Within a few months Let it Rock began running out of original teddy boy clothing, so McLaren co-opted Vivienne, who had made her own clothes since she was a teenager, to run up copies. She was happy to stop teaching, as she had become disillusioned by the class sizes and the conformity demanded by the state system: ‘It was impossible to teach anything in such a large class … But the naughty children were the smart ones, they’ve got something. To get out of teaching was not a big jump. I was considered a nuisance when I was a teacher because my sympathies were with the children. If they swore at me, I didn’t care, actually. I was already unorthodox in my attitude of what children ought and ought not to do.’
In order to pay for the second-hand sewing machine Vivienne worked on at home, McLaren disconnected the flat’s telephone – he could use the one at the shop, and Vivienne, he reasoned, ‘was too nervous a person and was used to being alone. She didn’t like coming down to the shop and hated having to deal with the phone. It was mostly my friends anyway.’
Left undistracted in Nightingale Lane, Vivienne sowed the seeds of her new career, repairing, altering and eventually copying rock ’n’ roll clothing. She carefully and methodically unpicked and duplicated original teddy boy garments while Sid Green, an East End tailor whom she regularly consulted, made up the drape jackets in neon colours and fake fur, sequinned or lurex collars chosen by her. With the archivist’s exactitude that became her signature, she sourced authentic cloth, buttons and linings and, informed by research in teddy boy clubs, copied and recoloured the look. ‘She’s a real worker,’ says Tommy Roberts. ‘She was self-taught, taking things to pieces.’ What distinguished the merchandise at Let it Rock from the second-hand/vintage clothing sold at other boutiques was Vivienne’s perfectionism. She would restore the clothes to pristine condition, dry cleaning them, repairing the lining and replacing lost buttons with authentic originals.
Despite Vivienne’s commitment, McLaren is dismissive of her contribution: ‘The fashion industry was in my blood, not hers, especially in menswear. My grandparents were tailors. I was the Dedicated Follower of Fashion, just like Ray Davies of the Kinks sings, whereas Vivienne was someone who fell into it. I forced her.’ He held court at the shop and issued instructions to Vivienne, casting her as a love-slave to his scams, which he amplified into ‘a stand against the system’. For many years, when talking to the press he gave the impression that he was the only one involved in the shop – Vivienne did not exist.
Vivienne may have been introduced to the fashion business by McLaren, but it became, in her words, ‘a baby I picked up and never put down’. She earnestly taught herself the tailoring craft (McLaren could not thread a needle), and gradually introduced new designs. ‘She’s quite a formidable force once she sets her mind to it,’ one employee recalled. ‘She’s like a dog with a bone, and she won’t give up.’ To keep her under his control, McLaren played on Vivienne’s insecurities, constantly telling her that she would be ‘nothing but a factory worker if it wasn’t for me’, which was patently untrue.
While Vivienne toiled, McLaren and Patrick Casey reorganised the ‘art installation’ of 430 King’s Road. As Casey was homeless, he dossed on the floor of the shop, hence the musty smell customers noticed on entering. Being a ‘speed freak’, he would sleep until noon, and consequently the shop rarely opened before lunch. These unorthodox hours amused McLaren, who liked to watch the frustrated customers waiting outside (the practical and disciplined Vivienne would have opened at nine in the morning). To further whet the customers’ appetites, McLaren would capriciously announce that a pair of white brothel-creepers, a forty-five or a plastic, guitar-shaped handbag was a ‘collector’s item – not for sale’. Up to half the merchandise would be teasingly unavailable. McLaren loved to quote Andy Warhol’s adage that ‘being good at business is the most fascinating kind of art’.
