Tripping down King’s Road once again, a new boutique has opened a few doors down – SEX. The laconic, in-yer-face, don’t-give-a-damn attitude of such a name marks the new era of punk. The late Dame Vivienne Westwood’s and Malcolm McLaren's boutique has opened in all its transgressive glory.

Punk has always been seen as built on the rejection of hippieism. Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols was said to have been recruited as the enfant terrible singer of the band while wearing a desecrated Pink Floyd shirt with ‘I hate’ scrawled at the top. Yet, fascinatingly, SEX was opened under the name Let it Rock by McLaren in 1971, overlapping with Granny’s existence for a whole three years (Granny closed its doors in 1974). Punk and psychedelia don’t just overlap in time or space, however. I want to argue that at the centre of both movements’ experimental fashion lies a desire to shock, to outrage and transgress; both promote – be it wearing satin or safety pins – a radical politics.

A weird point of transmutation from psychedelic to punk rock lies in the figures of Sy/id. Sid Vicious (often smirked at for winning his position as bassist in the Pistols for his jet-black, spiked-hair look, rather than his musical ability) inherited his infamous nickname after being viciously bitten by Rotten’s pet hamster. In turn, the hamster was named after the withdrawn, reclusive rockstar Syd Barrett, early pioneer behind the psychedelic rock of Pink Floyd and frequenter of Granny. Such a connection would deepen when Jamie Reid – the artistic force behind the iconic décollage, ransom-letter graphic style of the Sex Pistols – attempted to lure Barrett out of retirement to take on the role of producer for the Pistols’ one-and-only 1977 album, Never Mind the Bollocks. This would unfortunately be to no avail. But there’s an alternative history out there where the cult psychedelic rockstar Syd Barrett was resurrected in the name of punk. Something of Barrett’s defiant rejection of the music industry and commercialism (he said to Rolling Stone in 1971 that all he wanted to do was play the guitar ‘but too many people got in the way’) seemed to appeal to this emerging scene which would become known as ‘punk’ – originally an insult as old as Shakespeare’s plays. Such a vignette highlights the points of contact between two seemingly disparate movements.

The Sex Pistols playing in 1977 (Wikimedia Commons)

In the 2000 rockumentary The Filth and The Fury, directed by Julien Temple, Johnny Rotten expressed his disdain for what 70s fashion had become. Flares were flailing past heaps of rubbish bags, uncollected due to widespread strikes. It was the escapism of such an image which Rotten hated. So, Rotten started cutting up the trash bags and dressing in them. He wore the filth which society was failing to recognise. And Rotten knew there was a beauty in that, as he menaces in ‘God Save the Queen’: ‘We’re the flowers in the dustbin’. To bring in Oscar Wilde again, Rotten wore such trash to show ‘the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.’

Similarly Glen Matlock, original bassist of the Pistols, reminisces on working at SEX in a recent article; he says of Vivienne: ‘She was one of the first vegetarians I met […] when I got chicken, she’d take the bones home to boil and sew on to T-shirts.’ Though there has been criticism over Westwood’s and McLaren’s pricing of items in SEX, it is precisely this DIY attitude with which punk democratises fashion. In other words, you didn’t have to buy from SEX to look “punk”, the point was to do-it-your-damn-self, to craft your own authentic style with the materials you had at hand. The safety pin would become emblematic of this DIY ethos.

This aesthetic and political attitude of DIY lies at the heart of both punk and psychedelic fashion, whether it be adapting Indian bedspreads or bin liners into gowns. It was about fashioning an external image to reflect your own internal landscape and beliefs by any means, and textiles, possible. As the late Jordan said, main assistant in SEX, ‘I wanted to be a living work of art’. Such a declaration again runs close to Wilde’s aphorism which greeted those entering Granny: ‘one should either be a work of art or wear a work of art’. Jordan created abstract shapes with her make-up, making her face a kind of canvas of modernist art. She was the queen of ‘PVC, fishnets, rubber [and] casual nudity’, viewing her train journey to work as a kind of performance stunt: ‘Some of the things I wore were quite near the knuckle […] people were apoplectic with rage. I had to be moved into first class for my own safety.’

