‘This book solves the mystery of a spell that was cast on a time that won’t fade away’

Hiroshi Fujiwara

2024 has got off to a good start with the news that the Japanese edition of The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren is going to be published by East Press on January 26, four days after what would have been the great provocateur’s 78th birthday.

This translation includes a new photo selection, the above cover quote from Japan’s style guru Hiroshi Fujiwara and updated text, including much new detail on the visit McLaren made with Vivienne Westwood and Gerry Goldstein to Andy Warhol’s Factory in New York in the summer of 1973.

The Life & Times Of Malcolm McLaren Japanese edition is available to order here.

Tags: Hiroshi Fujiwara, The Factory

//From the presentation for tomorrow’s event//

Tomorrow I’ll be talking to interiors, homewares and textile designer Sue Timney about the fashion legacy of the King’s Road, the two-and-a-half mile thoroughfare in west London’s Chelsea where the late Mary Quant kicked off the boutique boom by opening her clothes shop Bazaar at 135a in 1955.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Ace, Don Letts, Jeannette Lee, King's Road Music & Fashion Trail, Let It Rock: The Look Of Music The Sound Of Fashion, Mary Quant, Peter Golding, Quorum, Sheila Rock, Sue Timney, The Great Gear Market, Timney Fowler

//Clockwise from top left: @vieux.wave, @pippabrooks, @luxoramor, Nick Vivian, @ladyacss, @chrissalewicz//

//Clockwise from top left: @belmaczmayfair, mr + mrs @adamskiofficial, @joebrookks, @pippabrooks, @ourmanincairo, @mrsgorman//

We have to take our pleasures where we can during these grim times, and last night’s virtual book launch of my Malcolm McLaren biography provided a much-needed tonic.

The plan was to celebrate the publication with a party at the library bar of London’s hotel The Standard, with a relaxed congregation of friends and contributors and DJ sets by Pippa Brooks and Pam Hogg.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Pam Hogg, Pippa Brooks, The Standard Library, virtual book launch

“With this book, Gorman convincingly moves away from the ossified image of McLaren as a great rock’n’roll swindler, a morally bankrupt punk Mephistopheles, and closer towards his art-school roots, his love of ideas”
Victoria Segal reviewing The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren in the Sunday Times, April 5, 202

The first reviews of my Malcolm McLaren biography are carried today by Britain’s Sunday Times Culture section and in The New Review magazine of it’s broadsheet rival The Observer.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Chrissie Hynde, Constable, Dave Vanian, David Harrison, John Lydon, Masters Of The Backside, Rat Scabies, Sean O'Hagan, Sex Pistols, Sunday Times, The Observer, Victoria Segal

“Within the slippery divides between disciplines and media – fashion, art, music, interiors, commerce – one finds Malcolm McLaren, roaming and creating.”
Lou Stoppard in her essay in The Life & Times Of Malcolm McLaren

Disruption to the publication of a book is extremely small beer at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has set the world in disarray, so I’m sanguine about the postponement of several events and signings which were due to occur around the publication of my biography The Life & Times Of Malcolm McLaren.

//The back of the book jacket features this 1976 portrait by photographer Joe Stevens//

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: CBS Theatrical Films, Fashion Beast, Joe Stevens, Lou Stoppard, Malcolm McLaren, Peter McLaren, Tracey Winwood

//Window display for Impresario at the New Museum, Sept 16 – Nov 20, 1988. Image from the New Museum Digital Archive//

//Introduction to the show. Image from the New Museum Digital Archive//

My biography of the late Malcolm McLaren will now be published in April 2020, exactly 10 years after his premature death at the age of 64.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Adam Ant, Art & Text, Catherine McGann, Impresario: Malcolm McLaren & The British New Wave, Keith Haring, Marcia Tucker, New Museum Of Contemporary Art, Paul Taylor, Vivienne Westwood, William Olander, Witches

