"We are all aware of fashion. The supermodels of today are among the biggest stars in the world. But they are silent icons, and the mysterious appeal of the beauty industry continues to grow. Fashion is the visual expression of a culture. Paradoxically it can be both sublimely sophisticated and carnally bestial at once. Fashion is used as a means of sexual display, status symbol and tribal code. This is a story about fashion. Fashion is one of the most elusive subjects, but it is precisely this elusiveness which fascinates. Fashion has an ability to take over people's lives to an astonishing degree. Fashion can never be pinned down; it is constantly morphing into something else. No one completely escapes it. Youth irreverence and anti-fashion statements are coveted, as they can never be bought, but in various forms they can be taken up and converted into fashion before being discarded. Fashion is as ruthless as it is fickle. The extraordinary hold fashion possesses lies in its ability to provide identity. Everyone who enters this world has a different reason or motive for doing so. Sometimes it is simply the result of a chance encounter, but once they are truly ensconced it is almost impossible to escape.
At the age of 25, I designed one of my first pieces of clothing, a bright blue lame' suit, my first rock n' roll suit, which I intended to wear walking down the length of King's Road. I was looking for one of those chance rendezvous that would change my life. This was 1971, and the King's Road in Chelsea was full of people a parade of late-'60's fashions and styles, a dropped-out, motley group of hippie emporia - Bazaar, Alkasura, Granny takes A Trip, I was counting on that unexpected moment of glamour, and I found it at number 430. In this black hole at the end of the King's Road, i changed my life. In the shop's various incarnations - Paradise Garage, Let It Rock, Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die - I made clothes that looked like ruins. I created something new by destroying the old. This wasn't fashion as a commodity; this was fashion as an idea.
A later incarnation of the shop was called Sex. It had a range of fetish and bondage paraphernalia, mostly all in black. Black expressed the denunciation of the frill. Nihilism. Boredom. Emptiness. How do you dress an army of disaffected youth? I and my partner at the time Vivienne Westwood, designed our own military trousers and put a strap between the legs, binding one knee to the other, and stitched in a zipper that went straight down the crotch and wound its way up the arse. These trousers, our bondage trousers, were about the explosion of the body, a declaration of war against repression. They were the perfect uniform for people battling against the consumerist fashions of the High Street.
Sex translated into fashion becomes fetish, and fetishism is the very embodiment of youth. Youth has to behave irreverently - it has to take drugs because of its fundamental belief in its own immortality, which it needs to assert over and over again. Fashion and music are the natural expressions of youth's need for confrontation and rebellion, and fetishism in both is its necessary razor's edge, the exhilarating border between life and death. Fashion and music - music and fashion - are expressions of the same needs. in retrospect, it now seems natural and right that The Look should show how shops such as mine and others on the King's Road throughout the '60's and '70's and '80's produced a street fashion which would inevitably act as a catalyst for the musical tastes of the time.
John Pearse, who created Granny Takes A Trip in the'60's, used an American car that appeared as if it had crashed right through his window. His clothes - velvet suits with loon pants - brought back the Regency dandy. There was also Tommy Roberts, who created pop-art fashion with his shop Mr Freedom, noted for Mickey Mouse T-shirts and Snow White dresses, with a window display which at one time sported a giant gorilla covered in bright-blue fake fur. Also John Lloyd whose shop Alkasurq sold the bohemian look look of anti-fashion '60's Chelsea. John would often be seen creeping around the lower end of the King's Road dressed in a monk's habit. He later set fire to himself and died. Trevor Miles, whose paradise garage I inherited, was noted for selling the first used blue jeans. That store had the look of a downtrodden American garage that you might find on a desert highway in Arizona. Outside was a disused petrol pump; inside was a live parrot in a cage. All of these stores were the street's visual answer to an authentic pop culture that did not necessarily pay homage to the commercial beat of the time.
It is a revelation that punk rock has inadvertently become part of a gay fashion history - part part of an underground delight in leather, rubber, and bondagewear. To think that The Sex Pistols could be as much a part of gay fashion as John Travolta in the movie Saturday Night Fever is a truth, as well as a fantasy, worth savouring. It's interesting how punk and disco, having both risen up from the street as proletarian fashion, have been co-opted by the fashion world over the past 20 years by gay designers as encapsulating a gay spirit which now seems perfectly normal.
New York fashion designer Jon Bartlett said recently "I originally came into fashion because it meant something, because it promoted subcultures. But by the time I arrived it had changed, and the subculture was being replaced by mall culture, and nowhere more strongly than in Europe. I was trying to relive those moments I spent in London, but no one really wanted to know. If I had hung on, I;d be over by now. The fashion companies had taken over - designers had become 'product managers'. The rules were set, and if you attempted to change them, you were out. You have to lose your identity to be successful in fashion today. Even John Galliano isn't John Galliano when he's working for Dior; he's just creating costume balls and reinventing some lost world.
Christian Dior said "Fashion is an act of faith", but today there is little faith in fashion, because it has become mere product. If the street is no longer the place where fashion is displayed, you might ask where it has gone. Perhaps to the movies of Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie, which are nothing more than one long fashion show. Movies represent feelings, ideology and fantasy, because the ordinary world - the everyday world which we all inhabit - has become one of mail order, the J Crew look. The street as a fashion parade is almost over. Look down Fifth Avenue in New York and you will find Gap followed by Banana Republic Followed by Club Monaco. There are still some displays of corporate rather than personal identities. Movies might be the last place where fashion has a true voice. The problem is that, in the past, fashion has always thrived on people's insecurities, but today this isn't the case. People care more about comfort than code.
The most revealing truth about fashion is that no one who works in this world can ever live in the present. This, more than anything else, explains fashion for me. Couturiers have to design for winter in summer and summer in winter. They are in a constant state of displacement. Whether the couturiers are attracted to fashion because of this sense of displacement or whether this displacement is an occupational hazard for them is debatable. One thing is clear, though: they can never be disatisfied; the moment a collection is finished, it is out of date... unless, of course, it isn't fashion. We seem to be on the verge of a fashion industry that produces something other than fashion: product"
