The Malcolm McLaren Estate Vs The Vivienne Foundation

 

 

I. 

 

Once upon a time, as everybody knows, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood were lovers, creative collaborators, and business partners. But then they fell out, went their separate ways, built solo careers, began to bore everyone, got old and died.   

 

 

II. 

 

The Malcolm McLaren Estate was established by his sole heir and executor - as well as his girlfriend and business partner for the last twelve years of his life - Young Kim. 

 

Its primary purpose seems to be to advance the idea that Malcolm was a visionary genius and pop cultural icon: "An artist in the most post-modern sense of the word, working in every conceivable artistic and intellectual medium ..."

 

 

III.

 

The Vivienne Foundation was launched as a not-for-profit organisation following her death in 2022 [1]. 

 

It exists not merely to honour, protect and continue the legacy of Westwood's creativity and activism, but in order to implement "Vivienne's plan to save the world" by halting climate change, stopping war, defending human rights, and protesting capitalism. 

 

IV.

 

Unfortunately, but perhaps inevitably, relations between the Malcolm McLaren Estate and The Vivienne Foundation are not exactly cordial. 

 

And this week, they have taken a significant turn for the worse following an article by Young Kim in which she reveals the truth about Vivienne's creative relationship with Malcolm and Westwood's unrelenting animosity towards the man who enabled her to become a celebrated fashion designer [2].

 

Kim's main complaint - and it's a serious charge, for which she has a good deal of evidence and justification - is that The Vivienne Foundation is continuing the process (started by Westwood) of revising cultural history and trying to erase McLaren's fashion legacy. 

 

Whether that justifies Kim's description of Westwood as uneducated and provincial, is debatable. 

 

And, to be fair, Westwood was a lot more than McLaren's assistant during their time together at 430, King's Road, although I absolutely believe it to be the case that the majority of ideas - certainly all the best ideas - were Malcolm's; not Vivienne's, not Bernie's, not Rotten's, but Malcolm's.   

 

Finally, Kim is also angry about the fact that many of the McLaren-Westwood designs sold as authenticated originals - with the Vivienne Foundation's blessing and support - are, she says, inferior copies, or fakes.

V.

 

Not surprisingly, Joe Corré - co-creator and director of The Vivienne Foundation - has defended his mother and responded to Young Kim's accusations. 

 

In a letter to Gill Linton [3], he claims, for example, that there "never was a 'McLaren Westwood' brand or label", which, if technically true, is more than a little disingenuous: the actual label designed (by McLaren) for the Seditionaries personal collection contains both their names (his first; then hers).

 

More astonishing, to me at least, is the fact that Corré would argue that his mother was in professional partnership with his father, McLaren, only for a "relatively short period" and that this (twelve-year) period is of minor significance compared to "the later parts of her creative career", when she produced items "of much greater interest and value".

 

Corré concludes his letter by saying that it is laughable that items sold from the McLaren-Westwood period - 1971-1983 - should first be authenticated by the Malcolm McLaren Estate: "Appraisal and authentication relies on the knowledge and credibility of experts. The McLaren Estate does not have anyone in this area and we certainly do not require their help." [4]

 

It is, as I say, all rather unfortunate ... And strangely depressing.   

 

It's also, essentially, a family feud; as evidenced by the fact that even Joe's daughter - the model and activist Cora Corré - is enlisted to defend the four pillars and help claim the moral high ground for her dear departed grandmother, whilst hardly stopping to give a tinker's toss for her equally dear, equally departed, but infinitely more interesting and amusing grandfather [5].

 

  

Notes

 

[1] I am reminded that The Vivienne Foundation was initially launched - by Westwood herself - as The Vivienne Westwood Foundation in 2018, but it's the Foundation's current existence, following Westwood's death in December 2022, that mostly interests me. Although a not-for-profit organisation, it should be noted that it is not a charity. 

 

[2] This article can be found in the Evening Standard (25 Aug 2023): click here to read online. Young Kim had originally written to Gill Linton (see note 2 below) claiming there were serious problems with the Westwood concession on Linton's Byronesque website.

 

[3] Gill Linton is the founder and Chief Executive of Byronesque, an online boutique selling contemporary vintage fashion, with whom The Vivienne Westwood Foundation work closely: click here. The letter Joe Corré sent to Linton in response to Young Kim's email to Linton - which the latter forwarded to Corré - can be read here on the Byronesque Instagram account. 

 

[4] In his letter to Linton, Joe Corré also takes an unnecessary (possibly libelous) pop at McLaren's esteemed biographer and the man who arguably knows more about the sound of fashion and the look of music than anyone else, Paul Gorman, much to the latter's understandable - slightly weary - outrage: click here.    

 

[5] In an interview on the Byronesque website entitled 'From Seditionaries to Saving the World', Cora Corré says of Westwood: "I feel incredibly privileged and lucky to have had her as a grandmother and a teacher. [...] In a way I feel her fight will always continue through me shedding light on issues and speaking up for people that don't have a voice." 

      Click here to read the interview in full (if you can stomach the virtue signalling, the self-righteous hypocrisy, and political naivety that the Westwood family and foundation seem to specialise in).  

