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Among the most revealing exhibits at the Malcolm McLaren show Let It Rock is the cultural iconoclast’s copy of a folk art book which proved a rich source of reference when he came to design the Savage collection with Vivienne Westwood in 1981. McLaren’s consistent approach to creative activity always began with deep research (from […]
The idea is to show in clothes and music that, in the post-industrial age, the roots of our culture lie in primitive societies. Malcolm McLaren on Nostalgia Of Mud and Duck Rock, 1983 Thanks to Hiroshi Fujiwara for tipping the wink over one of the sources of visual inspiration fed by Malcolm McLaren into the […]
The exhibition Disobedient Objects opens at the V&A tonight; here curator Catherine Flood – who originated the concept for the show – talks me through five exhibits which embody the spirit of contemporary protest. TEAR GAS MASKS MADE FROM WATER BOTTLES Disobedient objects are often those which are simply to hand and waiting to be […]
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 […]
John Beck and Matthew Cornford’s intelligent and measured book The Art School And The Culture Shed may be a slim volume but it packs a hell of a punch in locating the ravages wreaked on our cultural life over the past 20 years by privatisation, the failings of local councils and town planners and the […]
Design authority Jim Walrod wears a deep and wide-ranging understanding of his subject – specifically that pertaining to modernism in furniture, interiors, product design and architecture – lightly. This is refreshing in a field populated by bloodless experts and humourless know-alls. The founder of important 90s/00s store Form & Function, Walrod – described as “the […]
Beat This: A Hip Hop History is an hour-long documentary broadcast by BBC in its Arena strand in 1984 and directed by Dick Fontaine (who I interviewed for my Goldie book back in the early 00s). In one section Malcolm McLaren talks about his August 1981 introduction to Afrika Bambaataa’s Zulu Nation in the south […]
Jack Henry Moore – who has died aged 73 – was one of the unpindownables of the counterculture in the 60s and 70s. Known principally as a pioneering video film-maker and sound recordist (the archive he leaves behind is estimated to contain more than 70,000 hours of tape compiled over five decades), Moore was central […]
One of the choice selections to be screened as part of this month’s post-punk film season This Is Now is Solitude, the 1981 John Maybury short featuring David Holah, then a fashion student, soon to launch the era-defining label Bodymap with Stevie Stewart. Put together by British Film Institute curator William Fowler, This Is Now […]
I’m agnostic about Steve Nicks (though I have been to The Night Of 1,0000 Stevies), but this is mesmerising. Mrs G turned me onto this. It seems Nicks was listening to a backing track of then-new composition Wild Heart as she was being made-up for a Rolling Stone photoshoot. The title song of her first solo […]