Kitabı oku: «Vivienne Westwood: An Unfashionable Life», sayfa 5

3 PRANKSTER RETAILING

1971–1975

‘Be Childish

Be Irresponsible

Be Disrespectful

Be Everything

This Society Hates.’

Malcolm McLaren, script for the film Oxford Street, 1969

After two and a half miles, his optimism flagging, McLaren turned the corner into World’s End. There the fashionable King’s Road quickly degenerated into inner-urban decay, tower blocks and pubs where drugs could be scored. As he passed number 430, a figure leaning against a bamboo façade beckoned him into the retro boutique Paradise Garage.

‘Where you going, man? I dig the drainpipes,’ began Bradley Mendelssohn, the Brooklyn-born store manager, referring to McLaren’s lurex-threaded trousers. McLaren explained that he was looking for a stall where he could sell his rock ’n’ roll records and memorabilia. Bradley suggested the back half of the shop, and an ecstatic McLaren returned home with plans to set up a business with his Harrow Art School friend Patrick Casey, another collector of fifties ephemera. Ever practical, Vivienne initially greeted the idea with scepticism, but as usual she eventually went along with McLaren’s wishes.

Pooling their dole cheques and raising additional finance by selling a film camera which McLaren had permanently ‘borrowed’ from Goldsmith’s College – Helen Wellington-Lloyd also lent them £50 – the partners patched up the back of the shop and bought more stock. On the pavement outside they erected a sandwich-board, illustrated with guitars and musical notes, which read ‘Let it Rock at Paradise Garage’, and commenced trading in November 1971. On the second day Bradley failed to turn up to man his half of the store, so Casey and McLaren covered for him. After three or four days Bradley still had not reappeared, and the till was bulging. ‘What were we supposed to do with the takings?’ McLaren wondered. ‘Keep the cash in the shop, tuck it under our beds, what?’ He requisitioned the shop.

Several weeks later, Trevor Miles, the proprietor who had left his emporium in Bradley’s care, returned from a Caribbean honeymoon, walked in and discovered the interlopers. After some haggling he agreed that they could stay, provided they paid a weekly rent of £40. Miles, like many of the young boutique traders at that end of the King’s Road, was into drugs, and just wanted some extra cash. McLaren decided to sit it out and claim ‘squatters’ rights’, calculating that even if Miles resorted to legal action they would have at least three or four months in which to trade before the court hearing. But a week later McLaren arrived to find the shop locked. Their stock had been tossed out on to the pavement.

Outraged by this ‘injustice’, Vivienne turned to their shopkeeping friend Tommy Roberts. ‘Oh, Tommy,’ she wailed down the telephone, ‘the landlord has chucked all our stock out on the street and locked the shop up.’ That was illegal, said Roberts, and she should seek redress from the law. He rang his solicitors in the City and made an appointment for Vivienne to see them. She arrived dressed like a slattern in laddered stockings and a mini skirt, with her spiked peroxide hair. After the meeting the non-plussed solicitor – ‘an old-fashioned kind of bloke’, Roberts remembered – told him: ‘Miss Westwood came to see me and we had to walk to court together with her great long winklepickers, the hair, the stockings, the lot!’ ‘He loved every minute of it,’ said Roberts, ‘despite the fact that his bill wasn’t settled for years.’

Let it Rock was back in business, and now occupied the whole premises. McLaren, Casey and Vivienne (when she wasn’t teaching) scoured the unfashionable outer London markets of Hackney, Streatham, Leytonstone and Hendon for merchandise. They amassed old bakelite valve radios, which McLaren restored and displayed on the pavement, a guitar-shaped mirror, of which they had copies made, old records, fanzines, post-war ‘skin’ magazines like Photoplay and Spick, postcards of period pin-ups and retro clothing. The booty was hauled back to 430 King’s Road.

In imitation of a kitsch fifties front room, the shop was decorated with authentic Festival of Britain-era wallpaper (from a fusty DIY shop in Streatham), a period fridge painted bubblegum pink and black, teak sideboards and formica display cabinets. Rock ’n’ roll blasted from a jukebox, and fluorescent pink letters announced the shop’s name and creed: ‘Teddy boys are Forever – Rock is our business’. Besides vintage records as mainstream as Billy Fury, Little Richard and Elvis Presley, and as esoteric as Hank Ballard and Johnny Guitar Watson, complementary artefacts were sold: Brylcreem, novelty socks decorated with musical notes, plastic earrings and black leather ties with see-through plastic pockets into which were slipped pornographic playing cards. Original, often unworn, fifties clothes were bought from warehouses in the Midlands and on the south coast. Photographs of Billy Fury, James Dean and Marlon Brando were pinned like holy relics onto fake leopardskin, along with Eddie Cochrane’s autograph, sent by friends to Shelley Martin, a sales assistant at Let it Rock, but which McLaren commandeered – just as he had taken possession of Paradise Garage, the film camera, books from Foyle’s and other people’s ideas. He had little respect for the concept of physical or intellectual property, arguing: ‘Plagiarism is what the world’s about. If you don’t start seeing things and stealing because you were inspired by them, you’d be stupid.’

