SEX

In 1974 the shop was gutted, renovated and re-opened under the name SEX. McLaren and Westwood weren’t coy about it either as the name was emblazoned in four foot high pink rubber capitals; literally putting it into your face. The shop walls were thick with gobs of latex and sprayed with lines from Valerie Solanas’s Scum (Society For Cutting Up Men) Manifesto and situationist slogans.

The change again marked a shift as the couple went up a gear and taboos were openly brought into the high street not least with the name of the shop specialized in fetish and bondage gear. Sex and deviancy was an underground thing typically serviced by mail order and porn mags stacked high up shelves. Sex was not really talked about and especially what was viewed as deviant sex.

Where did the name come from? McLaren & Westwood had kept in touch with designers John Dove and Molly White who’d supplied t-shirts to when the shop was Paradise Garage and were an obvious influence on them.

John White V&M wanted to talk about a collaboration with us. They were especially interested in changing the shop from the Teddy Boy culture to a more challenging concept. They wanted to stock our new photo-collage printed T’s.

We discussed the story of DaDa-ist art and pornography. Vivienne was investigating sex fetish clothing … She was interested in the idea of shaking off the taboo – she saw that people were buying their fetish-wear in brown paper bags ‘under the counter’ – she talked about making this style of clothing more accessible through opening a new shop and closing Let It Rock. Honeyee Interview, 10.10.2017

It went further with a magazine cover proposal story for the German magazine Stern from John & Molly where they’d had to redesign their proposed cover (shown below) because it was deemed too shocking.

John White The word” SEX “became a hot topic when Malcolm and Vivienne first visited our studio, … I referred to a time in the 60’s when we were …asked to design the cover of Germany’s “Stern Magazine”. Stern was planning a story on the ‘Sexual practices of the German people’.

…What I proposed was a design that portrayed the word “SEX” in pink on a black background to extend over the entire cover….Vivienne and Malcolm liked this story and named their store “SEX”. Honeyee Interview, 10.10.2017

Jordan …it was a mish mash of wonderful things. Screen printed t-shirts and Angora sweaters mingled with studded and zipped masks and leather crotch pouches, whips and cire pants. Malcolm and Vivienne’s discoveries in fetish land were of both the hard and smooth varieties. Black vinyl trousers and rubberised canvas raincoats in pastel, ice-cream shade, like pretty flashers macs…above it [the old metal hospital bed] was an alcove..negligees made from yellow latex with purple rubber edging. Aprons, skirts, purple stockings and short, frilly tops, all made of rubber, hanging next to rubber bras and suuspender belts. Defying Gavity

Now t-shirts moved to deliberately provocative images. The infamous ‘two cowboys’ t shirt (based on the style of Tom Of Finland appeared around August 1975 and got SEX assistant Alan Jones arrested for wearing it and fined, though there was a surreal element to the court case with arguments over whether the penises were touching. Another one was the t-shirt designed in the period between SEX and Let It Rock with a nude black basketball player and his extended penis (Johnny Rotten wore a version when the Sex Pistols played at Andrew Logan’s party on Valentine’s Day 1976)

In an interview in Street Life, May 1976 McLaren, dressed in a ‘Be reasonable Demand The Impossible – sloganned shirt, says this to columnist Rick Szymanski.

Malcolm predicts that one of the things about his shop is the cult it could start…”I think the kids have a hankering to be part of a movement (like the Teddy Boys of the Fifties and the Mods of the Sixties). They want the same, to associate with a movement that’s hard and tough and in the open like the clothes we’re selling here.”

Jordan It was all about the shop. It was a hub, a place that was meant to be as a catalyst for everything else. It’s never been an easy place to get to – it’s a long way from Sloane Square – so you had to really mean to want to go there. Dazed

Among these was a youth named John Lydon had started to visit the shop.  The shop attracted the striking Susan Ballion soon to be Siouxsie who bought clothes there. She was part of a group of friends who would become known as the Bromley Contingent but at the time were listening to Roxy Music, going to gay clubs (like Louiuses and Chagaramas) and dressing outrageously with a penchant for dressing in fetish gear and Nazi swastikas in the style of Sally Bowles in the film Cabaret or sex and swastika films like Salon Kitty and The Night Porter.