In Memory of Gentleman Jack Sheppard

Jack Sheppard (1702 -1724)

Engraving by George White (1728) 

based on a portrait by James Thornhill (1724)

I.

I have to admit, I have reservations about memoralising the career of a petty criminal; such low-lives, always ducking and diving from the law, are rarely as charming in real life as we like to imagine them. Just ask the woman working at my local supermarket who was spat at and punched in the face last week after challenging a would-be shoplifter ...

Having said that, it would be churlish to deny the popular appeal of Jack Sheppard; a flash young tea leaf and audacious jailbreaker who captured the sympathy and affection of many a Londoner, both before and after his execution at Tyburn, aged 22, in November 1724.


II. 

Sheppard was an East End boy who decided he didn't want to be a carpenter, preferring instead to make his money from skullduggery. It was a fateful choice: Sheppard was arrested and imprisoned five times in 1724 - suggesting he was either very unlucky or pretty fuckin' feckless as a criminal - and although he managed to escape four times, by the end of the year he was swinging from the gallows.

However, his death at such a tender age only helped establish his legend. An autobiographical sketch - thought to have been ghostwritten by Daniel Defoe - sold like hot cakes at his execution and there followed several plays based upon it, much to the annoyance of the authorities who were concerned that impressionable young rascals keen to play Jack the Lad would attempt to copy his behaviour.* 

In some ways, Sheppard makes an unlikely role model. For not only was he useless at evading capture by the law, but he was also physically unimposing; small in size and lightly built, Sheppard had a pale complexion and suffered with a slight stutter.

However, these things were compensated for by a winning smile and a quick wit that made him popular with both sexes in the taverns of Drury Lane, such as the Black Lion, where he met his future partner in crime Joseph 'Blueskin' Blake and the buxom young brass Elizabeth Lyon (aka Edgeworth Bess), who became his regular mistress.   

From being a good, hardworking young man with career aspirations, Sheppard now threw himself enthusiastically into an illicit lifestyle of booze, whores, and criminal activity. Whilst he soon progressed to burglary and highway robbery, his first recorded theft was that of two silver spoons pinched from a tavern in Charing Cross, so hardly the crime of the century.

As indicated, however, it was his talent for breaking out of jail that really captured the popular imagination, including an escape from Newgate Prison where he was awaiting execution having been convicted of theft at the Old Bailey. Sheppard managed to remove an iron bar from his cell window, climb through the small gap, then calmly walk past the guards dressed in the women's clothing that accomplices had previously smuggled in.     

Although he was soon recaptured and returned to the his cell at Newgate, he was now visited by the great and the good who were all keen to see for themselves Gentleman Jack Sheppard. When guards found files and other tools hidden in his cell, he was transferred to what we would now describe as a high security unit, clapped in leg irons, and chained to the floor.

Cheekily informing his gaolers that these measures were not going to hold him, Sheppard even demonstrated how he might use a small nail to get free. He was rewarded for this by being bound with still heavier chains and handcuffed. Sheppard, however, continued to make light of his predicament and, astonishingly, he got away once more - still wearing his leg irons!

This miraculous escape so amazed everyone that the belief grew that Sheppard must have had the assistance of the Devil himself. Whether that's true or not, Sheppard's final stint of freedom was shortlived, if admittedly spent in some style; having broken into a pawnbrokers on Drury Lane, Sheppard helped himself to a black silk suit, several rings, and a wig in order to enjoy a night on the Town, posing as a dandy highwayman with a girl on each arm.

He was arrested, for the final time, on the morning of November 1st, still dressed in his stolen clobber and still very drunk.

III.

This time, the authorities took no chance. Sheppard was kept under constant guard and loaded down with 300lbs of iron weights. A petition, signed by several prominent people, asking that his death sentence be commuted was ignored. Offered the chance to have it reduced by informing on his associates, Sheppard, to his credit, refused to grass.

On November 16th, he was taken to the gallows at Tyburn to be hanged. A joyous procession accompanied him through the streets of London; crowds were said to have numbered 200,000 (one third of the population at that time). Hopes of a daring last minute escape were thwarted when prison guards found and confiscated a pen knife hidden about his person.

After Sheppard's body was cut down, the crowd pressed forward to stop its removal by the authorities. When his badly mauled corpse was finally retrieved, it was buried in the churchyard of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

And thus ends the (really rather sorry) tale of Jack Sheppard ...

Though, as I say above, his posthumous legend has continued to grow. Sheppard now serves, for example, as a figure of inspiration for the punk fashion entrepreneur Joe Corré and his team at Child of the Jago: click here.

I mention this not because I particularly share Corré's sartorial sense or aesthetic vision - and I certainly don't subscribe to his (and his mother's) eco-political agenda - but for sentimental reasons (i.e., much the same sort of stupidity as those who champion Sheppard as a working-class hero or a potentially revolutionary figure of some kind).   

Notes

* Perhaps the best-known play that was at least partly based on Sheppard's life is John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728); Sheppard was the inspiration for the figure of Macheath.