Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die

The chicken bones T-Shirt made its appearance spelling out ‘rock’, ‘perv’ or ‘skum’ hung from the shirt by tiny chains. T-shirts were deconstructed and made sleeveless with accessories like zips and studs or even cut-off children’s bicycle tires and horsehair applied to them. In addition, there were zoot suits, Levi 501’s and brothel creepers to add to the range from the counter-culture.

Also making an appearance was the iconic, and now legendary, ‘Venus’ top (below right). This surely is an homage to John Dove and Molly White’s Elvis Sun t-shirt (below left) as Westwood started to find her feet designing and putting together clothes and whom she knew as designers/suppliers to one of the shop’s previous incarnations as the Paradise Garage.

They were featured regularly in fashion magazines and supplied/made clothes for Alice Cooper (Chicken bones t-shirt) and the New York Dolls, and again costumes for films like Ken Russell’s Mahler film. In it is a dream sequence where the composer meets his Nazi enemy who is dressed in a black leather skirt with a swastika studded onto the backside, studded leather tasseled top and topped off with a nazi helmet. McLaren/Westwood supplies the skirt and top. Is this their first use of the swastika on a design?

Among the people attracted to the shop are some lads Steve Jones and Wally Nightingale who have started a band. McLaren is taken with Steve and they become friends. Another person is Glen Matlock who enquires about a job and becomes a Saturday boy. He is also studying at St Martin’s Art College.

A visit to New York in 1973 on a selling trip sees a reacquaintance with the New York Dolls. They see the band and Patti Smith, visit Max’s Kansas City, visit the Factory, do cocaine and are exposed to the sexual underside of people filming other people being whipped and the hardcore leather S&M fetish scene and clothing involved.

While the biker/rocker chic may have had hints of homoerotic this is the real deal. The New York gay S&M scene had the same origin as biker gangs and the later rockers. These gangs offered men coming back from the Second World War to be in like-minded company and it evolved from there into deviant heavy sex, danger and taboo all driven by its fetish clothing of immaculately made leather jeans jackets and hoods along with hats, belts, wristbands, gloves, handcuffs, nipple clamps and studs. Tom of Finland with its highly stylised homoerotic art sums it up. In London, the London Leatherman is a specialist in manufacturing these and supplies McLaren.

It’s a whirlwind eye-opener of sex, drugs and rock n roll. Feeling they were becoming too middle of the road and safe the visit inspired McLaren to move up a gear

Another gamechanger is first Glen Matlock’s then Bernie Rhodes’s access to a screen printer that when matched with Vivienne’s idea for 2 squares of cloth, seams on the outside – one size fits all now matter how badly and the the stream of ideas from McLaren and Rhodes you had a virtual Warhol’s Factory printing a mind-boggling amount of designs and variations. The initial designs though rough and ready were already setting the scene for what was to come. One was drawing a line between them and us and the other the first of the direct challenges. One day you’re gonna wake up T shirt depending on who you believe was an idea of Bernie Rhodes with input from everyone else and is the first mention of the QT Jones Sex Pistols.

It would take McLaren a couple of months to refit and retheme the shop which is an age to be not taking money in retail but the wait would be worth it and change fashion forever.

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