The shop at 430 King’s Road, London, changed its name four times in six years. It was Let It Rock in 1971. It became Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die in 1972. In 1974 it became SEX. In 1976 it became Seditionaries. By 1980 it was Worlds End, which — uniquely — it has remained.

Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren ran the shop. Westwood designed; McLaren promoted; the Sex Pistols, whom McLaren also managed, modelled. The garments themselves — the bondage trousers, the safety-pinned muslin, the ripped T-shirts with the upside-down crucifix — constituted the first collection a commercially active designer has ever produced that was intended to look, at a distance, like it had been salvaged.

The Inversion

Westwood’s central insight was that the vocabulary of the 20th-century wardrobe could be recombined until it became unreadable. A school uniform (the striped tie, the grey pleated skirt) worn with fishnets and a T-shirt printed with Karl Marx was neither a school uniform nor an outfit; it was a sentence in a new language.

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Fashion is the armour we put on to fight the twentieth century. — Vivienne Westwood, 1988

The language spread. By 1977 every youth culture in Britain, and much of Western Europe, was defining itself in relation to it. Punk proper lasted eighteen months. Its stylistic descendants — goth, grunge, every subsequent anti-fashion moment — still quote Westwood’s 1976 sample book.

After the Shop

Westwood outlived both McLaren and punk. By the 1990s she had become, improbably, a British institution — a Dame, a showroom at Paris Fashion Week, a corseted silhouette she had excavated from Victorian dressmaking manuals and restored to the catwalk. She died in 2022, at 81, in Clapham, in a house full of books.

What she left, apart from the house, was a permissions slip: evidence that the wardrobe is a set of rules that can be rewritten, and that the rewriting is, occasionally, the whole job.