//From top left: Chinese Communist Party pamphlet, 1971; McLaren in Let It Rock 1972; Proclamation by Engels and Marx, 1881; Title lettering, Belgian film poster, 1958//

A year or so ago I established the source material for one of the first designs generated by Malcolm McLaren in the fashion partnership he conducted with Vivienne Westwood in the 70s and early 80s.

Now I can reveal the inspiration: text contained in an unprepossessing Communist booklet celebrating the short-lived “Paris Commune” government of 19th Century revolutionary France.

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Tags: Abbie Hoffman, Chuck Berry, Friedrich Engels, Jerry Lee Lewis, Karl Marx, Let It Rock, Let's Rock, Little Richard, New York Dolls, Paris Commune, Patrick Casey, Peter Clifton, Steal This Book, The Anarchist Cookbook, The Little Red Book, The London Rock N Roll Show, Vive le Rock!, Vivienne Westwood, William Powell, Yvonne Gold

//Front and back of Vive le Rock/Punk Rock Disco and the radical political and military texts used as source material for the design//

There were T-shirts left over from the Wembley Rock & Roll revival festival in our cupboards in South Clapham; we had to do something with them. Sid Vicious liked them just the way they were and was often photographed in the original Vive Le Rock! design. But I needed to throw a few messages across them and reinvent them. So, I married the slogan and images of Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis with words and drawings from various texts, using the title of The Anarchist Cookbook as well as the famous phrase of the Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Durutti.

Malcolm McLaren 2008

Imogen Hunt is a recent graduate from London College Of Fashion who tells me she was inspired by my work to write her thesis for the college’s history of fashion and culture course.

Part of Hunt’s dissertation – on the importance of the Situationist International and King Mob to the development of punk style – is dedicated to an examination of the influences and source material for the double-sided design Vive Le Rock/Punk Rock Disco, which was printed on the front and back of t-shirts and tops first sold in Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s King’s Road store Seditionaries in 1978.

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Tags: Abbie Hoffman, Buenaventura Durruti, Christopher Gray, Hiroshi Fujiwara, Imogen Hunt, Internationale Situationniste, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ken Knabb, King Mob, Leaving The 20th Century, Little Richard, London College Of Fashion, Pierre van Paassen, Seditionaries, Steal This Book, The Anarchist Cookbook, The Return of the Durruti Column, The Toronto Daily Star, US Army Improvised Munitions Handbook, Vive le Rock/Punk Rock Disco, Vivienne Westwood, William Powell