SEX Cowboys return to Situationist roots in new T-shirt inspired by one of my posts
//Drift: New t-shirt from Japanese streetwear company Peel + Lift//
My 2011 post unraveling the threads running through the notorious Naked Cowboys punk t-shirt has itself inspired a new shirt.
The Cowboys t-shirt was designed by Malcolm McLaren in 1975 for sale in SEX, the shop he ran with Vivienne Westwood at 430 King’s Road in London’s World’s End.
Popular with punks and worn by members of the Sex Pistols and their coterie, it was initially known as the Saturday Night Dance shirt because of the presence of the dancehall sign in the appropriated homoerotic cowboy illustration by Jim French.
//Cowboys t-shirt sold at auction in London last year//
The new t-shirt has been produced by Japanese streetwear company Peel + Lift, which reproduces many McLaren and Westwood designs. It is entitled Drift, making overt the presence of 60s radical thinking in McLaren’s artwork: the drift, or the dérive, was a major theme of the Situationist International, which believed individuals should allow themselves to wander urban landscapes and become either repelled or enchanted by what they found (in the manner of the archetypal French urban explorer the flâneur).
//Panel, p3, Le Retour de la Colonne Durutti, 1966//
//New t-shirt detail//
The dérive and realisation (SI’s chief theorist Guy Debord believed art should be “realised” so that creative acts become part of daily life) were included in the illustration on Drift which featured in my original post: a panel in Le Retour de la Colonne Durutti, the four-page Situationist “comic” circulated by André Bertrand around the Strasbourg University campus in October 1966.
This example of détournement (the juxtaposition of pre-existing elements) comprised a film still of two cowboys on horseback with speech bubbles containing an exchange from characters in a novel by the Situationist International’s Michelle Bernstein:
What’s your scene, man?
Realisation
Yeah? I guess that means pretty hard work with big books and piles of paper on a big table.
Nope. I drift. Mostly I just drift.
//Gerry Visco in original Cowboys t-shirt, The Park Royal, NYC, 1976. © Bobby Busnach//
In his act of détournement, McLaren played on the Situationist themes of alienation and boredom by juxtaposing the main image from French’s Longhorns – Dance drawing with the following dialogue:
‘ello Joe been anywhere lately
Nah its all played aht Bill
Getting too straight
This connection was also explored by Derek Harris and Tom Vague in their 2000 publication King Mob Echo: From 1780 Gordon Riots To Situationists, Sex Pistols + Beyond.
Le Retour de la Colonne Durutti is published online here.
Michelle Bernstein’s All The King’s Horses is available here.
Read The Cowboys Came From Colt Studio here.