VIVIENNE WESTWOOD VIVIENNE WESTWOOD VIVIENNE WESTWOOD

Rotten, Vicious Fashion

Childhood friends Johnny Rotte n and Sid Vicious claim names that evoke the true essence of punk. The Sex Pistols, their short-lived and infamous band, changed the face of music and gave voice to a disenfranchised generation. The Sex Pistols were working-class, antagonistic, innovative teenagers turned “punk” before it had a name. The clothing popularized by the Sex Pistols could be seen as a reaction against, as well as the culmination of, a long line of proscribed postwar British subcultural styles, including mods, skinheads, rastas, and rudies. The Sex Pistols needed a manager to guide them and McLaren and Westwood needed an outlet for their ideas, both fashionable and political. To this day, there is much debate about whether McLaren was the architect of punk ideology. A known Situationist,7 McLaren supposedly created the Sex Pistols solely as a marketing tool for the SEX shop, but singer Johnny Rotten disputes this, emphasizing that the band existed prior to the collaboration with Westwood and McLaren but were used as models for the ideal punk look through their stage clothes often supplied by SEX.

Deconstructing Punk

Punk was trash culture gone avant-garde and/or the avant-garde gone trash, and just as Dada had tried to destroy the institution of art, so the punks seemed bent on destroying the very institution of fashion. Philosopher Jacques Derrida’s concept of “deconstruction,” a term used to describe the process of uncovering the multiplicity of meanings in text, has been used to analyze everything from modern art to architecture. As applied to fashion, deconstruction has come to imply a decoding of both meaning and designer intent, as well as a descriptive term for certain structural characteristics.