Also visiting and buying was Viv Albertine who was girlfriend of Mick Jones from The Clash, Marco Pirroni, Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto and Pauline Murray from oop North.

As the band start to play more gigs they, like the shop, began to pick up like minded people like the Bromley Contingent and start to influence other bands and musicians forming bands. Followers attracted to the band, wear pieces of clothing from SEX but add their own clothes sourced from Oxfam or army surplus stores, sometimes defacing or altering them. The audience begins to become as newsworthy as the band.

Adorned with zips and D-rings, it featured a detachable bum flap made from black towelling, not to mention a deliberately naughty zip that ran from the crotch to the arse. There were also big pockets, plus adjustable straps at the knee, enabling the wearer to restrict their own movement. The overall effect hinted at straightjackets of the sort used to compromise the physical freedom of psychotic patients.

“Those trousers, our bondage trousers, were a declaration of war against repression,” McLaren later wrote in The Guardian, in 2007. Mr Rotten, meanwhile, had a sort of love-hate relationship with the attention-grabbing bondage suit which looked so good on him. In his 2014 autobiography, Anger Is An Energy, he recalled it as, “the most restricting, disgusting, annoying thing to be in. I felt really hateful in it. I loved it!”

The second garment making its appearance and now recognised as a classic design was the Anarchy shirt. While some people will try and credit Jordan with this, it’s a typical McLaren/Westwood creation. There’s a spark – Jordan wearing a shirt – and there’s the execution – the deconstruction of the pinstripe to almost concentration camp stripes, slogans, Nazi regalia upside Nazi insignia and a choice of armbands. It’s the swastika armband that stands out, but it’s interesting how the potency of that symbol completely dominates the viewer rather than the image of Marx.

Gene Krell When the ‘Dolls’ folded Malcolm returned to Vivienne. Her latest design was an anarchy shirt—distressed to look old, with bleached-out stripes, and appliquéd with badges, flags and slogans: ‘Only anarchists are Pretty!,’ ‘Dangerously close to Love,’ ‘We are not afraid of Ruins,’ ‘Chaos,’ and a woven label from Chinatown of the portrait of Karl Marx, to which Malcolm added a swastika. This shirt looked as if it belonged to an urban guerilla and Malcolm saw in it the key to a new collection of clothes. Gene Krell, Vivienne Westwood 

Add into this mix the cropped spiky short hair, liberal use of safety pins and piercings and the appropriation of gay and dominatrix S&M studded belts and wristbands from the London Leatherman shop and your classic punk was complete.

Fashion and music come together on the Sex Pistols’ incendiary debut TV Appearance on Tony Wilson’s So It Goes in September 1976 playing Anarchy In The UK. There are three Anarchy shirts on display including Jordan’s ultra-rare first version (with swastika taped over) nicely balanced out by Rotten’s homemade détourned ensemble and Cook wearing Rotten’s defaced ‘I Hate’ Pink Floyd t-shirt.

Not long after this on the 1st December, the band appeared live on the Bill Grundy TV show and swore which caused uproar in the media and press. In the programme, a number of the Pistols and entourage are wearing SEX clothes. Simon Barker is wearing Jordan’s Anarchy shirt, Rotten in mohair and Jones in TITS t-shirt)

Punk went overground with a bang and into the public’s consciousness. Acres of newspaper and magazine columns were devoted to the subject both fascinated and appalled. There were even articles on how to dress like a punk with bin liners and safety pins.

In December 1976 the shop once again changed look and name and this would be the last for Westwood and McLaren for punk. Its new look, in the way these things happen, seemed tailor-made for and reflecting the turbulent times ahead.

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