Ben pined for his mother when he was dumped at boarding school or banished to his father’s new family. Being a loving and faithful son, he insists that he enjoyed a ‘really happy childhood’, but he does acknowledge his stepfather’s hold over his mother at the expense of her sons: ‘One thing that wasn’t perfect was that Malcolm was her number one.’ Vivienne’s obsessive love for McLaren, and his disregard for the children, must have felt extremely excluding for the boys. Was Vivienne mirroring her own parents’ excluding love, which drove her to early independence?
Though careless of Vivienne’s love, McLaren was possessive of her attention. If he came home late at night and found her sleeping in their bed cuddled up to Joseph, he would fly into a rage and kick the boy into his own bunk. Perhaps as a result of the ten years he slept alongside Grandmother Rose, overt familial affection disturbed him.
Vivienne was gradually, under McLaren’s influence, adopting the garb of a street-smart Londoner. Indulging his fetish for fashion, he took her down the King’s Road to dress up, tutoring her with his mantra ‘the beauty of fearlessness’: ‘Once she had got that, her whole critique and sense of doing things fed through to her clothes.’ The rock ’n’ roll fashions of her youth that she had worn while with Derek were replaced by parodic retro-chic versions, in tune with the teds’ revival.
By the late sixties, hippies dominated the London scene. Fashion had gone limp. Backbones were out. When Ossie Clark scissored Celia Birtwell’s flower-strewn chiffons and voiles on the bias and lowered the hem two feet in 1967, wispy, whimsical ‘period’ dress ousted the strict, short look that had epitomised the energy of Swinging London. Fashion’s look moved anatomically south, down the leg from the upper thigh to the lower calf, and geographically west, along the King’s Road, from the optimistic, coltish modernism found at Glass & Black, Mary Quant and John Bates to the mawkish and nostalgic tatters of Granny Takes a Trip, opened by Nigel Weymouth in 1966, and Michael Rainey’s Hung on You. The name ‘Granny Takes a Trip’ alluded both to the use of hallucinogenic drugs and to the vintage costume favoured by Weymouth’s aristocratic, art school and music-business customers. Over the next two years an assortment of hippie and pop art boutiques, such as Tommy Roberts’s Kleptomania and Mr Freedom, and John Lloyd’s Alkasura, either moved to or started up in the World’s End vicinity of the King’s Road (the apocalyptic name derived from a local pub).
Dressed in widows’ weeds and under the influence of psychedelic drugs, there was an aura among those in the forefront of youth culture of languor and indolence. But after the high-water mark of idealism reached in the ‘Summer of Love’ in 1967, disillusionment characterised the end of the sixties. The Vietnam protest movement appeared to have little tangible impact on international politics, de Gaulle had crushed the student riots in Paris, confirming his right-wing regime with a landslide election victory in June 1968, while in Northern Ireland the Civil Rights movement polarised the Province into violent confrontation.
In Britain, Harold Wilson’s boom years gave way to devaluation in November 1967. 1970 brought back a Conservative government, and unemployment rose steadily, reaching a (then) post-war peak of 967,000 in the first quarter of 1972. In October 1973 the oil price soared as a result of the Yom Kippur war between Egypt and Israel. An economic malady which the Keynesians had not envisaged, stagflation, ensued. In February 1974 the coalminers demanded a 30 per cent pay increase in the average wage, and went on strike.
Wildcat strikes culminated in the three-day week and an entrenchment of class issues the like of which had not been witnessed in Britain since the General Strike of 1926. The situation was summed up by Brendon Sewill, a senior adviser to the government and special assistant to Anthony Barber, the Chancellor of the Exchequer: ‘At the time many of those in positions of influence looked into the abyss and saw only a few days away the possibility of the country being plunged into a state of chaos not so far removed from that which might prevail after a minor nuclear attack. If that sounds melodramatic I need only say that – with the prospect of a breakdown of power supplies, sewerage, communications, effective government and law and order – it was the analogy that was being used at the time.’
Drug-taking youth substituted mind-numbing opiates for the energy-inducing amphetamines they had favoured in the early sixties, heedless of the fact that a number of their pop icons – Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin – had died, or soon would, as a result of substance abuse. The energetic optimism of the earlier years of the decade gave way to hapless introspection at its close. Mary Hopkin had a hit with the wistful ‘Those Were the Days’ in the summer of 1967, reflecting the nostalgia for a better time.
Disillusion bred licence. The law’s gradual slackening of its harsh grip on ‘acceptable behaviour’ reflected, and to some degree fostered, increasing permissiveness. 1960 saw the end of the ban on D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence’s biographer Brenda Maddox describes the symbolic impact of the trial: ‘the verdict … virtually abolished literary censorship in Britain … There are those who consider that the circulation of a low-priced edition of Constance Chatterley’s discovery of the joys of warm-hearted fucking, to the accompaniment of her gamekeeper’s lavish praise for her cunt and arse, launched the permissive sixties all by itself.’
The liberalising process had started gathering steam in the late fifties. In 1959, the ground-breaking Obscene Publications Act ended the Lord Chamberlain’s centuries-old role as theatrical censor. In 1967 homosexuality between consenting adults was legalised, and in April 1968 the Abortion Act was passed, allowing women to terminate pregnancies legally. By 1969 the female contraceptive pill was widely available. Family break-up was facilitated by the 1969 Divorce Law, making it possible to divorce after two years’ separation if both parties were in agreement, five years’ if they were not. The following year, the Misuse of Drugs Act was passed. For the first time, premarital and homosexual sex, recreational drugs and family breakdown were openly discussed.
‘Retro-chic’ appropriately clothed youth’s ennui. Originating in New York as ‘vintage chic’ in the mid-sixties, the term – applied to fashion and films – was coined in France in the early seventies. Retro-chic is Janus-faced: it looks back to the past while keeping a keen eye on today. Retro-chic defied fashion’s traditional direction of influence: coming up from the streets and art colleges, rather than down from designers and mass retailers. It took root in disenchantment with commercial fashion, providing a cheap (second-hand), egalitarian alternative. To pull it off required time – foraging in attics or thrift shops – not money, and time was what the young had in abundance.
Style leaders like Catherine Tennant, a fashion editor at British Vogue, escaped from the present into an idealised past, ransacking their grandparents’ trunks for Cavalier plumed hats and capes and colourful old army uniforms. The impecunious scoured junk shops and markets such as Portobello Road and Petticoat Lane. Anna Piaggi of Condé Nast, Italy, and her companion Vernon Lambert were amongst the first stylists to reject the shoddily produced neophilia of sixties fashion in favour of the antique. They relished the quality and craftsmanship found in Victorian cut and panne velvets, Edwardian plumes, thirties bias-cut crêpes de chine, forties furs, and the affordable trinkets of bygone, and apparently better, days. The practice of dressing up in a cocktail of styles and periods spread throughout the youth of the West. By the early seventies, even mainstream designers were showing collections inspired by period costume, such as Yves Saint Laurent’s turbaned and shoulder-padded forties molls of 1970, and Thea Porter’s tiered chiffon maxi-dresses inspired by Visconti’s 1971 film Death in Venice.
McLaren and Vivienne, though, had no truck with either the farrago of costumes – second-hand or new – or the philosophical tolerance