‘Hippiedom is dead!’ was McLaren and Casey’s clarion call. McLaren claimed that he invented retro-chic, but in fact it had emerged back in the late 1950s. There were waves of fifties revivals throughout the sixties, but it was not until 1971 that the look became more than an esoteric backwater. Trevor Miles had traded fifties Americana such as Hawaiian shirts, college jackets covered in baseball or football logos and brightly coloured silk airforce jackets and overalls, some appliquéd on the back with maps of Japan or patriotic eagles. But McLaren’s fifties revival was unique in that it celebrated the fifties of Albion, not America. Unlike Americana – the look of the middle-class college kid or the gaudy tourist – McLaren’s fifties memorabilia celebrated the working class and the jingoistic instincts of the teddy boy. McLaren himself, remembered William English, one of the shop’s customers, looked ‘home-grown and working class, not adapted, just like a real old ted’. The merchandise and the accompanying credo had little to do with contemporary fashion. Nevertheless, within two months fashion features on the shop appeared in the Daily Mirror, the Evening Standard and Rolling Stone.

Let it Rock was not only a retro shop, but also a meeting place. Like Ossie Clark and Alice Pollock’s Quorum in Radnor Walk off the King’s Road in the late sixties, McLaren created a scene in which the like-minded could hang out. Location was vital – ‘Harrow or Streatham, forget it! … That street meant those media people came,’ he remembered – along with the popocracy (Jimmy Page, the Kinks, the Bowies, Marianne Faithfull), artists, dedicated followers of fashion and the hard-core teddy boys. Like Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, Washington Square in New York and Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, the King’s Road was a magnet for the young, the curious and the fun-seeking. At that time McLaren was receptive to customers’ comments and interested in their lifestyles, and would engage them in conversation rather than subject them to the monologues that were the hallmark of his later trading style. William English was struck that Let it Rock traded ‘in complete isolation’, surrounded by hippie emporia, and felt that this made them seem ‘very fresh, interesting’. He noticed that Vivienne and McLaren clearly felt more affinity with working-class provincials such as himself (he was from Leicester) than with their London neighbours: ‘They thought there was more going on in the provinces than in London – they both said as much.’ Ben Kelly, a Northern student at the Royal College of Art, was disappointed by the drabness of London until he discovered the shop, which he described as ‘a beacon … you could become part of their life. You didn’t have to buy anything, just get the vibes. It was exciting – better than drugs, really.’

Intoxicated by the attention and the modest commercial success the enterprise was enjoying, McLaren had even less time for family than before: many of his friends were unaware that he even had a child. In the spring of 1972 his grandfather died, leaving Grandmother Rose alone in her flat, only five minutes from Nightingale Lane. When he called on her one day in early December he found her sitting in bed, bolt upright from rigor mortis. His mother, who partly blamed McLaren for not keeping an eye on the old woman, broke off what little contact she still had with him.

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 were relatively insipid, simply advertising Vivienne and McLaren’s idols – Marlon Brando, James Dean, Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley – or their affiliations – e.g. ‘Vive la Rock’. After unsuccessfully attempting to sell these bland designs at the August 1972 Rock ’n’ Roll Festival at Wembley Arena, they converted the lot into knickers. Clearly, the T-shirts needed to be stronger. Vivienne began to customise them, adding tarty marabou feathers and tiny see-through plastic windows, into which a cigarette card of a pin-up girl or a rock idol was slipped. Into others she sewed two zippers which when opened allowed the nipples to peep through. She then came up with a macabre device, evoking a voodoo curse: letters constructed out of chicken bones attached to the T-shirts with chains and spelling out the words ‘Perv’ or ‘Rock’. The bones were collected from Ricky Sky, then a waiter at Leonardo’s Italian trattoria opposite 430 King’s Road. Vivienne took the discarded chicken carcasses, boiled them to strip them of flesh and gristle, then drilled holes into the bones. Only a dozen or so of these custom-made and highly collectible bone T-shirts were made – the chicken-slaughtering heavy-metal rock singer Alice Cooper bought one – and fakes were to appear on the market in the nineties. Originals now fetch several thousand pounds, and one example hangs today in 430 King’s Road, another in Vivienne’s Conduit Street shop in Mayfair.

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.