Will England, a student at the London International Film School, photographed Vivienne in the shop early one summer morning in 1975 while McLaren was out of town. She posed in front of a piece of fetish sculpture, a nail-studded leg (by Lawrence Daniels, later to become a multi-millionaire by patenting the holograms used on credit cards) draped in a black chain-hung T-shirt trimmed with horsehair tails and menacingly stretching a ‘blind’ black rubber mask. To England’s surprise, Vivienne ‘volunteered to wear the pink rubber bodysuit – she was not at all shy’, and followed his directions like a chillingly blank mannequin. It was an exhibitionist pose, not one that, despite Vivienne and McLaren’s claims to the contrary, indicated a liberated attitude.
A woman dressed in this gear, Vivienne argued, was courageously exploring sexual self-determination. This was a poor argument. In the mid-seventies, fashion was under attack from the feminist movement. Fashion, it was argued, simply pandered to the stereotypically sexist image of women. In protest, some feminists adopted an extreme form of asexual, workaday dress.
Neither Vivienne nor McLaren was a feminist, and the appropriation of Vivienne’s work by certain writers and commentators in the movement was ill-considered. Ted, rocker and biker uniforms were patently macho and focused on men: their gangs’ attendant women were dressed and treated as sexual chattels. Like a Hell’s Angel woman, Vivienne’s adoption of subversive S&M dress was not remotely feminist. Simon Barker argues: ‘Vivienne throughout her career has made women sexy by making them in control of their sexuality rather than suppressing it or playing a passive role. That’s what the feminists hate most about Vivienne, because it’s much more threatening to them and their beliefs when women want to take control of their sexuality … But Vivienne put them in control of those things, and they wear them for themselves and for the power those clothes give them. They can deliver or not, but the choice is theirs.’
This is a strength accorded to Vivienne’s work by others, rather than a motive that she herself fixed upon. She was, and has remained, in thrall to a series of manipulative men, from whom she has tolerated disrespect and abuse because she was convinced that it was only through these men that she could transcend her background and make something of herself. One employee remembers Vivienne telling her: ‘Malcolm used to kick me and kick me. I think he just wanted to kick me right out of his life. Men get away with so much, don’t they?’ At the same time, Vivienne failed to develop profound friendships with her own sex, casting weak young women as dolls to be dressed up, and strong ones as sexual and intellectual threats. To view her as a feminist, even a maverick one, is rash.
In the mid-eighties, elements within fashion and feminism encouraged a détente, epitomised in 1985 by the action taken in Paris by the feminist bookshop Maison des Femmes, which devoted its windows to the work of the French designer Sonia Rykiel. Reappraising Vivienne’s work, some journalists have attempted to appropriate her antics and clothes to the feminist cause, but they fail to understand (easy to do, since much of her thinking is fractured and inarticulately communicated) that her pronouncements were essentially not liberating. She simply wished to please McLaren, to practise his sensationalist creed and to attract the public’s attention, just as she had done as a teenager by wearing her marguerite earrings.
But McLaren’s youthful pranks had turned nasty, and he was prepared to go further. Since the New York Dolls had collapsed, and Richard Hell refused to join McLaren’s planned London version of the band, the self-styled Fagin had to find his own street urchins to perform his situationist pranks. They had been lurking in the background, approvingly listed under ‘Loves’ on the ‘What Side of the Bed’ T-shirt in the autumn of 1974 under the name Kutie Jones and his SEX PISTOLS. Into the limelight stepped four working-class teenagers. The aspiring impresario’s first step was to abbreviate their name to the more threatening ‘Sex Pistols’.
May 1975–1978
‘Successful demonstrations are not necessarily those which mobilise the greatest number of people, but those which attract the greatest interest among journalists. Exaggerating only slightly, one may say that fifty clever folk who can make a successful “happening” get five minutes on TV, can make as much political effect as half a million demonstrators.’
Pierre Bourdieu
‘When music moves from the music section to the front page of the newspaper, you’re in trouble.’
Danny Fields
‘Punk is like squeezing spots.’
Jamie Reid to Celia Lyttelton, 1986
Punk is a state of mind, and was a fashion. It had the greatest impact on Western popular culture – from music to fashion, from graphic design to politics – of any youth movement since the hippies in the 1960s. Yet the hard-core of the cult lasted a mere thirty months, from the summer of 1975 to January 1978, and was centred in London on, at most, two hundred teenagers. It was led by a handful of agents provocateurs in their late twenties and was spawned in a small, highly stylised shop in West London. Nevertheless, its reverberations continue today beyond Britain’s shores. Culling imagery and slogans from many cultures and epochs, it was post-modernist in its irony and fusion of disparate styles, and unmistakably English.
While the roots and impact of punk have excited much debate, it was a handful of exceptional individuals who made the movement so influential, idiosyncratic and seductive. And those individuals were all English. In its essential Englishness, punk was continuing a phenomenon seen in the 1950s with skiffle, and in the pop music of the mid-sixties (and perhaps in the 1990s in the worldwide success of ‘Britpop’). Colin MacInnes, in his essay ‘Pop Songs and Teenagers’, identified this Englishness:
The paradox is that the bearded skiffle singers with their Yankee ballads, and Tommy Steele and his ‘rock’-style songs, seem so resoundingly, so irreversibly English. I don’t at all deny an {American} influence (which, incidentally, has been going on ever since ragtime hit this country before World War I). But the kids have transformed this influence into something of their own … in a way that suggests, subtly, that they’re almost amused by what has influenced them. Put an English teenager beside an American, and you’ll see the difference: our vision is less streamlined, less pattern-perfect and more knobbly, homely, self-possessed.
Competing claims – of nation and class – have bedevilled the debate over punk’s origins. ‘Punk’, the word, and ‘proto-punk’, the style, originated in New York, becoming common currency there when three high-school friends, Legs McNeil, John Holstrum and Ged Dun, set up a magazine called Punk in 1975. Its contents reflected their own interests: ‘television reruns, drinking beer, getting laid, cheeseburgers, comics, grade-B movies, and this weird rock ’n’ roll that nobody but us seemed to like: the Velvets, the Stooges, the New York Dolls …’
Those who argue that the movement originated in America cite garage bands and the performers at CBGBs in New York, particularly Richard Hell, the New York Dolls and Tom Verlaine, as the proto-punks. The first, small, British punk coterie – the Sex Pistols and half a dozen rival bands, their earliest fans, the ‘Bromley Contingent’ (christened by Caroline Coon of the Melody Maker) and their hangers-on – claimed that the movement was a peculiarly British, specifically London, phenomenon, and jingoistically downplay any transatlantic influence. Jordan, the female icon at the heart of the movement, insists that ‘punk could only have happened in England. I’m a great fan of the British people. I think we’re the forerunner in all things