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embarrassed.’ The shop was crowded with sniggering youths.

      Alan Jones, a customer and later an assistant there, says that a number of customers became so excited by the merchandise that they would disappear behind the screens to masturbate. The staff found this quite acceptable. Once a customer trying on a rubber mask began crying out for help. ‘You go, Jordan,’ said Vivienne. ‘No, you go.’ Eventually Vivienne went to the man’s assistance, and from behind the screen came whimpers and slapping noises as he tried to unzip his face. When Vivienne emerged, flustered and sweating, the two dominatrixes lost their icy pose and burst into giggles. ‘But it was never at these people, because we were selling these clothes for a reason. It was serious and a whole new world,’ says Jordan. Like Vivienne, she hoped that the gear would provoke a sexual revolution in England, as the repressed discovered the power of deviance.

      One regular middle-aged customer, always dressed in a three-piece suit, had a worryingly ruddy face, the veins throbbing through his blood-reddened flesh. Was it stress, high blood pressure or an impending heart attack that caused this flush, the staff speculated. One day while undressing him, Jordan discovered that under his collar and tie he habitually wore a band of rubber around his throat which practically garrotted him. Restriction was his kick. For such aficionados, ‘it wasn’t a passing thrill, they were just genuinely interested in the clothes. It was serious to them. They weren’t leering perverts, and most of them were heterosexual, not homosexual. It might be a sweeping statement, but homosexuals were more into the leatherwear, and the rubber wear was really a specific heterosexual market.’

      Utterly uninhibited about either sex or her far from perfect body shape, Jordan became a cult figure, and her following flocked to the shop to admire her performance. Every day she would look different, like a living art object. She hand-painted bold stripes onto a plain Oxford cotton man’s shirt, for example, and pinned communist and Nazi emblems onto her clothing – ideas which were copied and developed by Vivienne. Boys from the council estate opposite the shop had Jordan’s image tattooed onto their arms. One of her keenest admirers was the television newsreader Reginald Bosanquet. After a liquid lunch he would typically arrive with a bouquet for Jordan, purchase a few items for ‘his girlfriend’, then stagger down the three steep steps out onto the King’s Road.

      A coterie of strong women gravitated to SEX either as customers – Siouxsie Sioux (later lead singer of the Banshees), Margi Clarke (television presenter), ‘Little Helen’ Wellington-Lloyd (artist), Gerlinde Kostiff (club proprietor) and Toyah Willcox (singer and actress) – or as staff – Jordan, Chrissie Hynde (lead singer of the Pretenders), Debbie Wilson and Tracey O’Keefe. Living up to the shop’s theme, some of the other, transient young assistants allegedly supplemented their wages by working as prostitutes. But their overtly sexual gear was not worn to pull men – ‘We just thought of it as fashion.’

      Vivienne, however, did not support her female associates, but regarded them with suspicion. She and Jordan were the most ferocious females in the pack, but Vivienne was jealous of Jordan’s sexual power. In pique, she could treat other female staff with condescension, masked as mothering, and on a number of occasions, feeling threatened by or envious of their sexual attractiveness, she attacked and eventually sacked them. She and Chrissie Hynde once went to a Roxy Music concert together. When Bryan Ferry came onstage with a group of backing singers dressed in sexy US Army uniforms Vivienne leaped to her feet and yelled, ‘You sexist bastard!’ She was thrown out by bouncers, but Hynde chose not to leave with her. To Vivienne, this was tantamount to treachery, and Hynde was summarily dismissed, Vivienne pointing to the door and melodramatically declaiming: ‘Go with the flow, and it’s going that way.’

      Nils Stevenson remembers many similar banishments by Vivienne and McLaren: ‘Adam {Ant}, Marco {Pirroni}, Nick Kent and me were all banned from the shop. It was about your commitment; that was what was awfully attractive about them. It was 100 per cent or nothing.’

