April Deep Dive: 430 King's Road

A look into Vivienne Westwood's shapeshifting storefront.

Have you ever been on a snowy morning walk, along your hometown’s Main Street, in search of bagels, when it hits you: everything around here is changing and it totally sucks?

The ever-shapeshifting storefronts of our cities give way to difficult questions. Is the economy terrible? Is gentrification in full swing? What happened to that weird old man who ran the hardware store?? Is he okay???

Today, class, we’re going to talk about one particular storefront and its many identities. These changes were not the fault of failure and economic strife, but instead of commercial genius (whether that genius was on purpose or by accident - more on that later).

This tiny shop’s history oozes with rebellion. It was a home for young misfits. It was a lab for mad sartorial scientists. It became, somehow, against everything it told us it was, a pinnacle of the capital-F Fashion industry.

OPEN ON: A bird’s eye view of London in the morning. Smog and concrete roofing. We hear the sounds of the city (the screeching Tube as it comes to a stop, cats fighting, horses clopping on cobblestones). The city flies towards us as we ZOOM IN on 430 King’s Road. A tiny storefront, squished in on either side, facade painted matte black.

JOAN JETT (V/O)

One two three four!

The drums come in hard. A tiny woman with short bleached hair and a ragged t-shirt approaches the storefront and unlocks the door.

JOAN JETT (V/O)

I DON’T GIVE A DAMN BOUT MY BAD REPUTATION

LIVIN IN THE PAST IT’S A NEW GENERATION

The woman turns to the camera and smiles. One of her front teeth is missing. She slams the door in our face.

My personal feelings towards Vivienne Westwood are complicated. She makes me emotional. I love her dearly and find her endlessly frustrating as if she was my own mother.

(It doesn’t help that they look… extremely similar. I must have some memory of infancy - a strong-willed white woman with a halo of bleach and a waft of patchouli reaching for me in my crib - that I have projected onto Vivienne Westwood.)

Westwood is undoubtedly my biggest inspiration in terms of design. She loved a lot of the same things that I love - artistic representation of rebellion, the aesthetic mixing of traditional regality and peasantry, a strong pendulum swing between feminine and masculine, a really good pleated plaid. And she uses them expertly, masterfully well.

Clothes are always political. That’s the whole point of this newsletter. It’s the whole point of the imaginary thesis I’ve been building for three years, since I started writing about fashion on the internet and making people regret talking to me at parties.

Clothes are how we communicate with the world around us. They say: I’m put together. I’m artistic. I’m dangerous. I’m professional. Clothes categorize us in the high school cafeteria. They separate us into social classes. Clothes are everything.

I am fascinated by the way that seemingly innocuous clothing can take on political meaning over time. When did tie-dye t-shirts become synonymous with the anti-war movement? Will I ever see a white man in a red baseball cap and not feel my heart sink? Did you know that once upon a time, wearing purple was illegal if you weren’t in a specific social class?? (This was the first ever Rudeletter topic, actually.)

The problem with this specific sociological obsession is that most topics are impossible to tie up into a bow. The mixture of fashion, politics, ethics, personal style, commerce…. it’s full of nuance. It’s impossible to stick the landing in a conversation about clothes and their meaning. It has to just peter out, like, “Anyway. Yeah. That’s what I think, I guess. But who knows, really? I’m gonna grab another drink.”

I love a succinct factoid. I hate when movies have no ending. I want a black-and-white understanding of humanity and its connection to fashion. My therapist (shoutout Lindsey!) used to yell at me about this all the time - stop trying to predict your life as if it’s a rom-com. You are not in Act 2 Scene 4, moments from a pivotal scene that will reveal some crucial misunderstanding. You are just experiencing life. And life is kinda messy. There might never be a resolution.

This is why Vivienne Westwood scrambles my brain. She is neither black nor white. She isn’t even in the greyspace in the middle. She is a larger-than-life Jackson Pollock. She zigzags at full speed between ideologies. It’s hard to keep up with. For example:

She is aesthetically inspired by the history of royal clothing. She is deeply and outspokenly anti-monarchy. She is knighted by the Queen. She goes commando on the day of her knighting.

She uses traditional DIY methods of the working class (safety pins, screenprinting, visible mending). She sells these pieces for thousands. The success of her brand means that poor kids in schools around the world can stand strong behind their clothing. It’s not held together with safety pins because new clothes are too expensive - it’s punk! It looks like the clothes on the runway! But the people inspiring her art will never, ever be able to afford it.

