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46 years after music manager Danny Fields took the photograph of a group of New York’s 70s demi-monde at the top of this post I’ve spotted the previously unidentified person behind them: the subject of my latest book, Malcolm McLaren (who appears to be chugging a half-bottle of Smirnoff).
I’m extremely grateful to artist/designer/photographer Ash Hudson for sending precious photographs and design sketches from the archive of his late mother Ola Hudson, the super-talented fashion designer and costumier best known for providing David Bowie with the formal yet other-worldly collection of garments he wore in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 film The Man Who Fell To […]
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.
There has been a breakthrough in my challenge to Dame Vivienne Westwood, her co-author Ian Kelly and publisher Picador over their lifting of substantial amounts of material from my book The Look: Adventures In Rock & Pop Fashion for the designer’s 2014 “authorised biography”. The paperback edition of Vivienne Westwood published last week contains a whopping […]
An under-acknowledged art world connection forged by Malcolm McLaren during his fashion design partnership with Vivienne Westwood was to the godfather of street art, conceptual artist Richard Hambleton. During his forays in New York in the early 80s, McLaren was struck by Hambleton’s eerie representations of The Shadow Man figure; there was one on a […]
Jenni Murray: You’ve said ‘clothes were politics long before fashion’. What did you mean by that? Vivienne Westwood: I have no idea. Jenni Murray: Was it something you said to Ian (Kelly) and now you’ve forgotten? Vivienne Westwood: No…is that what it says in the book? Jenni Murray: Yes Vivienne Westwood: Well then, he might […]
‘Black is the most exciting colour’ (Goya). Black when used in different ways appears the most infinite and mysterious, the most spatial and loose. Malcolm McLaren, essay for course at Croydon Art School, 1967 It’s exciting. Work is underway on building the Art In Pop group exhibition which opens next month at Le Magasin, France’s […]
//Photography: Bob Carlos Clarke 1976 (left) and David Parkinson 1975// Malcolm designed a very nice women’s mac. A real 50s style, it was made of very thin ciré and looked almost like a dress, with its circular skirt and stand-up collar. It was like something that the B52s might have worn – half a dozen […]
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 […]
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor is an exhibition of Polaroids taken by artist, illustrator and print-maker Jim French which opens tonight at New York’s ClampArt gallery. These include studies for French’s 1969 Colt Studio print Longhorns Dance, incorporated by Malcolm McLaren in 1975 in his notorious Cowboys t-shirt design, as sold in Sex and Seditionaries at […]