One of the inaccuracies around punk is that it’s a reaction to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, but punk starts before those regimes take power in the mid-1970s,” said the curator, Andrew Blauvelt. “Punk did become a reaction to neoconservative rule. It felt necessary at the time to provide a social resistance against some of those aspects against neoconservative policy, but had longer-lasting effects, as well.” Amid the tortured souls of punk, Westwood carved out her own path, one that was full of humour, beauty and joy. Her clothes – like her worldview – were anti-establishment, but never nihilistic. They were deliberately off-kilter – partly by dint of being ahead of their time – but they were always elegant. SEX: Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die was a compilation album edited by Marco Pirroni, which was compiled from the records on the jukebox at Malcolm McLaren's shop SEX.

From the dress and hairstyles of its devotees and the onstage theatrics of its musicians to the design of its numerous forms of printed matter, punk's energy coalesced into a powerful subcultural phenomenon that transcended music to affect other fields such as visual art, fashion, and graphic design." How to encompass the vastness of her legacy? Her punk phase is eternally referenced, morphing onwards through generations, and turning up through time in the safety-pinned collections of Gianni Versace and many more. In the days following her death, hundreds of people have posted memories of how her clothes led to self-discovery. Fashion academics have told me that students today quote her as their inspiration, both as a designer and as an activist. Her allegiance to youth, and to what matters, passed on her courage to so many designers to be themselves, from John Galliano to Matty Bovan. That radical power of Vivienne’s will continue, undiminished, long into the future. Her finances remained unsound. With introductions from rag trade friends, she moved incrementally into bank loans and business funding to pay off the debts of Worlds End, and to buy rather than rent her second shop, in Davies Street, Mayfair. Westwood earned where she could, teaching fashion at the Academy of Applied Arts, Vienna (1989-91), and the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin (from 1993). In the Vienna lecture room, she fell in love with her best student, Andreas Kronthaler. He moved to London, then into her flat, and they married in 1993. I really have no idea what they view as ‘punk art,’ and so why not? Let’s have a go at it.”—John Rotten Lydon in Rolling Stone When punk first hit the market, it terrified the record industry, “but it generated a market,” said Blauvet. “There became an opening for graphic designers to design without any rules. Typographic designers had more freedom. Album covers could be totally conceptual. You didn’t use a corporate approach, or if you did, it was ironic.”

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McLaren's eye – as much as his ear – for pop talent was crucial. He once told a Ramones fan, Vic Godard, and his pals, "you look like a group", so they formed one called Subway Sect. His gift for turning notoriety into a promotional tool (inherited from the Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham and surely passed on to Factory Records' Tony Wilson and Creation's Alan McGee) loomed equally large in his next project. Vivienne Westwood with Andreas Kronthaler on the runway during the Vivienne Westwood womenswear fall/winter 2022-2023 show at Paris Fashion Week, March 2022. Photograph: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images The store was kind of disposable in a way. Vivienne and Malcolm would pull out one thing and put in another,” explains the architect David Connor, who took over the design of Seditionaries from Ben Kelly in 1974, his first commission after graduating from the RCA at age 26. With an intimidating opaque façade and an interior depicting the air-raided scenes of Dresden, Seditionaries was the ultimate rejection of West End consumerism, a topic that McLaren had explored in his unfinished 1970 film Oxford Street, and which was listed as a hate on Westwood’s ‘hates’ and ‘non-hates’ T-shirt. “You had to be really brave to go through the door,” Connor explains. “We put white glass in the front windows, so that you couldn’t see inside… Some people actually thought it was a betting shop.” McLaren's Midas touch came and went throughout his career, but ideas never left him. He blended funk and orchestra on the 1989 album Waltz Darling and recorded the 1994 concept album Paris, which featured Catherine Deneuve. He wrote a song for Quentin Tarantino's film Kill Bill Vol 2 (2004), and secured a Hollywood deal as an ideas man for Steven Spielberg. He even became an outspoken critic of the burger industry by co-producing the 2006 film Fast Food Nation. He also channelled his bittersweet view of London into programmes for Radio 2 and Channel 4, but cancelled a plan to run for mayor of London in 2000. No fashion designer ever had a Paris show like the one staged by Vivienne Westwood in 1991. Although she was by then 50 and had been making clothes for sale for 20 years – and the British Fashion Council had named her designer of the year – she stitched much of that collection on her own sewing machine in her shabby south London flat, hand-finishing it in the van that transported her, and the models, to France, where the couturier Azzedine Alaïa had invited her to guest-show. Despite those limitations, the collection was a major success.

On view until 18 August, these rare items hail from the collection of Andrew Krivine, a leading punk memorabilia collector. The Sex Pistols singer Johnny Rotten came to see the exhibition and told Rolling Stone that he has “no idea what they view as ‘punk art,’ and so why not?” Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976–1986 is a two-floor retrospective featuring over 500 posters, zines and vinyl covers from the New York and British punk scenes. From photocopied posters to magazine cut-out covers for the Sex Pistols, it traces the roots of political resistance and the ethos of punk from a micro scene to global phenomenon. The exhibit also features Saville’s legendary Joy Division covers, alongside works featuring David Bowie, the Clash and Iggy Pop.

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The punk aesthetic also carries elements of futurism – just look at the constructivist posters of Kraftwerk – as well as German expressionism, Soviet-era posters, pop art and the Bauhaus design movement. Born in a period of economic malaise, punk’s energy coalesced into a powerful subcultural phenomenon that transcended music to affect other fields, and especially graphic design.

Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976-1986” on view at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) from April 9 through August 18. Explore the punked up visual fest here. She was born in Tintwistle, just outside the mill town of Glossop, Derbyshire, the daughter of Dora (nee Ball) and Gordon Swire. Her father was a factory worker; her mother had been in the mills and appreciated a length of good wool worsted – although everything was in short supply during Viv’s childhood. Her education at Glossop grammar school ended in 1958, when the Swires saved enough to buy a little post office business in London, and moved to Harrow. Viv soon left her art school course, frustrated that it prohibited sewing. Her own style was beehive hair, pencil skirts, stiletto heels – all the music-allied experiments of London’s first teen generation.Perhaps her self-conviction and resilience were there from birth. Vivienne Swire was born in 1941, in Tintwistle, Derbyshire. A northern war baby who grew up during rationing, she taught herself to sew clothes from the smallest amount of fabric. She moved to London with her parents, and briefly went to Harrow Art School, but diverted, needing to earn, to become a primary school teacher. At 21, she married Derek Westwood, and had a son, Ben, in 1963. Dissatisfied with domesticity, she left to live with her brother, who fatefully introduced her to McLaren. She gave birth to their son, Joe Corré, in 1967. Mythical wheezes, such as a Pistols-era plan to visit Madame Tussauds and melt the wax effigies of the Beatles, were typical of McLaren's tendency to blur fantasy and reality and turn hype into an art form. His talent was perhaps not so much in coming up with ideas as seizing on other people's and making them more successful. People ask: where does this movement come from?” said Blauvelt. “It was all against the systemic control of the music system. This idea of provocation in the streets, the field of punk was a social protest, elements of that still exist.”