like a suburban teddy boy’s front room and the pair sold copies of original teddy boy clothes, brothel creepers and old records and posters. The aim was for the shop as a hang-out.
The pair were influenced by designers John Dove & Molly White who were groundbreaking in their t-shirt designs, materials used and printing processes and who had supplied a range of their Wonder Workshop t-shirts to the Paradise Garage including the ones below. They left when the pair arrived but formed a relationship of shorts and Vivienne had a collection of their clothes.
One of the earliest Let It Rock t-shirts came from this time which was the Vive Le Rock one (as worn by Sid Vicious) which they made for the Rock n Roll festival in London 1972 that had on the bill Bo Diddley and strangely MC5 and Gary Glitter.
Tiring though of the conservatism, racism and reactionary attitude of the teddy boys and becoming a costumier for MOR TV shows (apparently Lionel Blair came in demanding clothes for his backing dancers for a Saturday evening TV show) and films (they provided drapes for That’ll Be The Day with Ringo Starr) McLaren & Westwood changed their approach after seeing the slogan on the back of a biker jacket – Too Fast To Live. Too Young To Die.
TalkPunk
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