• My point is, i get my ideas because I’m interested in the past. I’m interested in geniuses of the past: the best selves people have tried to be before. I’m interested in people’s vision of the world in the past. We can learn so much from what has happened before; their ideals and their hopes for the future. And you feel that very strongly here
• But utility wear was a political and propaganda coup played out primarily on women’s bodies
• Everybody knows that their past life is like a series of different little scenes. It’s a story and you’ve selected from your memory the things that you think are important. Nothing from the past is entirely true. But you are only in those scenes properly when they are put together.
• There was intimate cross-pollination between the spheres of fashion, music, art and graphic design
• British pop culture was not just accidentally attached to the art schools; the one could not have happened without the other. The public displays of musical taste and ‘tribe’ membership did more than just sell records and clothes; it became part of a new language of belonging. ‘it was the best possible time to be a teenager. We made up what it meant, and how it would look. Or, as Malcolm later said ‘we were searching for identity’.
• The situationists declared that artists and thinkers were morally obliged to break down the definitions between art and ‘real life’ in order to evade the commercialisation of the former. In other words, artists and activists were emboldened to deliberately flummox their viewers and audiences, and act, ideally, as agents provocateurs in creating ridiculous, potentially risky ‘happenings’ as an absurdist comment on the status quo. Art, as well as protest, was to be on the streets and know no barriers.
• ‘Be reasonable: Demand the impossible’, ‘Under the paving stones lies the beach’, ‘It is forbidden to forbid’.
• And though Malcolm and the whole pretentious, hedonistic world of the late-sixties student politics has become the stuff of easy ridicule, the legacy of the Situationists, via Malcolm and Vivienne and punk, is difficult to overestimate. It brought street fashion into high fashion. It allowed many forms of expression and protest to be discussed as art, and it helped fuse the already related worlds of pop music, art, graphic design and fashion into one insistent roar of defiance called punk.
• We can be as much a hostage to our future as to our past: artists often strive towards an ideal ‘best self’, or as Vivienne has it ‘a better world’, as a way to ignore the compromises of the present.
• The poor have status, the status of having more experience, and therefore a patina of prestige attaches to their clothes. They were heroic. It’s all about stories.
• Johnny wore a safety pin in his ear. Sid had these pink gabardine trousers and they had been destroyed, ripped to pieces by some junkie looking for drugs, and when Sid came round his trousers were slashed so he pinned them back together again with safety pins. He turned up at the shop, I remember, in those and some toilet roll round his neck as a tie. It was like that, then. These Irish girls using kettles as handbags and this guy who walked around with jam and toast on his head. So safety pins weren’t so very extreme.
• Though neither she nor Malcolm vocalised it at the time, they were also pioneering a new way of creating and marketing: where the image went ahead of the music and the cult itself. it had never happened before with the clothes first - or via a single shop.
• The T-shirt, or its various sloganed cousins, teamed with bondage-wear and Vivienne’s much-loved kilts, studded leather and dog collars, razor blades and chains, Situationist slogans, A clockwork orange make-up and Mohicans, became a tribal motif from Tokyo to California. And the song went straight into the charts, and indeed to number one, despite, or because of, a national broadcast ban.
• What started out with rubber-wear and stockings came in time to include a fashion lexicon for punk women that was just as strong, assertive and individualistic as the style created for Malcolm’s boys
• One of the pre-eminent virtues of punk and of Vivienne is that she became an enabler, and punk demanded acceptance. And we did that on a regular basis. Those kids were, in many cases, abused. They were social rejects and, you know, they came in there and they left with something really quite sacred, for them. And people are always dismissive of what we did and they just look at it as being, sort of, one-dimensional and hateful. But, you know, for a kid to come in, like that, with no feet and lose his inhibitions and leave that shop feeling that he was part of something that was more worldly and more universal, you know, that’s a very, very rare opportunity that’s presented to us, and Vivienne knew that. To make someone feel as relevant or as significant as anyone who walks this earth, that’s a rare and cherished gift. Punk could do that. Fashion can do that - rarely. Vivienne does it always.
• Punk began with a feeling, a spirit born out of London and New York that self-evidently resonated all over the world, and a look created by her and Malcolm. And it returned rock music to its rock’n’roll function: namely, to be rebellious, distasteful to elders, critical of the status quo, and to tell the important truth that it is each generation’s prerogative to imagine and describe its future.
• ‘No future. Your future dream is a shopping scheme. We need to stop educating people to be consumers and educate them so they are capable of thinking with their own minds, as Noreena Hertz says in her books: you can look at economics from the other side, from the people it suppresses. That is what punk was all about.
• Vivienne is a practical feminist. She gets on with it. She doesn’t ban on about the fact that perhaps, as a woman, it’s been a bit complicated
• That’s when I started thinking pirates. It was an idea of getting off the island - this little island, this moment that I was stuck in - and going into history and into the Third World, trying to find out more about the world we lived in through the Pirate collection, rather than in the tunnel of London, just in the streets with punks.
• The more pain you invest in a relationship, the more you feel betrayed when it falls down