Granny Takes a Trip with Gorman & Bracewell

Poster for the Granny Takes a Trip book event at Foyles (11 Feb 2026) 

Photo of Paul Gorman live on stage taken by Melpomeni 

 

 

I. In Anticipation ...

  

Much anticipating this evening's event at Foyles on the Charing Cross Road: Paul Gorman in conversation with Michael Bracewell; i.e., two of the UK's most celebrated pop culture writers [1] under one roof - and all for the price of a tenner (which includes a glass of wine). 

 

Essentially, they'll be discussing the look of music and the sound of fashion in relation to Granny Takes a Trip; the groovy London boutique that was opened sixty years ago this month on King's Road, Chelsea, by Nigel Waymouth, his girlfriend Sheila Cohen, and John Pearse.

 

Gorman recently published his illuminating study of the shop as well as the cultural scene from which it emerged [2], so obviously he'll be there in part to promote (and sign) copies of this book, but I'm sure he'll be willing to discuss also McLaren and Westwood's store which opened nearby a few years later and for which Granny paved the way and provided a model (like McLaren and Westwood's shop, Granny Takes a Trip became famous for its changing façade, interior, and styles of fashion).    

 

At least I hope so, as it's the punk store at 430 King's Road rather than the hippie haven at 488 that really excites my interest.    

II. On Reflection ... 

 

Well, that was fun!

 

Gorman is an engaging speaker and it helps when the interlocutor is deeply knowledgeable of the subject being discussed. The event was also nicely staged and managed by the staff at Foyles, so kudos to them. 

If I had a time machine and could only make one return trip, I'd still use it to visit SEX in 1976 rather than Granny's in 1966, but, to be fair, the latter was a more culturally vital space than I previously realised (even if listed on the wrong side of the bed).    

Members of a receptive and fairly large audience produced one or two interesting observations and although I didn't ask at the time, I came away wondering whether a store such as Granny Takes a Trip or SEX would still be possible today ... 

 

Sadly, I doubt it. 

 

Although whether that's because socio-cultural conditions have changed, or we have fundamentally changed as a people - become less imaginative and less daring and more desirous of safe spaces in which to self-identify, rather than zones of indiscernibility in which to dress up so as to mess up and become-other - I'm not sure.

Time was, in the 1960s and '70s, when any suburban teenager could go up to London, stroll along the King's Road or cruise round Soho, and (momentarily at least) leave their mundane life behind; could visit magical boutiques and try on an outfit like Mr Benn and be transported into a fantasy adventure.  

 

Now the young go to Primark or spend the day in Westfield and talk about the importance of diversity and being themselves whilst all looking (to my eyes at least) exactly the same in their casual street wear (baggy, low-rise jeans, oversized hoodies, trainers, etc.); a look that is heavily influenced by social media trends rather than the politics of style.  

 

Notes

 

[1] Paul Gorman (b. 1959) is a writer it would be easy to envy, but whom I prefer to love and admire; particularly for his 2020 biography of McLaren, but also for his work in a variety of other areas as a brilliant curator and, indeed, pop cultural map-maker.  

      Michael Bracewell (b. 1958) is a writer with whose life and work I am far less familiar, but whose two collections of essays - England Is Mine: Pop Life in Albion From Wilde to Goldie (1997) and The Space Between: Selected Writings on Art (2012) - I plan on reading in the near future. 

 

[2] Paul Gorman, Granny Takes a Trip: High Fashion and High Times at the Wildest Rock 'n' Roll Boutique (White Rabbit Books, 2025). 

      The publisher's blurb reads: 

 "Granny Takes A Trip was more than just a shop and a fashion brand; it was the original rock and roll clothes boutique, the template for all that followed. What started as an odd retail venture/art installation in a depressed part of London known as World's End became an international byword for glam decadence in Manhattan and Hollywood, combining flamboyant style and all manner of countercultural activity ...

      Unfolding over a decade-and-a-half, this tumultuous story invokes a cast of often unique, sometimes entitled, unusually talented and troubled individuals on a collective mission to shake up austere, repressed, class-ridden Britain and white bread America." 

      The book can be ordered here.  

 

 

This post is for Paul and Charlie's dark-haired Angels: Maria, Meni, and Jennifer. 

 

 

Reflections on a Punk Jesus

Fig. 1: Jesus: Punk or Cunt?  

