The bone T-shirts demonstrated Vivienne’s self-taught, do-it-yourself approach to fashion. Never happier than when sitting alone, immersed in a craft at her kitchen table, she fastidiously drilled, potato-printed and hand-stencilled garments, convinced that she was engaging in the politics of dissent. In customising standard biker wear with Hell’s Angel slogans, studs, chains, bones and talismanic rocker motifs such as the skull and crossbones, she had hit upon an approach to clothes design that went straight to the heart of excitable young fans. The formula of customising clothing with slogans became one of her enduring leitmotivs
Seething with genuine feelings of protest, fired up by McLaren’s invective but frustrated by her own inarticulacy, these didactic clothes became Vivienne’s means of carrying their vituperative opinions onto the street on the backs of their customers. Ever the schoolteacher, she crafted clothes to ‘instruct’ society, and every garment carried an almost sectarian message: the ‘Venus’ T-shirt, for example, featured horsehair, metal studs and bike-tyre sleeves, while others depicted rock idols made out of glitter. Such tub-thumping pronouncements attested fierce loyalty to a particular style of music and youth culture.
Receptive customers were thrilled by the commitment and zeal of this clothing. The French fashion designer and motorbike enthusiast Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, for example, was so taken with the unexpected juxtapositions of the collaged dadaist T-shirts and their anti-fashion amateurism that he left a note for the proprietor of TFTLTYTD which read: ‘I love the things you do. I think we have some common pensives and I would love to meet you.’ Coincidentally, he was designing clothes made from domestic rubbish – old floorcloths and blankets – scrawled with phrases from Rabelais. Keenly aware of de Castelbajac’s position in France’s aristocracy and fashion hierarchy, McLaren was determined to exploit this connection, while Vivienne was thrilled that a ‘real designer’ had praised her work. Despite their claims to the contrary, both Vivienne and McLaren responded to approval from the establishment. The Harper’s & Queen style critic Peter York, hearing Vivienne’s boasts that she and de Castelbajac were working on similar lines, remembers thinking: ‘She was clearly aspiring to be a mainstream designer.’
Several months later McLaren made a trip to Paris and, carrying a huge bottle of Johnnie Walker ‘with a label the same colour as his hair’ under his arm, called unannounced at de Castelbajac’s flat. ‘Hi, Charlie!’ he began familiarly. ‘No one’s ever called me that,’ de Castelbajac recalled, and within hours he and McLaren had become firm friends. It was the beginning of a long-lasting alliance.
In August 1973, several King’s Road shops were invited to show their wares at the annual National Boutique Show at the MacAlpine Hotel in New York. Feeling hemmed in by domesticity and the routine of shopkeeping, and tempted by a promotional opportunity and the excitement of their first trip to America, Vivienne and McLaren flew to New York. They were accompanied by Gerry Goldstein, a friend of McLaren’s from college days. The trio decorated their stall, set up in the hotel bedroom, with an array of T-shirts, teddy boy and rocker clothes and rock ’n’ roll memorabilia. Bill Haley and Jerry Lee Lewis hits were blasted down the corridors. Despite amused interest, no orders were taken.
However, Alice Cooper and Sylvain Sylvain, rhythm guitarist for the New York cult band the New York Dolls, paid them a visit. Sylvain and the Dolls’ lead guitarist Johnny Thunders had become customers of Let it Rock when they had recently visited London, but they had never met McLaren or Vivienne. Impressed by the retro-dandyism and lewd fifties pin-ups, Sylvain persuaded them to move into the Chelsea Hotel, the dank, downbeat lodgings on West 23rd Street whose residents had included Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan, Valerie Solanas, and a host of rock groups, artists and writers.
The Dolls introduced Vivienne and McLaren to the heart of New York’s rock culture. They found themselves surrounded by a narcissistic hedonism, bent on experimenting with the derangement of the senses. They were interviewed by Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine about their shop, went clubbing at CBGBs and saw performances by Richard Hell (né Myers), the Ramones and Patti Smith, whom McLaren regarded as urban poets. In particular, McLaren was transfixed by Hell and his group Television. Unkempt, degenerate and self-abusive, he wore slashed and safety-pinned clothing. His hair razored into a shag cut and his body daubed with doom-laden poetry, he treated his audience with weary contempt. It was, McLaren felt, as if the very streets of Paris 1968 had come alive in one man, his graffitied flesh like a living wall of protest.
The sardonic, glam rock Dolls – the name referred to their arch transvestism in trashy women’s clothes – fused the theatre of the absurd with classic rock ’n’ roll anarchy. They feigned sexual ambivalence in order to debunk the macho rock star image of success and sexuality. This struck a chord not only among young groupies, but also the older (twenty- and thirty-year-old) art and theatre crowd, Andy Warhol’s followers and other musicians like Iggy Pop, David Bowie and Lou Reed. Their act was knowing, louche and dismissive of their fans, but it was not political. It was in New York that McLaren grasped the potential of the disaffected youth market, becoming, according to Sylvain, ‘the Dolls’ biggest groupie’. Vivienne, however, had not enjoyed the trip, and returned to London declaring that she hated America. She never revised her opinion, later declaring that Americans were ‘barbarians’ and ‘the ultimate philistines’, and would not return for two decades.
Back in Britain, economic and social gloom was setting in. Industrial tension escalated into a series of strikes, and following repeated power shortages, a three-day working week was introduced.
Bored with Vivienne, London and the shop, McLaren promptly began an affair with Addie Isman, the wayward daughter of a wealthy New Jersey family who was working at TFTLTYTD. After nights out on the town with Addie, McLaren would return to verbal, and sometimes physical, attacks from Vivienne. Though the affair ended after a few months when Addie returned to America (where she died five years later from a barbiturate overdose), Vivienne became increasingly alert to potential sexual rivals.
Despite McLaren’s periodical departures from the Nightingale Lane flat in pursuit of sexual intrigue, Vivienne’s tenacity maintained the relationship. She now accompanied McLaren more frequently on his night-time prowlings around clubs and bars. Michael Kostiff, a Northern clubgoer and follower of Chelsea fashions who patronised TFTLTYTD with his spectacularly-dressed German wife Gerlinde, came to know the couple well at this time. During late-night drinking sessions at the Kostiffs’, McLaren would hold forth on the ideology of the shop, while Vivienne fed him questions. ‘But you know what I think about that,’ McLaren would snap. ‘Yeah, well I want to hear you say it again,’ she would reply. This was her method of learning, parrot-fashion, how to communicate the theories of others, which she would later repeat by rote, with her own idiosyncratic delivery. She was a foil to McLaren, the straight ‘man’ to his funny man. Having drunk their hosts dry, Vivienne and McLaren would raid the fridge for the last pint of milk, then leave.
The Kostiffs were taken aback that, given the severity of the recession and the duo’s avowed allegiance to ‘the people’, their aggressive didacticism precluded any empathy with or even sympathy for the poor: ‘They