May 23, 2015 |
The King’s Road wasn’t always home to the Sloane Ranger. It wasn’t always a middle-class mecca. It was, once upon a time, a place of pilgrimage for punks. Their church, Worlds End (the “wrong” end of the King’s Road). Their hymns, Sex Pistols songs. Their Virgin Mary, Vivienne Westwood. And their god, rebellion. It’s the spirit of this god that dwells, here and now, in the designer’s collaboration with Opening Ceremony. It’s hard to have faith in punk nowadays, particularly writing as someone who lives in Camden. A place that, apart from its high rate of tuberculosis, is known for its association with the subculture. Nowadays this association translates to a population of middle-aged men with mohawks who, at best, look like remnants of punk’s golden era and, at worst, like (rather tragic) tourist attractions. There is also a more transient population of teenage punk tourists instilled with a belief that a studded leather jacket and pair of Dr Marten boots is enough to make them punk. Is punk dead? By the looks of it, and by the smell of its rotting corpse lying by Camden Lock, yes, yes it is. But maybe punk isn’t dead. Maybe it has moved on. And maybe it’s those middle-aged has-beens and teenage hopefuls who haven’t. Because Vivienne Westwood’s punk was about rebellion, about counterculture. And so as long as there is a culture to counter and people countering it, punk is alive and well. Westwood and her new capsule collection with Carol Lim and Humberto Leon’s Opening Ceremony is living proof. The updated Vivienne Westwood’s Worlds End pieces share her work, as Leon explains, with a new generation. Take this shirt, aptly named the Drunken Anarchy Shirt, from the spring/summer 2010 Get a Life show. It’s asymmetrical, the hem is lower on the right than the left; it’s striped, blue and bleach. And pertinently, it’s emblazoned with the slogans “Do it yourself”, an essential part of punk’s stylistic experimentation, and “Active Resistance”, a reference to punk’s spirit of rebellion and of resistance. This is more than a shirt. It’s a relic of Westwood’s and Malcolm McLaren’s punk, of the clothes they sold at 430 King’s Road. It’s updated, yes, but it’s faithful to the unique identity of her brand. It’s faithful to her politics, too. It’s a middle finger up at what’s wrong with the world, whether that is neocolonial, white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy, “filthy, dirty, posh wankers” David Cameron and George Osborne (Russell Brand’s words, not mine), or the matter of climate change, a topic that Dame Westwood is particularly passionate about, to the extent that she recently shaved her head. Politics aside, this shirt, along with the rest of the collection, is bloody good. Bloody good and wonderfully Westwood. So fight the man, fuck the system and buy Vivienne Westwood Worlds End X Opening Ceremony.
By Ted Stansfield
