November 12, 2025 |
Having been converted during the latter half of the 19th century from a three-storey house into a pawnbroker’s shop with a flat above it, 430 King’s Road in Chelsea played host to eclectic businesses during the ensuing decades. These included a café, a scooter shop and, by the 1960s, various fashion outlets including Mr Freedom and Paradise Garage. Today it houses World’s End, the much-loved heritage boutique established in 1980, with its galleon-meets-Old Curiosity Shop interior and exterior designs, and is still owned by the Vivienne Westwood brand.
Westwood and her husband at the time Malcolm McLaren took over the premises in 1971. He was a London-born, ex-art school rebel, well versed in pop culture and situationist theory (a capitalist critique that tells people how to wake up and see the world as it is). She was a primary school teacher from Derbyshire, skilled in sewing and prone to questioning the norm. Together, they initiated a succession of destination boutiques at 430 King’s Road and by the mid-1970s had changed fashion and music forever with their often-controversial ideas and designs.
First was Let It Rock, offering authentic but tweaked 1950s teddy boy garb plus vinyl albums from the same not-too-distant period. In 1973, the shop was reinvented and renamed Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die. It brimmed with leather-studded and chain-strewn biker-inspired attire. Westwood and McLaren’s remixes of tough, rebellious, yesteryear youth tribes felt perverse yet feisty in an era when many youngsters were wearing mainstream-trendy flares and listening to Abba. With hindsight, the couple’s preoccupations significantly predated current consumers’ penchant for subculture-coded clothing, nowadays referenced in contemporary designs or flogged as ‘vintage’ in many high street fashion chains or on e-commerce platforms.
In 1974, the shop became much wilder. Giant bright-pink lettering on the front spelt out its audacious new moniker, SEX. The aim, as McLaren and Westwood proudly explained, was “to annoy English people… by attacking sexual attitudes, trying to undermine the puritan, philistine base of our culture”. Inside were pale pink rubber curtains, chicken wire and walls sprayed with graffiti slogans lifted from Valerie Solanas’s notorious 1967 S.C.U.M. Manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men). SEX stocked rubber, leather, PVC and bondage-y shockwear, appealing to an edgy clientele of thrill-seeking teenage misfits, sex workers and seasoned BDSM fetishists.
The shiny gear at SEX was accompanied by taboo-busting, and now massively collectable, sleeveless SEX T-shirts, shaped and hand-printed by Westwood with porno-plus-political imagery and text mostly sourced by McLaren. One legendary design bore a Jim French illustration of two penis-flaunting cowboys (which they used without permission). It famously prompted the 1975 arrest and subsequent prosecution for indecency of Alan Jones, a SEX store assistant, when he wore the cocky tee around the West End. Jones recalled such youthful brazenness in a 2024 interview with The London Leatherman: “Sometimes I can’t believe I would walk down the street in the anarchy shirt complete with swastika, the first Pistols group T-shirt with the naked underage boy, the fist-fucking Tom of Finland shirt or the Cambridge Rapist side-tie… everything was a fuck off to the establishment, whether from a sexuality point of view, a political one or a fashion statement.”
No less anti-establishment were a gaggle of music-obsessed, SEX-frequenting young upstarts: John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten), Glen Matlock (who worked at the shop in its early days), Steve Jones and Paul Cook. Encouraged by McLaren, who became their manager, they formed Sex Pistols. With anthemic songs about chaos and boredom, the band soon attracted a dedicated clique of stylish young fans from central London and its outer suburbs, some of whom also formed shouty bands, and created antagonistic-celebrity nicknames for themselves: Siouxsie Sioux, Sid Vicious (who replaced Matlock in the band), Billy Idol, Berlin Bromley, Adam Ant, Steve Spunker (aka Steve Severin, later one of Siouxsie’s Banshees) and Soo Catwoman, for example. They became walking advertisements for SEX and the forerunners of the punk movement.
Most shops positively welcomed customers, but SEX fostered a deliberately intimidating atmosphere. The dominatrix-like store assistant Jordan, with her stark make-up and, later, her Myra Hindley-ish peroxide hairdo, caused outrage among fellow passengers during her rubber-clad daily train commute to SEX and was key to crossing the shop’s threshold of terror. “You would be confronted by Jordan, whose reputation was fearsome – you knew you were going to be looked over and judged,” says Michael Costiff, a fashion and nightlife impresario. “We knew people who were far too scared to even go into SEX, so they would ask us to accompany them!”
from left: unknown, Alan Jones, Chrissie Hynde, Jordan and Vivienne Westwood in SEX, 1976
By late 1976, the Pistols were gaining increased attention for their music, appearance and fuck-you attitude now that they were signed to a major record label, Richard Branson’s Virgin, had hit the UK top 40 with their debut single Anarchy in the UK and made their first appearance on TV in music show So It Goes, which went out in the north-west. They were also brilliant ‘models’ for the increasingly refined and expensive unisex designs conceived by Westwood and McLaren, including long-sleeved muslin T-shirts with their customary confrontational imagery and slogans, as well as beautifully made cotton or tartan straitjacket-like bondage trousers, shirts and jackets, resplendent with multiple zips, buckles and straps. These formed the basis of the finery found at the next transformation at 430 King’s Road – SEX became Seditionaries. An apt name: sedition is dictionary-defined as “conduct or speech inciting people to rebel against the authority of a state or monarchy”.
