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Sid Vicious would never believe how much his old clothes were worth and that counterfeiters would go to great lengths to fake them.
Not long ago, London-based pop culture historian Paul Gorman, author of The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren: A Biography, and Rock Fashion auctioneer Paul Gorman acquired a piece belonging to Marr. Shirt by Malcolm McLaren.Vivienne Westwood’s Seditionaries label, circa 1977, for evaluation.
It’s made from muslin and features an instantly recognizable graphic by artist Jamie Reid for the sleeves of the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK” single.
If it is true, it will fetch a handsome price at auction.At a Bonhams auction in May, a 1977 Mr. McLaren and Ms. Westwood parachute shirt sold for $6,660, along with a rare black and red mohair sweater embroidered with a skull and crossbones and “Sex Pistols” No Future “Lyrics” sells for $8,896.
However, Mr Gorman was not convinced the shirt he was evaluating was what the owner claimed.
“Muslim is obsolete in some places,” Mr. Gorman said.”But elsewhere, the fabric was still too fresh. The ink was not 1970s quality and didn’t diffuse into the fabric.” Asked about the provenance, the seller withdrew the piece from the auction house and said it was then sold privately .”There’s only one similar shirt in the museum collection,” Gorman said, “and I think that’s questionable too.”
Welcome to the weird and lucrative world of fake punk.Over the past 30 years, pretending to be handcrafted with original designs incorporating S-and-M and dirty graphics, innovative cuts and straps, military surplus patterns, tweeds and latex – Sid Vicious and his peers in Anarchy What became famous in the era of ideology – has become a growth industry.
“I get several emails every month asking if something is real,” said Steven Philip, a fashion archivist, collector and consultant.”I’m not going to be involved. People are buying fools’ gold. There are always 500 fakes for a real one.”
For half a century, Mr McLaren and Ms Westwood have opened their counterculture boutique, Let It Rock, at 430 King’s Road, London.That store, now known as Worlds End, is the birthplace of street fashion.Its owners are the designers who defined the punk scene.
Over the ensuing 10 years, the store was transformed into Sex and Seditionaries, introducing a look and sound that had far-reaching effects and was therefore collectible.”Single items are very scarce due to a number of factors,” says Alexander Fury, author of “Vivienne Westwood Catwalk.”"Their production times are short, the clothes are expensive, and people tend to buy and wear them until they fall apart.”
Dior and Fendi’s artistic director, Kim Jones, has plenty of original work and believes that “Westwood and McLaren created the blueprint for modern clothing. They were visionaries,” he says.
Many museums also collect these things.Michael Costiff, socialite, interior designer and curator of the World Archives for Dover Street Market Stores, was an early client of Mr. McLaren and Ms. Westwood.The 178 outfits he assembled with his wife, Gerlinde, are now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, which purchased Mr Costiff’s collection in 2002 for £42,500 from the National Art Collection Fund.
The value of vintage McLaren and Westwood makes them a target for fashion pirates.At the most obvious level, replicas are available online and sold directly and cheaply, without deception – just a familiar graphic on a simple t-shirt.
“This piece comes from a background in the art world,” said Paul Stolper, a London-based gallerist whose vast collection of original punk works is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”An image or two from a certain period, like Che Guevara or Marilyn, ends up being transmitted through our culture. Sex Pistols define an era, so images are constantly being reproduced.”
Then there are the more obvious fakes, like the cheap Fruit of the Loom t-shirt featuring a crucified Mickey Mouse, or the $190 “SEX original” bondage shorts from A Store Robot in Tokyo that are easily identifiable as non-original, Because of the new fabric and the fact that this style was never really made in the 1970s.The Japanese market is flooded with fakes.
Last year, Mr Gorman found a garment called “Vintage Seditionaries Vivienne Westwood ‘Charlie Brown’ White T-Shirt” on eBay in the UK, which he bought as a case study for £100 (about $139) .
“It’s an interesting example of counterfeiting,” he said.”It never existed. But the addition of the ‘Destruction’ slogan and the onslaught of trying to use the much-loved cartoon character portrayed in a counter-cultural way guided the approach of McLaren and Westwood. I use the professional The printers have confirmed that the inks are modern, as is the T-shirt stitching.”
Mr McLaren’s widow, Young Kim, has worked hard over the years to preserve his legacy and legacy.“I went to the Metropolitan Museum in 2013 to inspect their collection,” Ms. King said.”I was shocked to find out that most of them were fake. The original clothes were small. Malcolm made them fit him and Vivienne. A lot of the clothes at the Met were huge and fit the pre-punks of today.”
There are other signs.”They have a pair of tweed and leather pants, which are rare and authentic,” Ms King said.”They happen to have a second pair, which is fake. The stitching is on the top of the waistband, not inside, as it would be on a well-made garment. And the D-ring is so new.”
The work in the Met’s 2013 “Punk: From Chaos to Haute Couture” exhibition drew some attention after Ms. King and Mr. Gorman publicly commented on the alleged fakes and many of the show’s inconsistencies.
