//Malcolm McLaren outside 430 King’s Road, March 1972. Photo: Mirrorpix//

In the shop’s various incarnations I made clothes that looked like ruins. I created something new by destroying the old. This wasn’t fashion as a commodity; this was fashion as an idea.

From his foreword to The Look: Adventures In Rock & Pop Fashion, Malcolm McLaren, 2001

The first exhibition to examine the late cultural iconoclast Malcolm McLaren’s engagement with fashion in the 70s and early 80s is to be held next month in Copenhagen.

Let It Rock: The Look Of Music The Sound Of Fashion – curated by Young Kim of the Malcolm McLaren Estate and me – is being staged from August 3-6 as part of the Copenhagen International Fashion Fair; creative directors Pierre Tzenkoff and Arnaud Vanraet have commissioned the show in conjunction with an exhibition entitled Industrial by Nature by streetwear guru Virgil Abloh.

Let It Rock will investigate McLaren’s deep roots in fashion (his mother + stepfather operated the womenswear brand Eve Edwards in the 50s and 60s and his grandfather was a master tailor’s cutter) and will also demonstrate how he drew on his art-school investigations into environments to become the progenitor of the pop up shop concept.

Let It Rock revolves around an installation dedicated to the shop from which it takes its title, complete with a recreation of the frontage in black corrugated iron and pink rock&roll signage McLaren designed when he opened the premises with Vivienne Westwood in 1971.

The exhibition is divided into six sections each dedicated to the manifestations at 430 King’s Road as well as Nostalgia Of Mud, the outlet operated by McLaren and Westwood at 5 St Christopher’s Place in London’s West End from 1982 to 1984.

These  sections will all feature rarely-seen and never previously publicly-exhibited clothing designs, photography, sketches, notes, magazine spreads and even pages from McLaren’s notebooks.

Among the exhibits is McLaren’s own ‘I Groaned…” t-shirt from Sex, the Chico hat and grey Crombie coat he wore in the famous portrait for the Witches collection taken by Steven Meisel for Vogue in 1983, the short sheepskin jacket worn through the Buffalo Girls and Duck Rock period and a Let It Rock drape suit fitted personally by McLaren for guitarist songwriter Marco Pirroni.

//McLaren modelling Witches in the Chico hat and Crombie coat with Talisa Soto and Vivienne Westwood by Steven Miesel, US Vogue, June 1983//

//Button, pocket and cuff detail of Marco Pirroni’s drape jacket fitted by McLaren and made by Sid Green, 1974//

//Leather t-shirt with Let It Rock label from 430 King’s Road in summer 1974 during the transition from Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die to Sex//

Ben Kelly – who realised the design for the exterior of Seditionaries in 1976 and is now professor of interiors & spatial design at University Of The Arts London – is contributing photographs taken of his work at the time for his portfolio and there is a very special leather t-shirt bearing a Let It Rock label during the transition in 1974 to the incarnation as Sex.

Contributors also include photographers Robyn Beeche, Bob Gruen, the David Parkinson Estate and Sheila Rock as well as others close to McLaren during his game-changing adventures in  the fashion world.

Find out more about the show on the CIFF site here.

Tags: Arnaud Vanraet, Ben Kelly, Bob Gruen, CIFF, Copenhagen International Fashion Fair, Let It Rock, Marco Pirroni, Mirrorpix, Nostalgia Of Mud, Pterre Tzenkoff, Robyn Beeche, SEX, Sheila Rock, Virgil Abloh, Young Kim

//From the catalogue for Christie’s Pop Culture auction, June 20,2014//

Six years ago on The Look blog I posted images and memories supplied by Terry Slobodzian, who ran boutiques Explosion and Lacy Lady in the upstate New York town of North Tonawanda in the late 60s and early 70s.

Such shops as Slobodzian’s and The People’s Space (run by Tommy Hilfiger in the neighbouring Emira) were part of a regional US trend for wild and usually wildly-named clothing stores sparked by eccentric retail ventures such as Granny Takes A Trip in England.