Seditionaries was realised by Westwood and McLaren in collaboration with up-and-coming interior designer Ben Kelly and Royal College of Art architecture student David Connor. Kelly told me, “They wanted a full-on confrontational façade for the shop. They liked the idea of surprise, so you would really want to go in there.” The conventions of a window display and eye-catching signage were ditched in favour of cryptic branding. The result? Aloof, white-timber-framed frontage with frosted white glass – “Vivienne’s idea,” says Kelly – so passers-by couldn’t see what was inside. This was complemented by one diagonal fluorescent tube light above the door. A tiny brass plaque was affixed to the right of the entrance, simply stating, in capital letters: Malcolm McLaren Vivienne Westwood Seditionaries. “People were unsure what Seditionaries was,” chuckles Kelly. “A lawyer’s office? A betting shop?” No doubt Westwood and McLaren enjoyed such confusion. The shop’s interior was Connor’s first commercial job. “I thought Vivienne and Malcolm were amazing!” he says. “At first I didn’t really understand what they were on about, but they were so creative and became a big influence on me.” He remembers the job took a few weeks to complete and the budget for the interior was about £2,000, “a pretty small amount at the time”. He was paid for his toils with £30 in cash and a full set of pristine Seditionaries gear (unfortunately, his disapproving mum later threw it all in the bin!).
Anyone entering Seditionaries when it opened in late 1976 was confronted with harsh lighting and murals of black and white photographs of the bombed-out city of Dresden, taken at the end of World War Two. “I sourced the images at the Imperial War Museum and had a printer in Dalston enlarge them,” Connor says. McLaren had smashed a hole in the ceiling to emphasise this artful destruction further. Behind the counter, a huge upside-down image of Piccadilly Circus was spread across fitted stock-cupboard doors, a symbol of the old order being turned on its head. Old school-gymnasium bars were repurposed as display rails to hang clothes on while austere grey carpeting throughout and clashing orange nylon-covered Adeptus foam chairs completed the carefully curated environment. “Seditionaries definitely looked more sleek and more designed than SEX,” says Costiff. When its interior was faithfully recreated in 2006 at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art’s AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion exhibition, it looked remarkably modern.
The stylistic experiments previously tested out at SEX as a situationist type of anti-fashion would, during the next few years at Seditionaries, become fashion. Customer numbers swelled, and people travelled to the shop from far and wide. Like many other newness-seekers, Costiff and his wife Gerlinde were hooked on Seditionaries and splashed out. (A vast archive of original pieces purchased by the couple from Westwood and McLaren’s various stores was eventually acquired in 2002 by the V&A for its permanent collection.) “To wear a bondage suit with straps and flaps back then meant people stared and it made you feel like you could rule the world!” Costiff marvels. But the ever-steely Pamela Rooke, aka Jordan (who died in 2022), kept everyone on edge. “We would interrogate the customers. ‘Why are you buying this? What does it mean to you?’ In our view they were buying a work of art, something they should treasure,” she told me in 2019, when her autobiography Defying Gravity: Jordan’s Story was published.
Seditionaries’ confrontational approach to style and a wave of new bands inspired a growing army of punk boys and girls around the world into further DIY style experimentation: short and spiky hair home-dyed in garish hues; jewellery and accessories improvised from safety pins, chains, tampons and badges; ripped clothing sourced from charity shops with slogans daubed on them in biro or marker pen; tight second-hand leather trousers and biker jackets; even black bin bags were turned into protest outerwear. All of this influenced many designers throughout the coming decades – notably Jean Paul Gaultier, Rei Kawakubo, Stephen Sprouse and Junya Watanabe – and continues to be routinely referenced in seasonal fashion collections.
By the late ’70s, King’s Road was known globally for its Saturday-afternoon parade of punks, all making their pilgrimage to number 430. But the Sex Pistols had acrimoniously split. Drugs, specifically heroin, had become a thing, sucking the life from some of the pioneers of the scene. Seditionaries’ windows had been smashed countless times, while violence between warring punks and everyone else was a regular occurrence outside the shop. And other stores across around the world were now blatantly copying McLaren and Westwood’s work. The couple knew the moment had peaked. They were, of course, already planning a new direction for the shop. With an initial design drawn up by Connor, it assumed its next and last guise, the aforementioned World’s End, ushering in the successful and mainstream New Romantic movement at the start of the next decade. The store has settled into its current incarnation, unchanged since the 1980s. The backwards-running 13-hour clock still ticks on its exterior and these days it mostly sells Westwood’s Gold label collection and archive pieces.
Looking back at those trailblazing mid-’70s interactions with Westwood and McLaren, Connor concludes: “Vivienne and Malcolm were two inspiring people who made something incredible happen. They created a global empire.” Kelly agrees: “They were politically motivated, they were agents provocateurs who wanted to stir things up and did. Seditionaries was a tiny shop, but it was like an explosion!”
Photography courtesy of Shutterstock. Taken from 10 Men Issue 62 – BIRTHDAY, EVOLVE, TRANSFORMATION – out on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
