Publisher's Synopsis
From a small boutique on London's King's Road in the 1970s, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood started a fashion revolution.
The clothes they created during their shop's various guises as Let It Rock, Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die, SEX and finally Seditionaries provided not only the wardrobe for the Sex Pistols, but also a confrontational, taboo-busting aesthetic which continues to inspire designers to this very day.
Indeed, their work appeared to have no precedent, as if the designs had appeared out of nowhere. A rubber T-shirt with bicycle tyres sewn around the arms and chicken bones spelling out ‘VENUS' attached to the front. Images culled from pornographic magazines and Disney cartoons. Bondage trousers with straps between the legs restricting movement and a zip running around the crotch. Clothes made out of muslin, straggly mohair and towelling. Clothes to get you noticed and – on occasion – arrested. Today they are collectors' items, sold for high prices in auction houses and hungrily sought out by investors and museums.
PunkPistol, the author of Clothes for Heroes, has amassed what is widely seen as the world's largest and most significant collection of Sex and Seditionaries clothing, much of which has never appeared in print or exhibitions before. In this book he has combined stunning photography of that collection, rare and unseen images from inside 430 King's Road and the 1970s punk scene, designs which never saw the light of day, and original testimony from key witnesses to the clothes' creation, to produce the ultimate visual history of one of the key partnerships in contemporary popular culture.
