The cream of British fashion journalism – Dean Mayo Davies, Ben Reardon and Lou Stoppard – will be discussing the indomitable body of design work produced by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood at tomorrow’s event Be Reasonable Demand The Impossible.
Central Saint Martins have produced these badges for the event at the Kings Cross site tomorrow night marking the 40th anniversary of the Sex Pistols live debut and the cultural legacy of their manager Malcolm McLaren.
Continue reading Be Reasonable Demand The Impossible badges by Central Saint Martins
Exciting: just received this from John Beck and Matthew Cornford, the masterminds behind the No Future t-shirt which commemorates Malcolm McLaren’s attendance to several London area art schools in the 1960s and early 70s.
The poster for the Sex Pistols’ first performance (on November 6 1975 in the Common Room of St Martin’s School Of Art in central London’s Charing Cross Road) has been found after 40 years – and it doesn’t even mention them!
Art schools are places of possibilities, which is one of the reasons we chose the title Be Reasonable Demand The Impossible for the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the first Sex Pistols gig at Central Saint Martins in London’s King’s Cross this Friday (November 6).
Tomorrow (November 2) I am introducing a Malcolm McLaren film night at Southampton’s The Stage Door as part of the city’s Film Week.
Continue reading Rare footage to be revealed at Malcolm McLaren Night in Southampton tomorrow
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.
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.
Lovely to see the gorgeous Eve Ferret out and about this spring with a series of live dates to celebrate the long-overdue release of her first album.
I fell under Eve’s spell in the summer of 1978, witnessing performances at Covent Garden’s pre-New Romantic Blitz club with her-then partner James “Biddie” Biddlecombe. More recently we connected via the late Tommy Roberts, at whose memorial she sang a version of Rawhide which rocked ’em in the aisles and nearly blew the roof off St Giles in the Fields.
This year’s presentation of the Malcolm McLaren Award at the finale of performance arts biennale Performa will celebrate the 30th anniversary of the iconoclast’s game-changing LP Duck Rock.
Hosted by eminent writer Glenn O’Brien and McLaren’s widow Young Kim, the event on Sunday will culminate in the presentation of the award by sound artist Christian Marclay to the artist under 40 who has demonstrated “the most innovative and thought-provoking performance” during Performa’s three-week run.
Designed by Marc Newson, the Malcolm McLaren Award was inaugurated at the last Performa in 2011, where it was presented by the late Lou Reed.
I’m making a presentation on Bowie’s visual style and in particular his relationship with clothing designers as part of the V&A’s Sound & Vision event today.
Among those I’m referencing will be the theatrical costume designer Peter J. Hall, who was commissioned to create the stagewear for the 1983 Serious Moonlight tour. I wrote about their fruitful working relationship here.
Continue reading Talking fashion, style and Bowie at the V&A today