Jane Mulvagh: Vivienne Westwood. An Unfashionable Life
 [Vivienne Westwood. Die Lady ist ein Punk]

For Vivienne and Malcolm, punk was both a continuation of their commercial exploitation of youth culture and a fusion of many previous post-war youth cults - rocker, teddy boy, mod, Rastafarian - into a Molotov cocktail of truculent protest. It was post-modern, borrowing symbols and clothing styles from other tribes to create its own collage, a formula Vivienne continued to use until the early 1990s. In this respect it was a reflection of the pluralism that had already killed the one season/one look of high fashion. 'Punk,' Vivienne explained, 'was a great stand against authority ... The motives for being anti-establishment were already in the culture ... When Malcolm and I first started to do clothes before punk rock we were looking at our own lifetime culture and trying to express the rebelliousness while throwing out all the motives. Through our curiosity and research we created a cult of our own.'
     In fact, none of the chief signifiers of punk originated from Westwood or McLaren 'Do-it-yourself' was its clarion call. Drainpipe trousers and jeans were already being worn by those who wished to distance themselves from the hippie flares; the safety pin came from Johnny Rotten via Richard Hell, who also pioneered the shredded and ripped clothing; the 'used' tampon from Sid Vicious; the razor blades, bin-liners and bike or lavatory chain were introduced by punks on the street, as was the later Mohican cut; the dog-collar by Sharon Hayman of the Bromley Contingent; the elements of militaristic dress and the brazenly artificial make-up and hair by Jordan; the customised leather jacket (ideally from Lewis Leathers in Great Poland Street) was appropriated from the Hell's Angels, and became associated with The Clash, not the Pistols, who preferred torn school blazers from charity shops like Oxfam.
    Punk dress celebrated the sordid, the cruel, the inappropriate and the poor. If an item smacked of political bad taste (the swastika), sexual bad taste (the used tampon or condom) working-class shoddiness (the parka-mac), cheapness (the black bin-bag, popularised by club entrepreneur Philip Sallon), the macabre (kohl-bruised eyes, inspired by Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film of A Clockwork Orange) or the morbid (the skinny black tie worn as a hangman's noose), it was seized upon. In 1978 Vivienne told the punk magazine Search and Destroy: 'Now that the death penalty has been abolished in England, everyone knows nothing that terrible will happen to him, so you can be as free as you like.'