As I discovered through contact with vintage dealer/expert Ben Cooney, these are the places who showed at the National Boutique Show in NYC and broadcast their wares from the back pages of Baron Wolman’s fashion/music mag Rags: A Long Time Comin’ in San Anselmo, The Bead Experience in Baltimore, The Great Linoleum Clothing Experiment in LA, Bouncing Bertha’s Banana Blanket and Jenny Waterbags in New York, Mom’s Apple Grave in San Francisco…you get the picture.

//From The Look blog, December 2008//

Granny’s occupied a totemic status for the people who operated these outlets; Slobodzian visited London on a buying spree in 1970 and naturally dropped in at 488 King’s Road. “What a trip it was,” he told me in 2008.“Every piece fit like a glove right off the rack. The craftmanship and choice of fabric was amazing.”

Now Slobodzian’s Granny’s suits as featured on The Look blog are in this Friday’s Pop Culture sale at Christie’s along with two shirts from Bouncing Bertha’s Banana Blanket.

Here’s Rod Stewart in the same paneled velvet suit design as Lot 55 in the sale:

Read The Look post here.

Find out more about the Pop Culture sale here.

Cassandra Tondro has uploaded pages from Rags Magazine here.

Tags: A Long Time Comin', Ben Cooney, Bouncing bertha's Banana Blanket, Cassandra Tondro, Christie's, Emira, Explosion, Jenny Waterbags, Lacy Lady, Mom's Apple Grave, North Tonawanda, Rags, Rod Stewart, Terry Slobodzian, The Bead Experience, The Great Linoleum Clothing Experiment, The People's Space, Tommy Hilfiger

Among the lines launching Tokyo’s new fashion and music retail outlet The Pool is a collaboration between Japanese streetwear labels Fragment and Peel + Lift on a fresh version of the 1976 Anarchy Shirt design by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood.

The reissue, in four versions, is a stripped down reproduction of one of the original variants created by McLaren and Westwood to be worn by the Sex Pistols and for sale in their shop at 430 King’s Road in its incarnations as Sex and Seditionaries.

“I had been a student in the 60s, and the anarchic student movements in France really framed my critique,” McLaren told me in 2007.  “This particular shirt celebrated that.”

The original designs used as a base the deadstock Wemblex brand shirts stored in boxes at McLaren & Westwood’s flat in Clapham, south London in the mid-70s. “They were pin-striped and made in cheap cotton in the early 60s when the ‘pin-through’ collar style – an American look – was fashionable,” said McLaren.

“I wore and wore them and then, one day, Vivienne decided to paint stripes over one. She showed it to me and together we customised it, using my son’s stencil set, with slogans such as “Only Anarchists Are Pretty” and “Dangerously Close To Love”.

“As well as layering the stencils to increase the impact, I attached silk patches of Karl Marx I discovered in shops in Chinatown which sold Maoist literature.  I chose him because his book started the Socialist and workers’ movements in the 19th century. Also, Vivienne and I liked his beard.

“Marx was a writer/author, a creator of ideas, not a politician like Lenin. Marx represented a greater significance and was important to us because he lived in London at one point.”

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Tags: Anarchy Shirts, Aoyoama, Dangerously Close To Love, Fragment, Glen Matlock, Hiroshi Fujiwara, J-Wave, Jordan, JUN Group, Karl Marx, Only Anarchists Are Pretty, Peel + Lift, So It Goes, Sophnet, Soundpool, Steve Jones, The Black Hand Gang, The Pool, Uniform Experiment, Vivienne Westwood, Wemblex

//McLaren/Westwood Buffalo Hat 1982, V&A Collection.//

Long-standing revisionism is not unusual on the breakdown of a partnership, and there has been much rewriting – not least by the parties themselves – of the history of who did what, where and to whom in the three decades since the dissolution of one of the most potent creative collaborations in the history of popular culture: that between Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood.