//Detail: Etching in steel toe-cap for the 80s collection. This image © Paul Gorman Archive. No reproduction without permission//

On the collapse of their design partnership in October 1983 after showcasing of the collection Worlds End 1984 in Paris and London, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood went their separate ways.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Amanda Grieve, Andrea Linz, Blonde Ambition, Dinkie Heel, Fans, Hypnos, Jean Paul Gaultier, John Galliano, Madam Butterfly, Madonna, Mr Freedom, Paradise Garage, Robert Erdman, Simon Withers, Susie Bick, Trevor myles, Vivienne Westwood, Witches, Worlds End 1984

A few years back I came across Malcolm McLaren’s annotated copy of Indian Rawhide, the anthropologist Mable Morrow’s study of the folk art produced by Native American tribes which inspired the late cultural iconoclast in the conceptualising with his partner Vivienne Westwood of their Spring/Summer 1982 fashion collection Savage.

//Frontispiece to Morrow’s book, published by University of Oklahoma Press in the Civilization Of The American Indian Series, 1975//

//From Indian Rawhide: design produced by the Apache Mescaleros in Taos, New Mexico, matched by McLaren and Westwood with book-end marbling on this Savage slip dress. No reproduction without permission//

//The Apache design as it appeared printed on the end of the train on a Worlds End jersey toga dress. No reproduction without permission//

McLaren obtained a copy of Morrow’s book during travels recording his debut solo album Duck Rock. Since the Pirate collection of March 1981 had established a post-Punk direction for himself and Westwood and their Worlds End shop and label, McLaren set about investigating the powerful ideas residing in pre-Christian ethnic cultures, selecting Indian Rawhide as the text with which to frame the next group of designs.

My McLaren biography, to be published in spring 2018, will reveal that research – particularly literary – was one of the life-long consistencies in his approach to creative acts.

The musician Robin Scott told me that McLaren was an avid attendee of art history lessons during their spell as students at Croydon Art School in the 60s, and a couple of years before his death in 2010 McLaren confirmed that he was inspired in part to open Teddy Boy revival emporium Let It Rock at 430 King’s Road in 1971 after reading Nik Cohn’s peerless post-WW2 youth cult history Today There Are No Gentlemen.

//This edition Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971//

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: A General History Of Pyrates, Assiniboin, Bow Wow Wow, Dakota, Duck Rock, Frederick's Of Hollywood, Giorgio Morandi, I Want Candy, Jean Kerboull, Judy Nylon, Mable Morrow, Mescaleros, Nik Cohn, Norah Waugh, parfleches, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing The Flak-Catchers, The Cut Of Men’s Clothes 1600-1900, The Mass Psychology Of Fascism, The Strangeloves, Today There Are No Gentlemen, Voodoo And Magic Practices, Wilhelm Reich

I’m delighted to announce that my map The Look Of London – which teases out the intertwining of popular music and street style in our capital over five decades – has been reissued by groovy guide makers Herb Lester Associates.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: American Classics, Kornbluth, Lewis Leathers, Paul Smith, Soul II Soul, The 'Duffer' Of St George, The baron Of Brixton

//Voodoo and Magic Practices, Jean Kerboull, Barrie and Jenkins, 1978. Translated from the French by John Shaw//

This is the book which inspired the late Malcolm McLaren to unite the design ideas he developed with Vivienne Westwood for their Autumn/Winter 1983 fashion collection Witches.

At the time McLaren was completing his album Duck Rock, which was conceived as an ethnological travelogue and modelled on the  LP series Dances Of the World’s Peoples released on the ethnographic Folkways label; in fact, Duck Rock was originally titled Folk Dances Of The World and the incorporation of an illustrated insert containing track-by-track explanations was taken from the one which appeared in the 1958 albums.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Dances Of The World's Peoples, Duck Rock, Folkways, Jean Kerboull, Keith Haring, Legba, Nick Egan, Nostalgia Of Mud, Voodoo And Magic Practices, Witches