//The premises of Jack English Snr’s lighting shop in Leicester’s Granby Street provide the book’s cover image//

//Will English (right) with Helen Robinson and Steph Raynor in a transport cafe c.1970. Photo by Rose Kendall//

//David Parkinson and his Messerschmitt bubble car, 1974. Photography: Will English//

Perfect Binding, the recently published book by British experimental filmmaker/broadcaster/bookseller William English, is a psychogeographic portrait of a particular strain of cultural activity in a particular place at a particular time: the Midlands city of Leicester from the 1950s to the 70s.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Acme Attractions, Bill Burns, Boy, Captain Maurice Seddon, Cecilia Green, David Parkinson, Helen Robinson, Hugh de la Cruz, Jansje Schoen, Jim Mellors, Kirby Muxloe, Leicester, Perfect Binding, PX, Ray Gosling, Steph Raynor, The Dining Room, Victoria Ashley, Vivienne Westwood, William English, Young Fabian

//Marx, the Great Gear Market, 85, King’s Road, Chelsea, 1979. Photo: Salvador Macasil//

In the histories of London street style, Kenny MacDonald’s King’s Road outlet Marx receives rare mention, yet from the mid-70s this unusual and tucked-away boutique was important in the development of the type of English tailoring-with-a-twist which has subsequently dominated a strand of menswear around the world.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Acme Attractions, Boy, Futurama, Great Gear Market, Hoofer, Jah Wobble, Jeanette lee, John Lydon, John Wardle, Kenny macDonald, Marx, Peel + Lift, PiL, Pinto, Public Image Ltd, Salvador Macasil, Tom Salter, Trickers

Steven Meisel’s campaign clip for Miu Miu’s autumn/winter 2015 collection tips a knowing wink to Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s 70s label Seditionaries, and in particular the design collage Vive Le Rock/Punk Rock Disco.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Boy, Hailey Gates, Maddison Brown, Mia Goth, Miu Miu, Miuccia Prada, Olivier Rizzo, Seditionaries, Stacy Martin, Steven Miesel, Vive le Rock/Punk Rock Disco, Vivienne Westwood, Worlds End

//One of the two bondage suits which have been removed from the Met collection. They were previously granted prominence in the museum’s 2006 exhibition Anglomania. This image is from the frontispiece of the show’s lavish catalogue//

Years after concerns were raised about the authenticity of around half of the punk fashion pieces in the Metropolitan Museum Of Art Costume Institute collection, cleaning house has finally begun at the New York institution with the expulsion of two bondage suits purporting to have been original 70s designs by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood.

A museum spokesperson has confirmed that the suits have been “formally de-accessioned”. A relatively rare process in international-standard curatorial circles, de-accessioning occurs when information undermining the provenance and authenticity of a museum object comes to light.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Anglomania, Boy, Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum Of Art, Pirate, Seditionaries, SEX, Sex Pistols, Simon Doonan, Vivienne Westwood, Witches, Worlds End

//Viva Hamnell at Glastonbury Festival, from Amanda Bluglass’s short Viva Punk Rebel//

//Viva Hamnell at Port Eliot Lit Fest 2006 with her daughter Jane and son-in-law Rik Gadsby modelling McLaren, Westwood and Reid punk designs for The Look//

//The crowd went wild and jogged the photographer’s elbow: onstage in this blurry shot with Viva in Jamie Reid’s Sex Pistols Fuck Forever t-shirt, Port Eliot Lit Fest, 2006//

Punk had great freedom with no rules. I couldn’t sing, but I got up there and sung. It didn’t matter. You had to have the spirit and the energy.

Viva Hamnell, 2014

My first meeting with Viva Hamnell eight years ago was not untypical, I subsequently learnt.

74 at the time, she was viewing the various Malcolm McLaren, Vivienne Westwood and Jamie Reid designs I was co-opting friends and attendees at Port Eliot Lit Fest to model that year to illustrate an event for the newly published second edition of my book The Look.

//Hamnell goes about her Lollipop Lady duties in a 70s TV news item//

//Left in the 70s//

//Lining up with fellow members of The Bricks//

Having surveyed the Naked Cowboys, Mickie & Minnie and Snow White & Her Sir Punks, Viva plumped for Reid’s 1986 BOY t-shirt issue of his poster design for The Great Rock & Roll Swindle: Sex Pistols Fuck Forever set in flouro-pink.

And when she closed the show by strolling on stage wearing the shirt, the crowd naturally went wild.