 

 

I.

 

We all know, thanks to the Ramones, that Jackie is a punk (and Judy is a runt), but Jesus ... can the Nazarene really be conceived as such? 

 

After all, Johnny Rotten campily affirms a cod-Nietzschean position vis-à-vis the Son of God in the opening line of the Sex Pistols' debut single: I am an anti-Christ [1]. 

 

And in case there should still be some doubt regarding this matter, the infamous Destroy shirt designed by McLaren and Westwood for Seditionaries, features (along with a swastika) an inverted crucifix [2] - could that be any more sacrilegious, as Chandler Bing might say.   

 

Despite this, however, there's recently been talk in certain punk circles around the need to enthuse the diverse global subculture that has emerged from what was once simply a sound and a look born of 430 King's Road with a form of Christian spirituality (or faith) [3] - and I for one don't like it! 

 

For as my friends in Cradle of Filth once succinctly put it, Jesus is a cunt [4].  

 

 

II. 

 

Having said that, even Nietzsche recognised Christ as someone in revolt against social hierarchy, writing: 

 

"This holy anarchist who roused up the lowly, the outcasts and 'sinners' [...] to oppose the ruling order [...] was a political criminal, in so far as political criminals were possible in an absurdly unpolitical society." [5]

 

So perhaps the idea of a punk Jesus is not so absurd as it seems at first (whilst remaining profoundly problematic). 

 

Or perhaps we might instead understand punk as merely another unfolding of the slave revolt in morality [6]; the marginalised, the disprivileged, and the talentless - driven by ressentiment - attempting to invert the value system of the music business and overthrow the pop elite: No Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones ... [7] 

 

 

Fig. 2: Johnny Rotten: Anti-Christ / Photo by Barry Plummer (1976)   

Fig. 3: Destroy shirt by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood (1977)  

  

Notes

 

[1] Sex Pistols, 'Anarchy in the U.K.' (EMI Records, 1976). The track also features on the album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols (Virgin Records, 1977): click here to play and watch the official video on YouTube. 

      As one critic writes, the opening line of this song has become one of the most famous in rock history: "As a simple declaration, these words possess an immediate shock value familiar in the themes of transgression and iconoclasm that helped define rock and roll." 

      See Benjamin Court, 'The Christ-like Antichrists: Messianism in Sex Pistols', in Popular Music and Society, Volume 38, Issue 4 (2015), pp. 416-431.

 

[2] The figure of Christ on the Cross was adapted by McLaren from Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece (1512-16). 

 

[3] In November 2019, for example, Francis Stewart and Mike Dines of the Punk Scholars Network, organised a two-day in person and online symposium on the theme of 'Punk and the Sacred': click here for details. 

      The peer-reviewed academic journal Punk & Post-Punk (ed. Russ Bestley) has also published several articles on punk spirituality; see, for example, Ibrahim Abraham's 'Postsecular punk: Evangelical Christianity and the overlapping consensus of the underground', in Volume 4, Issue 1, of the above (Mar 2015), pp. 91-105, which argues that "the negotiated inclusion of religiously diverse social actors in punk scenes can inform ongoing debates about diversity and inclusion ..." Abraham also edited Christian Punk: Identity and Performance (Bloomsbury, 2020).

      This attempt to give punk a religious gloss doesn't always involve a Christian makeover, however; there have also been attempts to blend punk with Buddhist and Hindu practices and beliefs, for example. If not exactly hostile, let's just say - as an anti-theist [click here] - I'm suspicious of this creeping religiosity; I don't want punk philosophy and art to be corrupted by theologenblut.

 

[4] This line was written on the back of the Vestal Masturbation T-shirt; a controversial item of Cradle of Filth band merchandise, originally printed and distributed in 1993 (the front of the shirt features an image of a masturbating, semi-naked nun). As with several of the early McLaren-Westwood shirt designs, it garnered much controversy and resulted in some fans being arrested for wearing it. 

 

[5] Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1990), § 27, p. 150.

 

[6] See sections 10-12 of the first essay in Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality (1887).

      It's important to note that this slave revolt is not merely a politics of class war and revenge; it also, crucially, introduces into history the idea of a free-willing human subject (the modern individual) whose existence is conceived in moralistic terms (i.e., as good or evil). Thus, Nietzsche does not simply condemn the triumph of this revolt nor seek to reverse it: "Such an exercise, even if desirable, would be pointless because slave morality has become an essential part of what we are." 

