The couple’s affiliations were doggedly reactionary, not progressive. Allying themselves to the teddy boys, they became customers of Tommy Roberts’s Mr Freedom, where they found teddy boy draped jackets, drainpipes, bootlace ties, ram’s head belts, ‘brothel-creeper’ lace-up shoes, circle skirts and cardigans. Unlike the originals cut in soberly smart Edwardian blacks and greys, mimicking their wearers’ social superiors’ City gent status, these modern impostors were scissored out of vermilion, neon-violet and beacon-orange gabardines and velvets. Yet despite the recolouring into Pop Art’s garish hues, they were still charged with the cocky defiance of the fifties: defiance against the restoration of the rigidities of inter-war privilege, against the ineluctably rising tide of American popular culture, and against racial and sexual inequality. Above all, they were indisputably British, working-class and proudly conservative in their sharp, tailored aggression. Set against the prevailing hippie values of inclusive – and, to Vivienne and McLaren, undiscriminating – internationalism, classlessness and tolerance (even this last was not as all-embracing as it seemed), they symbolised a romantic, nostalgic and selective tribalism. Their very tailored construction suggested macho, disciplined control, in contrast to the unkempt, unisex and uniclass hippie garb.
Tommy Roberts was one of the most lovable characters of the British fashion scene. This tough, plain-speaking Cockney was – unlike many of the other boutique owners – without affectation. He was there to trade, not to pontificate on possible utopias. As short as a jockey and as wide as a Sumo wrestler, Roberts led fashion into its first flirtations with retro-chic. Parody distinguished his manner, his humour and his creations. Lined up in his shop were the ephemera of fifties rock ’n’ roll, the kitsch excesses of thirties Hollywood and the gleefully simple images of Pop Art and American comic-strips.
Among Vivienne’s outfits from Mr Freedom were a lurid green dress printed with Pop Art silver stars, which clung to her lithe body from throat to ankle, and a hooped jitterbugger’s skirt. Moving along the King’s Road to Terry de Havilland, the rock star’s cobbler, she bought four-inch-heeled snakeskin sandals and, from Jane & Jane (Jean Muir’s first enterprise), a hot-tomato-red jersey baby-doll dress. Taking her cue from Mr Freedom, she would find cheap fabrics in unusually bright colours, such as neon orange and shocking pink, and transform them into teddy-girl circle or pencil skirts and rib-hugging blouses worn with bobbysocks and stilettos. ‘She was like a bright peacock, a walking traffic light, though she never thought of herself as beautiful,’ said McLaren.
Vivienne’s love of drawing attention to herself through dress, which had emerged in her adolescence, was emboldened by McLaren. Cocking a snook at contemporary hippie style, their clothes became more overtly allied to the fifties roots of rock ’n’ roll. Vivienne’s last vestige of provincial conformity was eliminated in 1971 when she had her hair dramatically cut. Persuaded by McLaren to go to the fashionable Mayfair salon Leonard, at twenty-nine years of age she relinquished her long hair, convinced by her lover that having it cropped would look more sexy, cool and urban. She then peroxided it herself, and razored it into layered fronds down the back of her neck and uneven short spikes which stood erect with hair gel on her crown. Vivienne claimed that she was the first to create the spiky, peroxide-dyed hairstyle, bristling with aggression and artifice, that was to become the hallmark of the punks. Simon Barker believes that David Bowie and his wife Angie copied it: ‘I’m sure they got it from Vivienne. Bowie has always been a style thief and she had that look in early 1971 before Ziggy Stardust came out. Can you imagine what the hairdressers must have thought? Kids cutting their own hair – brilliant! They {the hairdressers} did do what they called a “coup sauvage” after that, bringing it back into the fold and adapting it like that – otherwise they’d have been out of business.’ In the space of four years, the provincial aspirant in well-turned-out clothes had evolved into a modish city-dweller in hard cult fashion. The transformation of the girl from the Snake Pass was complete.
