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Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die: Punk & post punk graphics 1976-1986

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At the time there were lots of couples that we knew that had shops,” explains Michael Costiff, founder of the famed West End club night Kinky Gerlinky, and who had a café in the Chelsea Antique Market in the early 70s. “Celia Birtwell and Ossie Clark were up the road and our friends Jeff and Pam had a shop over Battersea Bridge selling Hawaiian shirts.” How to encompass the vastness of her legacy? Her punk phase is eternally referenced, morphing onwards through generations, and turning up through time in the safety-pinned collections of Gianni Versace and many more. In the days following her death, hundreds of people have posted memories of how her clothes led to self-discovery. Fashion academics have told me that students today quote her as their inspiration, both as a designer and as an activist. Her allegiance to youth, and to what matters, passed on her courage to so many designers to be themselves, from John Galliano to Matty Bovan. That radical power of Vivienne’s will continue, undiminished, long into the future. Punk questioned everything, and it's that spirit of inquiry that is driving MAD forward today, presenting and debating innovative works and ideas with lots of energy, color, and noise." Three months ago, Westwood was noticeably absent from her Paris fashion week show. The collection has for some years been designed by Kronthaler, but she remained figurehead and muse, and each show would end with her husband presenting Westwood with a bouquet and taking her hand for a joint bow. Unless otherwise noted, all objects in this exhibition are courtesy of Andrew Krivine. The Museum of Arts and Design is extremely grateful for his support of this exhibition.

Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren in 1977. The clothes sold by their shop Seditionaries on Kings Road, Chelsea, were attributed to both of them. Photograph: Mirrorpix/Getty Images

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The punk aesthetic also carries elements of futurism – just look at the constructivist posters of Kraftwerk – as well as German expressionism, Soviet-era posters, pop art and the Bauhaus design movement. One of the inaccuracies around punk is that it’s a reaction to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, but punk starts before those regimes take power in the mid-1970s,” said the curator, Andrew Blauvelt. “Punk did become a reaction to neoconservative rule. It felt necessary at the time to provide a social resistance against some of those aspects against neoconservative policy, but had longer-lasting effects, as well.” Since its rebellious inception in the 1970s, punk has always exhibited very visual forms of expression, from the dress and hairstyles of its devotees and the on-stage theatrics of its musicians to the graphic design of its numerous forms of printed matter. As such punk’s energy coalesced into a powerful subcultural phenomena that transcended music to affect other fields such as visual art and design” notes the Museum.

Born in a period of economic malaise, punk’s energy coalesced into a powerful subcultural phenomenon that transcended music to affect other fields, and especially graphic design.

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Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976-1986is organized by Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and curated by Andrew Blauvelt, Director, with the assistance of Steffi Duarte. The presentation at the Museum of Arts and Design was managed by Curatorial Assistant Alida Jekabson. Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die charts punk's explosive impact on design and examines its complex relationship with art, history, and culture," commented Chris Scoates, MAD's Nanette L. Laitman Director. Originating at Bloomfield Hills, Michigan's Cranbrook Art Museum, the exhibition has been adapted for its run at MAD to include selections that showcase the visual output of New York City's punk scene: flyers from the famed East Village punk venue CBGB; concert posters and memorabilia from Blondie, the Ramones, and other artists; early issues of Punk magazine; and more reports Dexigner. By this time Westwood was broke, but with practical help and a modest loan from family and friends, reopened the shuttered Worlds End, lit by candles after the electricity was cut off, and easily sold her limited supplies.

She became a primary school teacher and in 1962 married Derek Westwood, a toolmaker with ambitions, which he achieved, to be an airline pilot. Their son, Ben, was born in 1963, but the couple separated soon after, divorcing in 1966. She returned to her parents, and began to make jewellery for a stall in Portobello Road. The punk-infused exhibition moves from the sobriety of a stripped down minimalism to the expansive color palettes and expressive forms of new wave as it examines punk through the lens of graphic design created by both professional and amateur designers. In October 1986, when asked about the plans for her S/S87 collection, Vivienne Westwood told The Face, “I’m using my shop as a crucible. The stuff that’s in there is what will sell elsewhere… It’s kind of market research…” Westwood and her then partner Malcolm McLaren had opened their first Chelsea-based boutique in 1971, and it operated not only as a testing ground for global sales, but as a location of diverse and famed retail incarnations, selling the uniforms of socio-economic rebellion. Vivienne Westwood with Andreas Kronthaler on the runway during the Vivienne Westwood womenswear fall/winter 2022-2023 show at Paris Fashion Week, March 2022. Photograph: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images SEX: Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die was a compilation album edited by Marco Pirroni, which was compiled from the records on the jukebox at Malcolm McLaren's shop SEX.Vivienne Westwood at an Extinction Rebellion demonstration outside the London headquarters of BP, protesting crimes against the climate in the Papua rainforest, October 2019. Photograph: Ki Price/Getty Images Mythical wheezes, such as a Pistols-era plan to visit Madame Tussauds and melt the wax effigies of the Beatles, were typical of McLaren's tendency to blur fantasy and reality and turn hype into an art form. His talent was perhaps not so much in coming up with ideas as seizing on other people's and making them more successful. Amid the tortured souls of punk, Westwood carved out her own path, one that was full of humour, beauty and joy. Her clothes – like her worldview – were anti-establishment, but never nihilistic. They were deliberately off-kilter – partly by dint of being ahead of their time – but they were always elegant. But those who knew him described a polite, dapper English gentleman who loved art, music and clothes with a passion – he was fond of tweed suits and Doctor Who-style scarves – and had an almost childlike enthusiasm for his projects and pranks. His death has melted one of music's most bitter feuds. "For me, Malc was always entertaining," Lydon said. "Above all else, he was an entertainer."

Much of the copy and pasting culture that defined punk is rooted in the Dada collages of Hannah Hoch, says Blauvelt. “Sterling was sourcing works from lifestyle magazines and making gender commentary in the posters,” said Blauvelt. “On one hand, it’s a revival of this cut-and-paste strategy, in another way, it’s a new time period.” Her finances remained unsound. With introductions from rag trade friends, she moved incrementally into bank loans and business funding to pay off the debts of Worlds End, and to buy rather than rent her second shop, in Davies Street, Mayfair. Westwood earned where she could, teaching fashion at the Academy of Applied Arts, Vienna (1989-91), and the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin (from 1993). In the Vienna lecture room, she fell in love with her best student, Andreas Kronthaler. He moved to London, then into her flat, and they married in 1993. When the album rose to number one on the music charts, it was proof “there was genuine opposition to what was going on,” Reid previously told the Guardian.The Harris tweed and later, far wilder, Brit collections gave Westwood her second, and permanent, fashion identity: London tailoring plus romantic gowns, with a dissident edge, labelled with her logo, a coronation orb circled by Saturn’s rings. As one of the chief architects of punk, she was the fairy godmother of how every subculture since has used clothes to define its tribe. That streetwear has leapfrogged haute couture to become the leading edge of the global fashion industry owes a great deal to a seamstress from Glossop, Derbyshire who partnered with her boyfriend, Malcolm McLaren, to open a tiny shop on King’s Road in London in 1971. Westwood’s heart had moved on from fashion in the last decade of her life, which she devoted to political causes. But fashion never fell out of love with Vivienne Westwood. McLaren's eye – as much as his ear – for pop talent was crucial. He once told a Ramones fan, Vic Godard, and his pals, "you look like a group", so they formed one called Subway Sect. His gift for turning notoriety into a promotional tool (inherited from the Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham and surely passed on to Factory Records' Tony Wilson and Creation's Alan McGee) loomed equally large in his next project.

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