//In the arena: McLaren engages with pop, 1983//

It will be a while before we understand whether their achievements together will leap the boundaries of the still-bouyant decorative arts and the now-dessicated form of popular music into true and lasting cultural significance, but for the time being the couple’s combined impact on fashion design and the development of musical genres from punk to hip-hop and world music continues to draw in contemporary performers and designers.

QV the ballyhoo around Pharrell Williams’ recent sporting of a Westwood reissue of the so-called Buffalo Hat, a design produced by the pair for the Worlds End 1982 Buffalo collection. This coincided with the opening of their last retail environment Nostalgia Of Mud and also provided a major element in the visual identity of McLaren’s debut solo album, the towering pre-digital cross-genre pop masterpiece Duck Rock.

The hat, like the rest of the Buffalo collection, was undeniably a product of their collective resources. It may have been his concept – taken from images of traditional Peruvian dress discovered during research for Duck Rock – but it was their combined realisation.

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Tags: Ancien, Buffalo, Buffalo Hat, Dazed Digital, Dead In England, Dries van Noten, Grammys, Nostalgia Of Mud, Pharrell Williams, Thomas Tew, Vivienne Westwood, Worlds End

//Exhibition cards and private view invitations, 1973 to date//

I’m assembling materials for Rethink/Re-Entry, the long-overdue monograph of the great British artist Derek Boshier I am currently editing.

The book takes its title from the early Boshier painting which inspired rock’s ultimate art-directed star Bryan Ferry to choose the name Remake/Remodel for the first track on Roxy Music’s game-changing debut LP.

//Rethink/Re-entry, oil on canvas, 1962//

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Tags: 1979, Bryan Ferry, Central Saint Martin's School Of Art, David Bowie, David Hockney, Hayward Gallery, Joe Strummer, Let's Dance, Lodger, Loves, Remake/Remodel, Rethink/Re-entry, Richard Hollis, Roxy Music, Steve Johnston, Thames & Hudson, The Clash, Whitechapel Gallery

“There is a moment when ‘good taste’ becomes dead; what has been considered ‘bad’ is suddenly found to be invigorating. Fashion today has little to do with la mode and the tacky is often accepted as an essential part of the necessary ‘total’ look. It can be fun.”

Cecil Beaton, introduction to the catalogue for the 1971 V&A exhibition Fashion: An Anthology

Recent visits to the V&A’s Archive of Art & Design have proved fruitful, particularly a viewing earlier this week of the collection of  Pop Art clothing sold through London boutique Mr Freedom in the late 60s and early 70s.

//Design: Diana Crawshaw, 1971//

//Kiss Off t-shirt, Jim O’Connor, 1971//

//Design Christopher Snow/Trevor Myles, body design: Diana Crawshaw, 1971//

//Design: Pamla Motown, 1971//

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Tags: Christopher Snow, Diana Crawshaw, Dinah Adams, Elton John, Fashion An Anthology, Felix Dennis, Jim O'Connor, Michael Regan, Oz, Pamla Motown, Royal College Of Art, Sir Cecil Beaton, The Fabric Of Pop, Trevor myles, V&A

//Clockwise from top left: Cover, Helen And Desire, 1970; George O'Dowd, photo: Richard Bevan, 2013; Carnaby Street book and Palisades swing tag, 1970 and 1966; front cover, Anarchy In The UK newsprint fanzine, 1976//

I’m involved in a couple of events which open in London this week: artist Lucy Harrison’s multi-layered project Carnaby Echoes in the West End and photographer Nick Knight’s exhibition Punk at his Showstudio space in SW1.