Amanda Bluglass’s documentary portrait Viva Punk Rebel captures this indomitable rule-breaker, whose embracing of punk rock as a 43-year-old freshly divorced lollipop lady in 1976 set her on a life of adventure – taking in membership of Cornish punk band The Bricks and involvement in the Elephant Fayre and Lit Fest at St Germans and the Glastonbury Festival – which lasts unto this day.

Viva Viva!

Thanks to womenyoushouldknow.net for the link to Bluglass’s film.

Tags: Amanda Bluglass, Boy, Cornwall, Elephant Fayre, Glastonbury Festival, Jamie Reid, Jane Gadsby, Nake Cowboys, Port Eliot Lit Fest, Rik Gadsby, Sex Pistols Fuck Forever, Snow White & The Sir Punks, St Germans, The Bricks, The Great Rock & Roll Swindle, Viva Hamnell, Vivienne Westwood, womenyoushouldknow.net

//Vivienne Westwood in felt Inside Out Jacket with assistants Debbie Wilson and Michael Collins in Seditionaries, 1977//

While updating his rich and varied archive, photographer Homer Sykes came across these superb photographs taken inside Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s boutique Seditionaries at 430 King’s Road in the spring of 1977.

The images capture the air of raw uncertainty surrounding the shop and the McLaren/Westwood coterie in this period. McLaren’s charges the Sex Pistols had recently been signed to their third record company in six months – Virgin Records – after being publicly excoriated for their behaviour and bounced out of EMI and A&M. The national media had seized upon punk as a source of sensationalism and the release of the Pistols’ explosive God Save The Queen was a matter of weeks away.

//Debbie Wilson (aka Debbie Juvenile) sports Hangman Jumper, Seditionaries, 1977. Note the studded Venus Top and leather jacket on the wall behind the counter//

//Westwood expounding against the photographic mural of Dresden after WW2 air-raids, Seditionaries, 1977. Note Collins’ Cambridge Rapist design produced by Westwood’s partner Malcolm McLaren a couple of years earlier//

//Behind the customer in black bondage jacket is the wall-size inverted photographic mural of Piccadilly Circus, Seditionaries, 1977//

On Saturday August 20 1977 Sykes again took to the King’s Road to document the atmosphere of unrest embodied by the outbreaks of violence caused by marauding Teddy Boys targeting punks and such boutiques as Seditionaries and Boy.

//Young Ted bops while another’s jacket mourns Elvis Presley’s recent death, King’s Road, 1977//

//Musician/actor Gary Holton and girlfriend Tracy Boyle lead a demonstration against violence between Teds and Punks along the King’s Road. Far left is punk Mick Bladder//

Some of his photographs feature the punk Mick Bladder, whose arrest on that day in August 1977 was featured in Wolfgang Büld’s Punk In London. This documentary  shows how the movement’s initial creative burst swiftly dissipated, while Sykes’ images capture the ways in which a cult movement had entered the mainstream, infiltrating the media, music, fashion and the wider culture.

Sykes’ archive covers the waterfront, from social unrest including the Notting Hill Carnival riot of 1976 and the riots in Toxteth and Brixton in the early 80s, to the on-the-road antics of Paul McCartney & Wings and Sigue Sigue Sputnik, the New Romantic haven the Blitz club, Andrew Logan’s Alternative Miss World and Quentin Crisp . Visit www.homersykes.com.

Tags: A&M, Andrew Logan's Alternative Miss World, Boy, Cambridge Rapist, Debbie Juvenile, Debbie Wilson, Elvis Presley, EMI, God Save The Queen, Hangman Jumper, Homer Sykes, Michael Collins, Paul McCartney, Quentin Crisp, Seditionaries, Sex Pistols, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Virgin Records, Vivienne Westwood, Wings

Here’s a selection of photographs from the family photo album of Johnny Deluxe, one of my favourite unpindownable Londoners. Deluxe is an artist, clothes-maker, performer, raconteur and all-round individualist.

I’ll let him tell the story behind each.

This was taken in March or April 1978. I was wearing a Seditionaries Destroy t-shirt and Boy zip trousers, not quite bondage ones, just zips on the pockets, but super drainpipe in bright canvas. I was just about to go to France and be chased by French teddy boys. I got my hair cut at Alphonso’s in Oxford Road, Reading, an old boy’s barber where I asked for an “Elvis” and then hacked into it at home (Alphonso was too old for the modern stuff).

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Alice Clowes, Boy, Cowboys, Destroy, Johnny Deluxe, Jordan, Reading, Seditionaries, Vivienne Westwood