Though McLaren had scoffed at Vivienne’s rural upbringing for so long, it was the display of her ‘country heart’, and not her change of clothes, that drew him closer to her. On occasions he would join her, the two boys and the mostly Afro-Caribbean children from the Brixton primary school where she taught on jaunts into the home counties. The countryside was alien to this urban boy, but he accompanied them on their train trips to the green fields and woodlands of Kent. His relationship with Vivienne deepened during the delightful and uncomplicated hours of these idyllic afternoons – she trying to recapture her childhood, he hoping to experience something always longed for.
Gathered round a campfire in a field, the two adults would tell magic tales for the children. Leaping through the long grass like a demonic wizard, McLaren warned his spellbound audience that if they did not keep the fire burning the snakes – poisonous, of course – would attack. He was a mesmerising performer. His oratory could provoke mayhem as he built up the children’s natural restlessness, with his flaying arms and fire-bright eyes, into a conflagration of mischievous adventure. Here was an adult who thought like a naughty child. It was a trait he would trade on for many years. Both he and Vivienne would tap into memories of this wild-child Arcadia to create their fashions in the early eighties.
In between her lover’s performances, Vivienne enthused the children with her knowledge of flora and fauna. For once, she could be teacher rather than pupil to her lover, guiding him through the natural world and bolstering her feeling of self-worth. ‘I was a real rascal with these black kids,’ McLaren remembered, ‘and Vivienne was in charge of us all. I felt like a child in the childhood that I never had, and that made me care a lot for Vivienne because I felt safe and secure with her.’
Vivienne was deeply and irretrievably in love, but McLaren was emotionally incapable of applying the word ‘love’ to their relationship, spuriously arguing that ‘it was bigger than love’. Though he acknowledged his ‘responsibility to the child’ (making no reference to Ben), he claimed he was still searching for ‘an ideal love’, and kept his heart closed and his options open: ‘Vivienne, as all women are, was calmer and more collected in her thinking, and hoped that a formula would lay out rules, but we were finding our way and I was a more lonely character; a lot more lost and immature and more driven.’ Unlike Vivienne, who relished the chance to disappear into her own world as she crafted her clothes, McLaren feared solitude. But he was not content to settle down to family life, and still sought excitement through ‘the chance encounter’.
In the summer of 1971, aged twenty-five, McLaren finally ended his student days by graduating from Goldsmith’s, and promptly plunged into a depression. Was it time to grow up? What should he do? In tune with his mood, he painted the hall and floor of their flat black. He became obsessed by the perfection of this floor, and if it was not spotlessly clean when he came home to the flat at night, he would turn on Vivienne. The couple had to make ends meet, but at this stage they had no ambition to enter mainstream fashion. Music was his passion – perhaps he could make a living from it, starting out by setting up a stall and selling his collection of old forty-fives and rock ’n’ roll ephemera. And shopkeeping, of course, was in Vivienne’s blood. From the age of thirteen until she left home she had lived above her parents’ shops.
Sharing Vivienne’s knee-jerk aversion to received opinion, McLaren was determined to proselytise the purity and energy of rock ’n’ roll’s roots. He despised the hugely successful ‘super groups’ like Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes, Pink Floyd and others, that had emerged in the late sixties. Rock was now big business, and these bands, performing to vast audiences in enormous stadiums, shared neither the lifestyles nor the aspirations of their fans.
Claiming that his wares constituted an ‘art statement’, as well as a political indictment of the super groups and the glitzy dandyism of glam rockers such as Bowie and Roxy Music, McLaren, a quintessential trader in his winklepickers, posed as a square-toed evangelist, zealously preaching his creed. Since the name Edwards was sullied with a criminal record (he had been caught shoplifting a roll of linoleum, and been arrested for burning the Greek flag at a demonstration), Malcolm changed his name by deed poll back to that of his father, McLaren. In October 1971, wearing his new name, a teddy boy jacket and distinctive lurex-threaded drape trousers which Vivienne had run up for him, he stepped