      See Keith Ansell-Pearson, editor's introduction to On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. xv.

 

[7] Lyrics from '1977', by The Clash; B-side to 'White Riot', their debut single (CBS Records, 1977).  

 

 

Double Exposure (A Tale of Two Pictures)

D. H. Lawrence Boccaccio Story (1926) 

McLaren and Westwood Two Cowboys (1975)

 

Oh what a pity, oh! don't you agree 

that figs aren't found in the land of the free! [1]

 

I. 

 

If, like me, you are keen to promote the idea of D. H. Lawrence as a Sex Pistol, then one of the aspects of his work that you might discuss in order to lend credence to such a thesis is his painting ...

 

Take, for example, the humorous canvas Boccaccio Story (1926), which depicts the handsome young peasant Masetto [2] asleep - or possibly feigning sleep - beneath a large almond tree on a hot afternoon with his clothes in a state of dramatic disarray, exposing his lower body to the view of some passing nuns who, it might be noted, stare intently at his genitalia, rather than averting their eyes in embarrassment as one might have expected. 

 

It was clearly intended to amuse - but also to provoke. For as Lawrence confided to a friend at the time, he deliberately inserted a phallus in each one of his pictures somewhere: "And I paint no picture that won't shock people's castrated social spirituality." [3] 

 

This is very much what we might now characretise as a punk attitude and it's not surprising that Boccaccio Story - along with a dozen other pictures - was seized by the police after being exhibited at the Warren Gallery in London in the summer of 1929 [4].  

 

 

II. 

Forty-six years later, another police raid took place at a small boutique called Sex on the King's Road, Chelsea, owned by Malcolm McLaren and his partner Vivienne Westwood ...

 

This time, it wasn't an oil on canvas that the virgin pure policemen came to grab, but T-shirts featuring a print of two semi-naked cowboys "facing each other in side profile [...] one wearing a denim jacket, the other a leather waistcoat" [5]. 

 

The cowboy on the right is shown rather tenderly adjusting the other's neckerchief. It's not this detail, however, which initially catches one's eye. Rather, it's the fact that their "semi-flaccid penises, prominently on display, are close to touching" [6]. 

 

For McLaren, this image - appropriated from the world of gay male erotica - not only possessed the capacity to shock and outrage public opinion, the cowboys also encapsulated the frustration and boredom he was feeling at this time: "'It was as though they were waiting for something to happen, just like everyone I knew in London.'" [7]

 

The shirt went on sale at Sex in the summer of 1975 and Alan Jones - who worked at the shop - was perhaps the first to buy it; he was certainly the person who became best associated with the shirt after being taken into custody by two burly policemen for wearing it whilst walking round Soho and charged with 'displaying an obscene print in a public space'. 

 

He was then released, but ordered to appear at Vine Street Magistrates' Court a few weeks later.  Naturally, the case attracted attention from the press. It also resulted, as mentioned, in a police raid on 430 King's Road: 

 

"The remaining stock  of eighteen Cowboys T-shirts were seized, and McLaren and Westwood's arrest on indecency charges escalated the affair into a free-speech cause célèbre when Labour MP Colin Phipps called on Home Secretary Roy Jenkins to review the outmoded law." [8]   

 

Despite mounting a spirited defence - one that called upon expert witnesses to attest to the artistic merit of the shirt design - Jones, McLaren, and Westwood were all found guilty and handed down fairly large fines [9].

 

 

III. 

 

McLaren may have hoped that this (somewhat farcical) case "would continue the process of 'decensorship' of British life that had begun with the 1960 victory to publish D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover" [10], but, it never quite became the national scandal that he wished for. 

 

It did, however, increase sales at Sex. 

 

And today, five decades later, a Cowboys T-shirt can be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art - click here - or bought at auction at Bonham's for a substantial sum of money; including this one originally owned and worn by Sid Vicious and autographed on the back by Johnny Rotten (a snip at £17,850). 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Innocent England', Nettles (Faber & Faber, 1930).  

[2] Masetto is a character in Boccaccio's Decameron, a collection of short stories by the 14th-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375). 