      Jordan says, ‘Vivienne’s always been very different with men and women, and I used to think she just looked at people’s exterior and what they dressed like too much. But I also think it’s to do with how she can mould someone. I had my own mind and vision about how I looked and dressed, I wasn’t someone she could mould, and she just likes to treat people like a project, the way she did with Debbie and Tracey and {later} Sarah Stockbridge. She’d send them to Keith of Smile to have their hair done and then have photos of them taken.’ Looks alone could prompt Vivienne to employ people. Bella Freud, daughter of the painter Lucien Freud, longed to join her sister Rose on the staff of 430 King’s Road. She was turned down until 1976, when Vivienne happened to notice her in a nightclub with her hair shorn, and employed her on the spot.

      In 1975 Vivienne boasted to Jordan, ‘Me and Malcolm are eccentrics,’ but Jordan had begun to notice how calculating Vivienne could be: having seen the admiration Jordan and McLaren received for being different, she determined to work on her own image. Simon Barker too never believed that Vivienne was naturally eccentric: ‘She just copied Malcolm and developed this persona; but it wasn’t her.’

      Meanwhile, in New York McLaren had found the Dolls in a miasma of narcotics and alcohol – their drummer Billy Murcia had died, and the band was going nowhere. With the help of Marti Thau, the owner of Flip, the New York and London chain selling American second-hand ‘classics’, McLaren inveigled himself into the Dolls’ circle as their unofficial and unpaid manager. A new look and new songs were needed to turn these boys into a successful band, McLaren decided. Their image rather than their music excited him, and he wanted to exploit them, to project onto them his Maoist/situationist notions. The Dolls, for their part, had no interest in politics.

      Johnny Thunders, the band’s guitarist, had just written a song called ‘Red Patent Leather’, and it was from this that McLaren – acting more as the band’s ‘haberdasher’, according to New York rock photographer Bob Gruen, than their manager – took his sartorial cue. Deliberately playing on American Cold War fears of ‘Reds under the bed’, McLaren styled the band in PVC jeans and red T-shirts, and photographed them against a massive red backcloth printed with the hammer and sickle. McLaren sent the group’s measurements back home to London, and Vivienne ran up the clothes. Even a tenuous link to McLaren was worth working for, she felt. By February 1975, the new-look Dolls were ready to perform again. It was a disaster. After several fruitless months of struggle in New York, McLaren decided to launch them in Britain. In May he returned to England, Vivienne and an opportune scandal.

      Michael Collins, the manager of SEX, had been interviewed by the Metropolitan Police following information that the notorious criminal known as the Cambridge Rapist, who eviscerated his six, mainly student victims after raping them, had bought his full-face leather mask with the word ‘Rapist’ on the forehead from the shop, and was living in London. McLaren decided to exploit the rumours that he had bought his mask from SEX – something Vivienne was loath to do. ‘I was sure it was one of our customers,’ he says, ‘so I phoned Scotland Yard and they came to interview me and I wound up in all these newspapers holding the mask and smiling at it. It caused so much publicity that we were inundated with people coming to buy more of them.’

      He also asked Vivienne to produce a Cambridge Rapist T-shirt, which showed the notorious leather mask over the words ‘It’s Been a Hard Day’s Night’. (The caption recalled an earlier sexual scandal, the death in 1969 of the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein following a bout of drugs and sado-masochism, though this was never proved.) Marco Pirroni remembers Vivienne justifying the shirt to him by saying: ‘He was a customer and we thought he should be protected, so we did the T-shirt because ultimately no one is innocent.’ This proved to be a publicity stunt too far. ‘Wearing something on a shirt was a way of endorsing it – you only wore things you were a fan of,’ one customer pointed out. Vivienne was furious about the ‘bad publicity’, but McLaren insisted that all publicity was good publicity.

      With hindsight, Vivienne now praises McLaren for his manipulative skills: ‘My reaction was the normal, I’d say stupid, reaction because it had no fantasy to it. Imagine, I wouldn’t have anything to do with the press!’ She was not to forget the lesson, learnt at McLaren’s feet, of opportunistically toying with the press and defying the public’s sense of propriety.

      The

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