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Tags: Alexander Trocchi, Anarchy In The UK, Binder Edwards & Vaughan, Boy George, Colt Studio, Culture Club, David May, Deal Real, Derek Boshier, Derek Ridgers, Duke Vin, Gallery International, George O'Dowd, Goodge Street, Hazel Albarn, Helen And Desire, I Groaned With Pain, Jim French, John S. Barrington, Keith Albarn, Kleptomania, Let It Rock, Lloyd Coxsone, Martin Cole, Miranda Sawyer, Nick Knight, Olympia Press, Sado sex For The Seventies, SEX, Showstudio, Smash Hits, Street Theatre, The Foundry, The Roaring Twenties, Vivienne Westwood

//Scrubbing up well. Cygan with auction house assistant. Photo: Christie's//

M.Goldstein’s Nathaniel Lee Jones is on fire at the moment; on the heels of next week’s Reginald Alan Westaway exhibition in Prague, his awesome 9ft-high robot Cygan goes on sale at Christie’s Out Of The Ordinary auction on September 5.

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Tags: Christie's, M. Goldstein, Nathaniel Lee Jones, Prague, Reginald Alan Westaway

//Reginald Alan Westaway, 1928-2008. Nude self portrait, 1960s//

Property Of A Gentleman, the exhibition opening at Prague’s Svit gallery at the end of the month, will cast much-deserved light on the life and creative outpourings of Reginald Alan Westaway, the British outsider artist and recluse.

Westaway died in 2008, the walls of his house in Herne Bay, Kent, scrawled with diagrams and plans for a lute he was making at the point of his demise. The words were written in Latin and the discarded instrument was propped amid the detritus of decades: empty wine bottles, documents and reference papers, threadbare clothes, packaging and paper bags. The “drawing room” was frozen in time – the curtains hadn’t been opened for years- and the surfaces in the house were submerged under accumulations of spiders’ webs.

From this clutter emerged a complete oeuvre indicating a singular artistic life, self-catalogued and apparently self-sufficient. Westaway’s achievements would have rested in obscurity were it not for the devotion of M.Goldstein’s Nathaniel Lee Jones, who is collaborating with the artist Dirk Bell on the forthcoming exhibition, the Czech title of which is Majetek ušlechtilého muže.

//Self-portrait on air-raid instructions//

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Tags: Dirk Bell, M. Goldstein, Nathaniel Lee Jones, Prague, Reginald Alan Westaway, Svit

I Always Remember A Face, Especially When I’ve Sat On It is the arresting title of a great 14-track vinyl-only compilation from artist of the fantastical,  Maurizio Cattelan.

This is the tracklisting:
A Side
1 Bernard Herrmann – Brave New World (Excerpt)
2 The Cheers – Black Denim Trousers & Motorcycle Boots
3 Pierre Schaeffer – Etude Aux Chemins De Fer (Excerpt)
4 Judy Garland – The Trolley Song
5 Coldcut – Stop This Crazy Thing (Excerpt)
6 Malcolm McLaren – Miss Belle
7 Gene Vincent  – Jezebel

B Side
1 Les Paul & Mary Ford  – Bye Bye Blues
2 Hoosier Hot Shots – I Like Bananas Because They Have No Bones
3 The Dorsey Brothers  – Lullaby Of Broadway
4 F.T. Martinetti & A.Guintini – Sintesi Musicali Furutiste (Excerpt)
5 Malcolm McLaren  – Ride A Fashion Horse Pt.2
6 Cornelius – Fantasma
7 Ozzie Nelson And His Orchestra  – Dream A Little Dream Of Me

//From Maurizio Cattelan, Fondation Beyeler, Basel, June 8 - Oct 6//

The LP – produced under the auspices of his online magazine Toilet Paper, marks Cattelan’s current show at Basel’s Fondation Beyeler. See here.

A collaboration with The Vinyl Factory, I Always Remember A Face, Especially When I’ve Sat On It has been produced in a limited edition of 1,000 copies and is available here.

Read Toilet Paper here.

Listen to the comp here:

Tags: A Guintini, Barnard herrmann, Basel, Coldcut, Cornelius, Dorsey Brothers, Fondation Beyeler, FT Martinetti, Gene Vincent, Hoosier Hot Shots, I Always Remember A Face Especially When I’ve Sat On It, Judy Garland, Les Paul, Mary Ford, Maurizio Cattelan, Ozzie Nelson, Pierre Schaeffer, The Cheers, The Vinyl Factory