The gradual liberalisation of society set the scene for McLaren, who calculated that one thing that was sure to antagonise the sexually-repressed English was the apparel and artefacts of sexual fetish. Vivienne and McLaren had first toyed with fetishistic dress when Ken Russell had commissioned them to customise their biker leathers with explicit sado-masochist and Nazi imagery for his musical biopic Mahler. (Shirley Russell, the director’s ex-wife and the film’s costumier, says that neither Vivienne nor McLaren did any work on Mahler. The leather-studded S&M costume was designed and made by Lenny Pollock.) Now, in the late summer of 1974, they reopened the refurbished shop under the name ‘SEX’, brazenly spelt out above the door in huge, spanked-flesh-pink letters cut out of padded PVC, which resembled a malleable Claus Oldenberg pop art sculpture. Naked, headless mannequins were piled, orgy-fashion, on top of one another in the window. Customers passed under the lintel – sprayed with Rousseau’s aphorism ‘Craft must have clothes but Truth loves to go naked’ – and into a sexual romper room. Sheets of elastoplast-pink surgical rubber, as soft and powdery to the touch as a condom, hung down the walls, which were sprayed with quotations McLaren had lifted from pornographic literature, including Valerie Solanas’s vitriolic ‘SCUM Manifesto’ and Alexander Trocchi’s School for Wives and Thongs.
Much of the imagery on the clothes strongly resembled the work of the fifties American artist Eric Stanton, who produced a series of drawings depicting women trussed up in black leather and rubber bondage wear, including faceless rubber hoods, like tethered birds of prey. Labels sewn on to the shoulders of the SEX clothes like epaulettes bore subversive quotations such as: ‘The dirty stripper who left her undies on the railings to go hitch-hiking, said, You don’t think I have stripped off all these years just for money, do you?’ One particularly shocking T-shirt featured a naked pre-pubescent boy provocatively smoking a cigarette – this at a time when the BBC had caused a storm of controversy with a documentary called Johnnie Go Home, about a teenager who ran away to London and ended up working as a rent boy. Another bore a graphic image of a naked black man with a large penis.
‘French lingerie’ (as coy department stores called it) in black or red lace, scissored open for easy access to the sexual organs, left customers in no doubt what game they were expected to play. Displayed on gymnasium exercise-bars alongside the more familiar tools of sado-masochism – whips, chains, nipple clamps, handcuffs and black thigh-high boots – was exotica bought from sub-culture catalogues, such as skin-tight black rubber eyeless masks, the hermetic seal broken only by a tiny breathing tube. These were worn with bodysuits constructed out of two ‘skins’ of rubber that could be inflated, pressing so hard against the body that they denied it any sight or sound. The focal point of the surgically bleak shop was a huge, grubby double bed laid with a rubber sheet.
‘Pornography is the laughter of the bathroom of your mind,’ customers were told as they were goaded to disappear behind a screen and dress up in the garb which hung challengingly round the shop. McLaren was greatly influenced by the American ‘skinflick’ director Russ Meyer, whose films such as Supervixens and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls were not explicitly pornographic, so much as crammed with camp excess. McLaren and Meyer were two of a kind.
Some of the merchandise, bulk-ordered from catalogues such as ‘Scandalous Lingerie & Glamour Wear’ from Estelle Lingerie in Walthamstow, which was sent to Estelle’s customers in unlabelled, brown-paper parcels, was customised by Vivienne with marabou feathers, lace and leather. Once again, this was not designing, but editing and customising available clothing. Vivienne was not, as yet, a fully-fledged designer.
The couple’s attitude to sex was aggressively missionary rather than joyously practised. Like a hectoring Miss Jean Brodie, Vivienne lectured her customers as if in the grip of a disciplined commitment to an idea, rather than a sensuous delight in erotica. She allied herself to McLaren’s campaign ‘to annoy English people … by attacking sexual attitudes, trying to undermine the puritan, philistine basis of our culture’, later describing this as ‘our first innovation’.
In the context of the time, when sexuality was not freely discussed in any but the most liberal company, to promote what McLaren dubbed ‘rubber wear for the street and rubber wear for the office’ was astonishingly provocative. Harper’s & Queen was the only fashion magazine even to refer to SEX’s wares, in an anonymous column by Peter York, who jocularly advised readers to avert their eyes when passing 430 King’s Road – it was just too shocking.
It is easy to forget just how grey and depressed London – even the King’s Road – was in the mid-seventies. Marco Pirroni, the lead guitarist and songwriter of Adam and the Ants, remembers: ‘Every day seemed grey, and you still had fog in those days. In my mohair, I’d pull the sleeves down over my hands to stop the cold. You got addicted to the shop. There was nowhere else you wanted to go. Everywhere else was a let-down. It was so tactile; the smell of the rubber, the clothes felt good.’
Viewing the merchandise of SEX from the perspective of the late 1990s, the outrageous edge has been blunted by more explicit images in film, rock videos and fashion, such as the late Gianni Versace’s sanitised hooker clothes. But in the context of the relatively naïve mid-seventies, its impact was shocking. SEX attracted curiosity, controversy and custom, and its infamously libertarian crusade was underscored by a series of explicit T-shirts. Classic white T-shirts were bought from Tommy Roberts or imported in bulk from New York in the luggage of Terry Doktor or David Ireland, who later worked at the shop. Never one to leave a classic alone, Vivienne believed that the simple T-shirt could be improved – further simplified. She sat for hours deconstructing it, seeking ways to reduce it to its essence. In the end, she settled on the most basic form. She cut off the arms, ripped the shoulder seams open and knotted them back together, giving the garment the make-do feel of the knotted-hankie ‘hat’ favoured by the working-class British holidaymaker. Painstakingly researching and experimenting, Vivienne took three days to design a pared-down T-shirt. She cut two simple squares of cotton jersey, and sewed them roughly along the shoulders and down the sides. There was no attempt at attaching superfluous sleeves. It is unlikely that someone with an art-school or pattern-cutting training would have done that. It looked particularly sexy on women, who would provocatively gather the cotton in folds to cup their breasts. After a while, her confidence growing, she turned the T-shirts inside-out to flaunt their home-made scruffiness. The ripping, the customising and the hands-on craft showed that she and McLaren were attacking capitalist modes of production and consumption, and their customers were instructed to live up to the do-it-yourself ethos and the rhetoric printed across their chests.
At first the reconstructed shirts were hand-printed under McLaren’s instructions, and after 1975 screen-printed up by his old friend Bernie Rhodes, later to be manager of The Clash, with images and text. Vivienne did not devise the copy on the shirts at this stage. ‘She was never someone who could articulate any idea or thought,’ says McLaren. ‘She did not have any ideas. She did not think of herself as being creative, but she was phenomenally good with her hands. She was a great little researcher. She would find a way to make an idea work.’
Vivienne researched into the background of fetish clothing, and became enthralled: ‘I had to ask myself, why this extreme form of dress? Not that I strapped myself up and had sex like that. But on the other hand, I also didn’t want to liberally understand why people did it. I wanted to get hold of those extreme articles of clothing and feel what it was like to wear them.’
It is a common misconception that Vivienne was, or ever has been, interested in street or youth culture per se. Rather it was the dress and deeds of any vociferously or militantly sectarian, curiously-dressed or subversive group that fascinated her and stimulated her to spend hours in libraries and museums researching their social and dress history. The groups could be Samurai warriors, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Shakers