By the summer of 1976, according to Alan Jones, who had now joined the staff of SEX, the shop was taking quite a lot of money, but it was never banked – Vivienne and McLaren simply used it to live and to make more clothes. When two tax inspectors arrived at 430 King’s Road one day, Vivienne whispered urgently to Jones, Michael Collins and Jordan, who were serving, ‘Just pretend you’re customers!’
Jones, who later became a critic specialising in horror films, styled himself in an aggressively homosexual manner. Wearing tight black leather jeans and black see-through rubber T-shirts from SEX, he would apply stage blood to his arms and chest and strap a hypodermic syringe to his arm. Before the curtain went up on the first night of the musical A Chorus Line at the Drury Lane theatre, he was approached by the manager and informed that the performance would not begin until he removed his swastika armband.
The first SEX T-shirts had been printed by hand on Vivienne’s kitchen table with a child’s printing set and stencils. Each was hand-stamped, and many were customised – with marabou feathers, horsehair, lace, studs or shoulderpads cut from rubber tyres – and hand-inscribed with fabric dye. The later T-shirts were screen-printed. As the months passed, other villains joined the Cambridge Rapist in the rogues’ gallery of anti-heroes and rebels celebrated on cotton. Whether the eighteenth-century highwayman Dick Turpin, Charles Dickens’s Fagin and his Artful Dodger, or modern mass murderers and terrorists, all were lauded as freedom fighters who attacked the confinement of the moral majority.
The irreverent ‘Mickey and Minnie’ and ‘Snow White’ T-shirts attacked the Disneyfication of childhood. In Vivienne and McLaren’s eyes, the American entertainment industry had robbed children of their imagination and left them dependent on a commercially-driven cartoon culture. ‘Mickey and Minnie’ showed the Disney icons fornicating, Mickey’s ear defaced by an anarchist symbol, while Snow White was surrounded by sexually excited dwarfs.
McLaren sought scandalous material from every source – political, sexual, social. Probably the most notorious of SEX’s shock-tactic T-shirts was ‘Two Naked Cowboys’. Face to face in Stetsons and boots, naked from the waist down, two men stand with penises drawn – dangling so close that they almost touch. Alan Jones was arrested in Piccadilly Circus in August 1975 for wearing the shirt, and on 7 August the police raided the shop and McLaren and Vivienne were arrested.
A meeting was held between Vivienne, McLaren, Jones, Nils Stevenson and Gene Krell at the Portobello Hotel, where Jones worked as the night porter. Stevenson remembers that Vivienne and McLaren promised to back Jones at his trial, but they failed to turn up on the day. With no supporters in court, Jones pleaded guilty and was fined £30. Nicholas de Jong, then the court correspondent of the Guardian, asked him afterwards why he hadn’t defended himself and taken a stand about creative freedom. The case made the front page of the Guardian the following day, and a number of letters in support of Jones were written to the editor. Jones remains bitter about the whole incident: ‘They didn’t even pay the fine! I got the shop a lot of publicity, but it did fuck-all for me!’
After a second, farcical court hearing in November, in which the judge insisted that the space between the cowboys’ organs be measured in court with a school ruler, Vivienne and McLaren were charged with ‘exposing to public view an indecent exhibition’ and fined £50. They continued to sell the T-shirts one at a time from under the counter, hiding the rest of the stock in a flat above the shop. The police conducted surprise raids but never found them, because the flat was accessed from the next-door building.
Toying with the theme of sex, Vivienne came up with a strangely surreal design: a pair of naked female breasts printed on a T-shirt’s chest. The confusing sexual image, and the shocking displacement caused by seeing it worn by a man, was to reappear in her collections a decade later. SEX clothing was not usually erotic.
By turning S&M gear into a defiant fashion, removing it from the privacy of the bedroom and flaunting it in a juvenile, ‘Up yours!’ manner in the street, Vivienne and McLaren robbed it of erotic mystery and turned it into combat gear for a post-permissive sexual liberation adolescent army. Passion ended in fashion. The couple’s very language was confrontationally righteous rather than alluringly seductive. Nils Stevenson remembers that because the clothes sold at SEX were so ‘kinky’, many people assumed that Vivienne and McLaren must have had a ‘particularly sexual relationship, and that being into a particular kink or perversion bound them together’. Only later did he realise how sexually naïve they both were, and that what they actually shared was an ability to be obsessed by another person. Vivienne became intrigued, for example, by one client who was a prostitute: ‘It was a strange world to Vivienne, and she became really besotted by her and what she did to her clients.’
When feminists argued that SEX’s sado-masochist accessories degraded women, Vivienne hit back with the rhetorical question, who was being degraded? Certainly not her dominatrix troops. The threat – if not the delivery – of sexual ravaging by these teenage harridans challenged traditional views of the man’s role as sexual aggressor. ‘We’re not just here to sell fetish clothing,’ Vivienne claimed in the pages of the sex magazine Forum, ‘but to convert, educate, liberate … we want to take it out of the bedroom and onto the streets.’ For McLaren, profit and amusement were the motives, but Vivienne believed that their campaign would irrevocably alter English attitudes to sex.
It was not to be. The SEX manifesto had little appeal beyond the shop’s loyal young following, and it encountered the same aversion as the Rational Dress Movement, founded in 1884 to promote healthy and appropriate women’s clothing, had done a century earlier. A political manifesto pinned onto a new style of garment rarely persuades the public to adopt it. It took the alluring oils of the Pre-Raphaelite painters and, more powerfully, the exotic Eastern promise of Diaghilev’s orientalism to entice fashionable women to loosen their robes, discard their unhealthy corsets and live a little. Vivienne and McLaren’s support for Valerie Solanas’s violent rampage against the opposite sex was hardly libido-boosting, as the opening sentence of her ‘SCUM Manifesto’ suggests:
Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complex automation and destroy the male.
Many of the young – and most of those attracted to the shop were still adolescent – were asexual, homosexual or sexually unsure. Their naïve and playful dressing-up lightened the image of the darker context which McLaren and Vivienne were dabbling in. Simon Barker, then a shy suburban teenager from Bromley who shopped at SEX, explains: ‘We did want to shock, but not in a tacky way. We were really into looking great – we felt great. We didn’t want to look the same as everyone else … People used to call us street theatre, and we just thought everything else was boring.’ McLaren and Vivienne’s designs may have been calculated to challenge received opinion, but the kids just wanted to annoy their elders and have a good time. The look was simply the precursor to punk, a singularly asexual style.
McLaren claimed that one of Vivienne’s breasts had deflated after Ben’s birth, making her ‘very self-conscious about that when she was naked’. Whether this was true or not, by now Vivienne’s physical self-confidence was blossoming. In the name of free speech and free action she would totter around the shop on high heels, dressed in a totally see-through skin-tight pink rubber T-shirt or négligée, while McLaren, more timidly