      Its overtly sexual and anti-clerical elements did not go down well with the Church, but the work, first translated into English in 1620, has remained hugely popular and influential. It is available online as a Project Gutenberg e-book: click here. The story of Masetto and the nuns is the first tale told on the third day.

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence letter to Earl Brewster (27 Feb 1927) in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. V, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 648. 

 

[4] What is surprising, however, as I indicated in an earlier post discussing Lawrence's Boccaccio Story - click here - is that Lawrence scholars, including Keith Sagar, should wish to play down the scandalous aspect of his paintings. 

      It is surprising also that Lawrence should react with such (seemingly genuine) distress when thirteen of his pictures were removed by the police from the Warren Street Gallery, branded as obscene, and threatened with destruction by the authorities (they were saved from the flames and returned to Lawrence only after it was agreed with the judge at Bow Street Magistrates court that the paintings would never be exhibited in England again).   

 

[5] Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 265. 

      As Gorman informs readers, the image of the two cowboys was originally produced as a charcoal and ink drawing by the American artist Jim French, in 1969. McLaren had come across the picture reproduced in the magazine Manpower! that he had purchased at a bookshop located in New York's gay quarter in the spring of 1975.  

[6] Ibid. 

[7] Malcolm McLaren quoted by Paul Gorman in The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, p. 266. 

      This explains the addition of the text McLaren added beneath the figures to the effect that there's nowhere to go and nothing to do; that everything was played out.

     

[8] Ibid., p. 269. 

  

[9] Gorman reminds us that, according to Alan Jones, "McLaren and Westwood reneged on their offer to reimburse him for his own £30 fine". See The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren, p. 271.

 

[10] Ibid., p. 270.

 

 

For related posts to this one, click here, here, and here.     

 

Rocking the Lobster Look with Elsa Schiaparelli, Salvador Dalí and Cosmo Kramer

Lobster evening dress by Elsa Schiaparelli in collaboration with Salvador Dalí

Michael Richards as Cosmo Kramer in Seinfeld wearing his lobster shirt 

I.

The surreal genius of Michael Richards as Cosmo Kramer in Seinfeld is not to everyone's taste. In fact, of the four central characters I find Kramer the least interesting and sympathetic. But I do like his comic hipster dress sense, including the short-sleeved white lobster shirt with red print.   

I don't know from where the character drew his sartorial inspiration, but it's nice to think that this particular item is an hommage to the work of the great Spanish artist Salvador Dalí, who had a penchant for marine crustaceans with their hard protective shells and soft insides, particularly lobsters, which appear in several of his iconic works, including a dress made in collaboration with the Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli ...       

II.

If Coco Chanel ever had a serious rival, it was Elsa Schiaparelli - one of the most fabulous figures in fashion between the wars, whose designs displayed the influence of several prominent artists, including Dalí and Jean Cocteau, though it should be noted that her great inspiration and teacher was master couturier Paul Poiret.

Punk rockers may be amused to discover, for example, that it was Schiaparelli - and not McLaren and Westwood - who first made clothes with visible zips as a key element of the design. She also loved to experiment with synthetic materials, unusual buttons and outrageous decorative features. It was her designs produced in collaboration with Dalí, however, that remain amongst her best known, including the so-called Lobster Dress of 1937.*

As can be seen from the above photo, the dress was a relatively simple white silk evening dress with a crimson waistband and featuring a large lobster - painted by Dalí - on the skirt. Whilst not as amusing as his Lobster Telephone created the year before, the dress - famously worn by Wallis Simpson - is just as provocative I think, bringing surrealist elements of eroticism and cruelty into haute couture (for Dalí, lobsters invariably symbolised sex and suffering). ** 

Notes

* The three other works that came out of the Schiaparelli-Dalí collaboration are the Tears Dress (1938), a pale blue evening gown printed with rips and tears and worn with a long veil; the Skeleton Dress (1938), a black crêpe number which used trapunto quilting to create ribs, spine, and leg bones; and the Shoe Hat (1937-38), which, as one might guess, is a hat shaped like a high heeled shoe.

** Two years later, at the New York World's Fair (1939), Dalí unveiled a multi-media experience entitled Dream of Venus, which featured semi-naked female models dressed in outfits made of fresh seafood, including lobsters used to cover their genitalia. See the photo below taken by German-American fashion photographer Horst P. Horst.

Surprise musical bonus: click here.