Like Granny, SEX had its own aphorism scrawled in the interior, alongside lines from the 1967 SCUM Manifesto: ‘Craft must have clothes but | Truth loves to go naked’. This goes back to a collection of witty sayings called Gnomologia (1732) by Thomas Fuller, none other than an alumnus of Queens’ College, Cambridge. The aphorism’s cheeky assertion of authenticity (‘nakedness’) is perfect for the politics of punk and it shows the true complexity of thought, and wit, behind the movement.

Jamie Reid’s ransom letter style logo for The Sex Pistols which would be used as the cover for the ‘Never Mind the Bollocks’ LP in 1977 (Wikimedia Commons)

The intellectual context behind such fashion stunts goes back to Westwood’s and McLaren’s interest in the Situationist International. This radical leftist movement emerging from the late 1950s sought to revitalise Marxist critique, updating it to the conditions of late-capitalism. One such practice, developed by theorists such as Guy Debord, was known as détournement. This practice was about ‘hijacking’ (its literal translation) the expressions of the capitalist system, through its media culture, to turn such energies against itself. Perhaps the best example of this is Vivienne Westwood’s, Jamie Reid’s, and the Sex Pistols’ collective (ab)use of the royal portrait of Her Majesty in their respective areas of fashion, art and music. The subversion of the royal portrait, with a safety pin pierced through the Queen’s lips, has become iconic; the mock-anthem of ‘God Save the Queen’ on the Bollocks album is infamous. Westwood’s and McLaren’s ripped-up shirt, which uses Reid’s satirical graphic design, can be seen being worn by guitarist Steve Cook in this electrifying music video for ‘Holidays In The Sun’. The symbols of royal authority – the Crown; the United Kingdom flag; the national anthem – are all hijacked and turned against themselves as the majestic and patriotic becomes crude, ridiculous, and hilariously so.

Similarly, Sid Vicious flaunts a white garter, symbol of the chivalric Order of the Garter, in his parodic solo of Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ in 1978. Punk is indeed the great movement of parody, of growling and smirking in the face of power, and fashion was its fundamental tool in doing so. As the late Dame Westwood articulates in her manifesto, Active resistance to propaganda: ‘A work of art may show us ourself – who we are and our place in the world. It is a mirror which imitates life.’ Such a philosophical statement reminds me of Rotten’s own pithy remark on the punk scene in The Filth and the Fury: ‘People that had no self-respect suddenly started to view themselves as beautiful in not being beautiful.’ Fashion was an integral part of that revelation and orientation, of being able to find a place outside of a rejected conventionality which has failed to please or hold you. As Vicious triumphantly declares of his misfit nonconformity in ‘My Way’:

Johnny Rotten wearing the ‘Anarchy Shirt’ from *SEX* in 1977 (Wikimedia Commons)

For one to think freely, declares Sid, one must dress freely – and say so. In a hysterical BBC interview in 1977, Derek Nimmo pays a visit to SEX. Rotten, Vicious, Steve Jones and Jordan are all present. Westwood shows us around the boutique sporting a stunning, tartan-patterned bondage piece. She pulls out the famous ‘Anarchy Shirt’ from the rail. Nimmo asks ‘what’s actually wrong with what I’m wearing?’ Westwood: ‘It’s a question of how you feel. The point is to change yourself…’ Nimmo, cutting in with an RP accent: ‘But why? Why does one have to change?’ ‘Because then you’ll feel great’, Westwood promises with a smirk.

And so we have returned full circle – back to royalty. With all this talk of the royal portraits and the national anthem, Charles II once again does not seem so out of place on his road, the King’s Road, be it in the company of the hippies of Granny’s or the punks of SEX. Yet across the centuries, this spectre of royalty certainly sits differently… What will the future hold then for King’s Road, now Charles is back on the throne in his third instalment?

King’s Road: Fashion from Psychedelia to Punk (Part 2)

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