THE BOUTIQUE THAT DRESSED PUNK

SEX operated from spring 1974 to December 1976, when Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood renamed it Seditionaries and kept trading. In those two and a half years, at a boutique whose façade was dominated by four-foot letters in pink foam rubber, a visual language was invented and distributed through the bodies of the people who wore it home on the bus. The shop didn't just sell punk clothing. It was, in large part, the reason punk clothing existed.

McLaren had been trading at 430 since late 1971, when he and art-school friend Patrick Casey opened a stall in the back of a shop called Paradise Garage, eventually taking over the entire premises and renaming it Let It Rock — second-hand and new Teddy Boy clothes designed by McLaren's then-girlfriend, Vivienne Westwood. By 1973 it had become Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die: leather, chains, sleeveless shirts. When McLaren and Westwood refurbished again in spring 1974, they covered the interior walls with passages from the SCUM Manifesto and chickenwire, hung rubber curtains, laid red carpet, installed a jukebox, and bolted their new name to the front of the building in foam rubber dyed the colour of bubblegum.

Sheila Rock photographed SEX in 1977, and her two photographs are among the most iconic documents the shop left behind. In the exterior shot, Jordan (Pamela Rooke), the shop's lead sales assistant and its most visible embodiment, stands in the doorway in full black against the pink shopfront, her platinum hair sculpted high, dwarfed by the scale of the SEX letters hanging above her. To her right, near the red telephone box on the pavement, a man in a dark suit has stopped walking. He appears uncertain what to do next. 

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In the interior, Rock catches Jordan leaning against the jukebox — an AMI cabinet in the centre of the shop, surrounded by racks of garments and a mannequin torso displayed in a leather harness. It is one of the most compressed images of what punk actually looked like in the moment of its formation: not a stage, not a crowd, but a shop floor. And that jukebox is the same one on which, in August 1975, a nineteen-year-old John Lydon sang along to Alice Cooper's "I'm Eighteen" while being auditioned for a band McLaren was managing. The band he was recruited to front became the Sex Pistols.

Jordan commuted two hours each day from Seaford in Sussex to Chelsea dressed exactly as she appears in Rock's photographs. She recalled what happened on those trains: tourists tried to pay her for photographs; mothers accused her of debauching their children; on one occasion somebody attempted to push her off the train through an open door. British Rail's solution was to move her to first class, out of trouble. 

THE DESIGN THAT GOT AWAY, AND THE ONE THAT DIDN'T

In 1973, McLaren and Westwood visited the Villiers Road studio of artists John Dove and Molly White, who worked under the Aspidistra Designs imprint. Dove and White had produced a T-shirt called BREASTS in 1969 — a trompe-l'œil screen print that mapped a bare female torso onto cotton with photographic exactness. The design was part of a series Dove and White called the Painless Tattoos: images that appeared to locate themselves on the body wearing them. Dove and White asked the artist and filmmaker James Wedge to make a life-sized photographic print of his girlfriend Pat Booth specifically for the design. The first edition was printed on ex-government surplus ecru jersey in monochrome black with a fine blue tint, and sold at COUNTDOWN, Booth and Wedge's boutique on the King's Road, alongside stockists in Greenwich Village and Berlin. Approximately forty examples were produced.

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McLaren and Westwood came to Villiers Road to stock the BREASTS design at the new shop they were planning at 430 King's Road. No deal was reached: Dove and White would not drop their own labels. The BREASTS tee was never sold at SEX.

Shop ASPIDISTRA DESIGNS X JOHN DOVE & MOLLY WHITE BREASTS Graphic T-shirt now →

The garment McLaren and Westwood eventually developed for SEX followed the same logic. The Tits T-shirt — a life-size photographic screen print of a naked female torso on cotton, first issued at 430 King's Road in the mid-1970s — extended the shop's deliberate collapse of clothing into body, and clothing into transgression. Where Dove and White had worked through trompe-l'œil, Westwood and McLaren went direct: photographic, full-scale, printed. The example available here is a 1983 reissue, produced from the original SEX-era screens for the BOY retail line at 153 King's Road — part of a small programme in which canonical SEX designs were reprinted for the post-Seditionaries shop. The screens themselves belong to the founding gesture.

Shop SEX VIA BOY X VIVIENNE WESTWOOD & MALCOLM MCLARENTits T-shirt now →

BEFORE IT WAS A T-SHIRT

The other strand of the SEX visual identity ran not through art history but through music promotion.

Jamie Reid, McLaren's collaborator, working in the cut-up and détournement traditions he had developed at Suburban Press, produced materials around the Sex Pistols' November 1976 single "Anarchy in the U.K." The design that became the Anarchy T-shirt existed first as press advertising and tour promotion: a Union Jack, torn and paint-spattered, overlaid with the single's title and band name in letters clipped from different sources, assembled to read like a ransom note. 

By the time the BOY line reprinted it in 1983, from the original Seditionaries-era screens, part of the same reissue programme that produced the Tits tee, the design was already an iconic symbol of punk. 

Shop SEX VIA BOY X VIVIENNE WESTWOOD & MALCOLM MCLAREN Anarchy in the UK T-shirt now →

The same trajectory is traced by the artwork for "God Save the Queen." Virgin Records released the Sex Pistols single on 27 May 1977, timed to arrive during Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee week. Reid's design, Cecil Beaton's 1956 official portrait of the Queen, defaced with ransom-note lettering across her eyes and mouth, became the face of a single the BBC banned from broadcast, that most major British retailers refused to stock, and that nonetheless reached number two on the Official UK Singles Chart during Jubilee week. It is widely reported that the single's position at number one was suppressed by an establishment that could not bring itself to publish the chart as it stood. The image has been continuously cited, reproduced, parodied, and reissued across every decade since. 

Shop VINTAGE Sex Pistols God Save the Queen T-shirt now →

In 1976, the clothes sold at SEX were cause for prosecution. Staff were hauled in under the Obscene Publications Act. Garments were confiscated. The pink foam letters on the shopfront were themselves treated as an affront to public order.

Today those same objects are in V&A vitrines and studied on fashion history syllabuses. The Sheila Rock photographs that documented the shop have shown at the Orlando Museum of Art, at Street Level Photo Gallery in Glasgow, and at Dimbola Museum on the Isle of Wight. 

SEX ran for two and a half years. The question it posed, about how far clothes can challenge, provoke, and transgress, has been answered differently by every generation since. But it was first asked at a boutique on the King's Road, against a background of rubber curtains and chickenwire, beside a jukebox, by a woman who wore the answer home on the train every day.