But there are questions about the work that had entered the museum eight years earlier.Examples include the bondage suit that featured prominently in the 2006 “Anglomania” show, attributed to London-based antiques dealer Simon Easton, and vintage Westwood and McLaren rental company Punk Pistol Collection, which provided stylists and filmmakers, and the 2003, Iraqi Mr. Stone and his business partner, Gerald Bowey, established the museum online.At some point, the museum stopped listing the suits as part of its collection.
“In 2015, two McLaren-Westwood pieces in our collection were determined to be fakes,” said Andrew Bolton, chief curator at the Metropolitan Costume Institute.”The works were subsequently returned. Our research in this area is ongoing.”
Mr Gorman sent Mr Bolton several emails in which he said other works in the series had problems, but Mr Gorman said Mr Bolton no longer responded to him.A spokeswoman for the Costume Institute said the pieces had been inspected by experts more than once.Mr Bolton declined to provide any additional comment for this article.
Mr Easton, who would not comment for this article, said by email that Mr Bowie was speaking for him, but his name is indelible in the fake punk legend.Over the years, his PunkPistol.com site, which was archived in 2008, is regarded by many as a reliable archival resource for original McLaren and Westwood designs.
However, Mr Bowie said that despite their best efforts to validate the collection, “the haphazard way in which the clothes were originally conceived, produced and subsequently reproduced hindered it. Today, even with auction catalogue listings, receipts and in some cases from Westwood’s certification, these garments are still controversial.”
On September 9, 2008, Mr. McLaren was first informed of the scale of the fraud surrounding him and Ms. Westwood through an anonymous email forwarded by Mr. Gorman for this article and verified by Ms. Kim.
“Cheaters wake up to fakes!” reads the subject line, and the sender is only identified as “Minnie Minx” from deadsexpistol@googlemail.com.A number of people from the London fashion industry have been accused of conspiracy in the email, which also refers to a 2008 court case involving Scotland Yard.
“Following reports, police raided homes in Croydon and Eastbourne, where they found rolls of agitator labels,” the email said.”But who are these new pranksters? Welcome Mr Grant Howard and Mr Lee Parker.”
Grant Champkins-Howard, now a DJ under the alias Grant Dale, and Lee Parker, a plumber, were tried at Kingston Crown Court in June 2010, Judge Susan Matthews said. They are “old-fashioned liars”.Their property was indeed raided in 2008 by the Metropolitan Arts and Antiquities Fraud Squad and seized a shipment of allegedly fake McLaren and Westwood clothing and related materials, as well as 120 counterfeit Banksy prints .
The two were later found guilty of falsifying Banksy’s work.Mr. McLaren, the only creator of the original Sex and Seditionaries garments willing to testify, was asked to examine the seized items and point to clues that the garments were fakes: incorrect size of stencil lettering, inconsistent fabrics, use of YKK rather than Lightning branded zippers, incorrect graphics juxtaposition and dyed old white tee.
“He was furious,” Ms King said.”He felt very strongly about protecting and defending his work. It was precious to him.” After the partnership between Mr McLaren and Ms Westwood broke down in 1984, there was a long-standing high profile between the two The dispute was never resolved, and the tension created a vacuum for counterfeiters.
Mr Howard and Mr Parker were given suspended sentences in the Banks case, but the fake clothing case was dropped when Mr McLaren died in 2010 because he was a key witness for the prosecution in the field.
However, it turns out that Ms Westwood’s family may have inadvertently created or fueled the fake punk industry.”I made limited editions of some early designs to raise money to launch the Agent Provocateur,” said Joe Corré, son of Mr. McLaren and Ms. Westwood, who opened his own underwear in 1994 business.
“We recreated the chicken bone T-shirt and the ‘Venus’ T-shirt,” Mr. Corré said.“They were labelled as limited-edition replicas, produced in a limited number of 100 pieces, and then sold to the Japanese market.” Before these detailed and expensive replicas, reproductions of works were limited to the obvious silkscreens on wholesale T-shirts Printing, production speed is fast, and the price is quite cheap.
Mr. Corré said Vivienne Westwood licensed the reproductions.Mr. McLaren was angry.In an email dated 14 October 2008 to a group including journalist Steven Daly, Mr McLaren wrote: “Who allowed them to do this? I told Joe to stop immediately and write to him .I am angry.”
Mr. Corré, who recently became a director of the Vivienne Foundation, “uses the copyright of her work in a compassionate way to raise funds for various causes.” He said he would explore how to “end” counterfeiting.Ms King continues to fight for Mr McLaren’s legacy and believes he is being repeatedly wiped from his own history.
Mr. Easton and Mr. Bowey’s punk pistol business continues to sell Ms. Westwood and Mr. McLaren’s work through the Etsy store SeditionariesInTheUK, most of which bear a letter of certification from the Vivienne Westwood Company, signed, designed and archived by Murray Blewett.These included striped shirts with Peter Pan collars and inverted silk Karl Marx patches, and Levi’s-inspired cotton-rubber jackets.
The internet isn’t as strict as most auction houses, and they wouldn’t comment for this article, but said they only represent works with bulletproof provenance, i.e. photos of the owner wearing the clothes in the 1970s.
“It’s important to understand that many victims of counterfeiting are willing victims,” ​​Mr Gorman said.”They really want to believe they are part of the original story. That’s what fashion is all about, isn’t it? It’s all driven by desire.”