Vivienne would often be summoned at seven or eight in the evening to chauffeur McLaren around in her old olive-green Mini, carpeted with disregarded parking tickets. Sometimes they would go to the Black Raven pub in Bishopsgate in the East End, the venue favoured by the ted revivalists. Dressed as one of them, in a canary-yellow mohair jumper and tight black ski-pants, or a circle skirt and stilettos, Vivienne would mingle with the crowd to research the look or solicit business for the shop. She was adept at ingratiating herself into a scene, particularly in the cause of research; she learnt their dances and shared their enthusiasms. It was when Vivienne was dancing, which she loved, that one could see the unbridled exuberance she had inherited from Dora. McLaren habitually sat in a corner, watching.
Occasionally Vivienne manned the shop, but as yet she was not comfortable with the fashionable King’s Road crowd. ‘She seemed mumsy and terribly suburban-housewifey, but surrounded by all this incredible gear, to which she didn’t seem to relate,’ one customer remembered. Vivienne would allow visitors to try on things ‘for hours, and it didn’t matter if you didn’t buy anything’. The hectoring polemicist had yet to emerge.
Given the choice, Vivienne preferred to stay at home sketching, making and thinking about clothes, while McLaren, accompanied by Tommy Roberts, toured the clubs and bars. The two shopkeepers loved to spar, McLaren dismissing Roberts’s customers David Bowie and Roxy Music as glam rock poseurs: ‘I think he got fed up with me,’ says Roberts, ‘because people used to come into his shop and ask, “Where’s City Light Studio {one of Roberts’s shops}?” He would charge them ten bob to tell them.’
Let it Rock attracted its own rock customers, including Ringo Starr and David Essex, who ordered clothes for their characters in the rock ’n’ roll tribute film That’ll be the Day (1973), and the cabaret performer Lionel Blair, who dressed the chorus line of his Saturday night television show in fifties copies. Although McLaren was the front man, Vivienne gradually became the stronger personification of Let it Rock, where she was spending an increasing amount of time. For her, the shop represented a commitment to a lifestyle which she disseminated like an evangelical preacher; whereas for McLaren it was simply the stage for a lucrative pose.
Familiarity with the teddy boys soon bred contempt. Claiming that they were disgusted by the teds’ racist and sexist tendencies – Vivienne’s sense of justice, in particular, was outraged – she and McLaren turned away from it (Casey had left the business). Ethical considerations aside, they were also running out of vintage stock, and were tired of simply copying it. Added to that, the Let it Rock look had caught on. Other local traders were astonished when, having built up Let it Rock’s reputation and profitability, Vivienne and McLaren closed the shop in early 1973. But McLaren and Vivienne shared a low boredom threshold, and they now elected, in advance of the pack, to ally themselves to another outlaw youth cult, the motorbike rockers and greasers.
James Dean, the prototypical teenage anti-hero of Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and Marlon Brando, the hoodlum biker who terrorises a small town in The Wild One (1953), epitomised disaffected American youth. In the spring of 1973, 430 King’s Road reopened as Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die (TFTLTYTD), the name having been suggested by their Saturday assistant as a tribute to Dean’s early death. Out went the drapes and brothel creepers, in came studded black bikers’ leathers, chains, motorcycle memorabilia and oil-stained second-hand Levi’s. While many of the Let it Rock clothes had had a tailored elegance, the biker gear was a caricature of fifties rockers. The look (later to be appropriated by the gay community, as epitomised by the American pop group the Village People) was rough and deliberately confrontational.
It was during 430 King’s Road’s incarnation as TFTLTYTD that McLaren and Westwood began to design slogan-printed T-shirts. They were the first retailers fully to exploit the incendiary impact of these affordable statements of defiance, sales of which were targeted at impressionable teenagers. ‘The T-shirt is anti-fashion at its simplest,’ they repeatedly declared, intentionally distancing themselves from commercial fashion. It became their core design, serving at the same time as a fashion item, a tool of propaganda and a clarion call to rebellion. In time, the subversiveness and downright scurrilousness of their slogans and designs attracted youthful buyers in direct proportion to the shock and offence they caused to the public at large.
The first T-shirts