Malcolm McLaren’s recent death threw me into a pensive mood about illnesses and the state of the art, music and fashion industries.
My angry thoughts about cancer could fill up many pages, but, for the time being, I’ll leave my personal pessimism in a limited area of my brain and focus on what McLaren has left us.
Genius or voluble charlatan, saint or satanic figure, cultural anarchist agitator or unbearable plagiarist and opportunist, it’s undeniable that controversial McLaren influenced culture on a global level.
Like him or not, he undoubtedly had a talent for spotting trends and fads and for generally causing mayhem.
In fact you would probably struggle to find one single person nowadays who may be considered a genuine troublemaker à la McLaren.
Every day we are bombarded with different cultural stimuli, images and inspirations, but, essentially, we live in a bizarre cultural limbo in which there are no real anti-establishment forces spreading revolutionary messages. Very few artists can indeed be considered as true inspirations for the art, fashion and music industries (do me a favour, don’t even mention me Lady Gaga, a deranged product of a sick mainstream faking an underground orgasm, the bastard child of McLaren’s motto “cash from chaos”).
Born in 1946, throughout the '70s McLaren passed from co-owner with Vivienne Westwood of the Kings Road-based Teddy Boy clothing boutique Let It Rock – later Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die and, by the mid-70s, transformed into the S&M heaven Sex (later Seditionaries) – into manager of the New York Dolls and the Sex Pistols.
What followed – Maoist costumes and hammer and sickle flags; safety pins and bondage trousers; playing on the Thames and at the 100 Club's Punk Festival with the Subway Sect and The Clash; Bill Grundy; punk and fetish – is recounted in hundreds (or maybe thousands) of books about history, fashion, style and music.
The 80s brought to McLaren new ventures and inspirations (the New Romantics, Adam Ant and Bow Wow Wow), more fashion connections (the shop World’s End), and new discoveries (hip hop through the 1983 hits 'Double Dutch' and 'Buffalo Gals').
Even the 1989 album, "Waltz Darling", technically a flop since it only got to number 30 in the charts, featured a track, 'Deep In Vogue', that somehow brought something exciting with it, like the striking pose dance so popular in New York's gay clubs that a year later Madonna turned into an even more popular craze.
Willi Ninja dancing in the 'Deep In Vogue' video (embedded at the end of this post since, after all, this is a fashion blog) represented for me the perfect synthesis between classical ballet, avant-garde and postmodernist dance and martial arts (the dancer strengthened his connections with the world of fashion by appearing in runway shows for Gaultier and Mugler and teaching models to walk on the runway).
McLaren in the meantime never failed to astonish, but recycled himself in multiple ventures, doing a song for Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol 2 and co-producing the 2006 documentary Fast Food Nation. Last year he also came back onto the fashion scene with a collaboration with a streetwear brand, a limited collection of clothes and accessories (mainly T-shirts, hoodies and sneakers) featuring his early artworks. “The popularity of punk rock was, in effect, due to the fact that it made ugliness beautiful,” McLaren once stated and surely the clothes that went with it - included the stilettos with protruding spikes you could buy in the 70s from Sex (and that would still be popular on today’s runways...) - helped turning not only ugliness but also fetishism into something desirable and even marketable.
Probably without the Sex Pistols we would have fewer fashion designers and iconic safety pin looks nowadays, while S&M rubber suits and accessories wouldn't constantly appear on the pages of many fashion magazines (Vogue Italia included).
Yet what's left of McLaren after his demise? Well his quotes, such as the ever popular “Be childish. Be irresponsible. Be disrespectful. Be everything this society hates”, are currently being tweeted and retweeted ad nauseam, making me wish that rather than just retweet it, people would abide to it a little bit more in their lives.
In fact I wouldn't mind seeing more people stopping to ponder for a while and thinking about genuine ways to break the rules, generate controversial ideas and make them happen, or invent and reinvent new things and then - why not? - destroy them, McLaren style. Guess that if stealing is, like he used to say, "a glorious occupation, particularly in the art world,” McLaren the plagiarist would really be happy to see us "stealing" from him his most outrageous behaviours.
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Comments