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These jaunty photographs were taken by Barry Plummer in the spring of 1979 for a Melody Maker interview with Malcolm McLaren about the just-released soundtrack for the Sex Pistols’ biopic The Great Rock N Roll Swindle (beset by financial and creative difficulties, the film wasn’t released for another year). McLaren was accompanied by Vivienne Westwood; […]
Amid the references to the late Christopher Nemeth in today’s Paris show of the Louis Vuitton A/W 15 menswear collection (see my last post), artistic director Kim Jones used the staging to pay subtle homage to the two great maverick figures of London street culture – namely Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood and specifically their […]
//Left, Saint Laurent point-toed patent brothel creepers, A/W 2014. Right: George Cox Buckle Diano made to the 1950s last// Last season’s foregrounding by Saint Laurent of the pointed brothel creeper is just one of a run of examples of fashion brands plugging into the purity of this quintessentially British rock & roll style minted in […]
Interior Design: Dead Or Alive is the title of the symposium being organised by the prominent British designer Ben Kelly at London’s Institute Of Contemporary Arts on March 14. I am a contributing speaker alongside writer/curator Michael Bracewell, designers Fred Deakin, Ed Barber & Jay Osgerby and Peter Saville, artists Lucy McKenzie and Bridget Smith […]
“More than anyone, Malcolm McLaren bursts the definitions as to what exactly constitutes an artist.” Yves Aupetitallot, curator at Magasin, the Centre National d’Art Contemporain, in the introduction to Art In Pop Due to popular demand, the run of Art In Pop – the French exhibition about the intermingling of artistic practice with popular music […]
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 […]
Currently doing the rounds of the punk groups on various social networking sites is this clip from the cheesy 70s revival of classic 60s British television series The Saint. Entitled The Arrangement, episode nine of The Return Of The Saint was broadcast on November 5, 1978 and starred such UK TV drama stalwarts as Carolyn […]
It will be frustrating for publisher Picador and their authors Ian Kelly and Vivienne Westwood that novelist Philip Hoare’s national paper five-star review of memoir Vivienne Westwood is rendered unreliable by, pro rata, as many inaccuracies as contained in the book itself. Holed by these gaffes, the review – in the Sunday Telegraph’s Seven magazine published […]
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 […]
A photograph of Vivienne Westwood – credited to the fashion designer’s archive in the new Westwood book with Ian Kelly – put me in mind of an image I have in one of my many books in storage. At first I couldn’t put my finger on the particular tome. Then bingo! Bought eight years ago […]