This dichotomy is perfectly illustrated in her first store, located at 430 King’s Road in London. It is both starkly anti-capitalist and a case study worthy of business school textbooks. She and her partner Malcolm McLaren eschewed every traditional method of running a storefront, and through their rebellion they created a highly effective method of market research.

But before we dive into that, a little history.

“A territory of the demi-monde frequented by dandies and women of questionable morals.” That’s how the neighborhood was referred to in the mid-1800s. Then called Cremorne Pleasure Gardens, the surroundings of 430 King’s Road weren’t… how should we say… the classiest. The storefront began its foray into retail as a pawnbroker shop, operated by a man named Joseph Thorn. No info on him exists as far as I can tell, but he sounds like a prickly character (sorry).

As industrialization moved in, the surrounding slums were only packed in tighter with density. I will not do an impression of a cockney chimney sweep child, but if I was going to, this is where I would do it.

After experiencing heavy bombing during WW2, there was a government effort to rebuild the area with social housing. From here on, the neighborhood is officially referred to as Cremorne Estate. ***brief side quest to talk about how weird it is that neighborhoods go through rebranding. As far as I can tell, a fancier-sounding name can force gentrification by tricking wealthier folks into moving there. I grew up in a neighborhood called Kensington in Brooklyn, but it was not a walk through rose gardens and sharp hedges. It was more like, drinking shitty coffee in a styrofoam cup, dodging wild packs of Hasidic children, and limboing under skinned goats being carried from unrefrigerated van to unrefrigerated butcher shop. In the best way.

After the area’s rebrand, 430 King’s Road has a brief stint as a cafe, a riverboat agency, and a scooter dealership. Then, in 1964, it finally finds its calling: peddling clothes to the young and restless.

First called 4.30 Boutique, the store sold mostly women’s clothes and men’s accessories. It was run by Bill Fuller and his girlfriend Carol Derry (daughter of a test pilot; the first Briton to break the sound barrier in 1948……… anyway). Carol made most of the clothes herself, and she sold them for cheap. Often compared to the legendary swinging 60’s boutique Biba (the store that inspired an early Rudie dress), 4.30 Boutique was one of the first clothing stores specifically catered to the youth. Summer shirts were under 2 pounds. Trousers under 8 pounds. They sold mostly to returning customers; dollybirds who dropped half their paycheck at the boutique each week. In 1967, 4.30 Boutique closed its shutters and reopened them with new management, a new name, and a new sect of young people at its doorstep.

Hung on You was essentially a hippie boutique, combining “ethnic clothing” with psychedelic colors and traditional English tailoring. It was operated by Michael Rainey, a fashion designer, and Jane Ormsby Gore, an editor at Vogue magazine and the inspiration for Lady Jane by the Rolling Stones. In Rainey’s obituary, the New York Times wrote, “His frilly shirts, jackets with velvet cuffs, kipper ties, lemon-hued sharkskin suits and reworked military uniforms turned customers into peacocks.” There were always celebrities around. It was a groovy place to see and be seen.

From the New York Times again: “Hung on You did not hang on for long. It made a costly move nearby, and Mr. Rainey lost money on a large shipment of shirts whose long sleeves were delivered three inches short, his son said. Mr. Rainey sold the shop and moved for a while with his family to Gozo, a Maltese island, to find enlightenment through fasting and meditation.” Go off, king.

In the summer of 1969, a new celebrity fashion powerhouse moved in. Tommy Roberts and Trevor Myles, owners of the popular “Kleptomania” boutique nearby, took over the space and launched a new brand with it. Mr. Freedom was experimental, blindingly colorful, and wildly successful.

It was an acid trip. A little western, a little fetish. Their frequent customers included David Bowie, Twiggy, and Mick Jagger. Their quick success meant that within a year they had to relocate to a larger retail space. Roberts left with it, but Myles had a new vision for the space and stayed behind.

Paradise Garage was the first shop in Britain to import and sell used denim in a meaningful way. It kept a lot of the interior color explosion from Mr. Freedom, but this time the walls were lined with denim - often faded and patchworked. It also stocked items like Hawaiian shirts, baseball jackets, and dungarees. The year was 1970 and the world was rapidly changing.

Owner Trevor Myles told Jackie magazine, “There’s so much pollution in the world and we thought you should use the gear you already have – not buy something just because it’s fashionable. By throwing the old lot away you only add to the pollution problem. So that’s why we’re using it all up.”

But Paradise Garage’s life was short. Myles had issues in his marriage and grew distant from the shop. He went on a trip overseas, and while he was gone, a friendship between interim manager Bradley Mendelson and the ever-ambitious, art school dropout Malcolm McLaren grew. By the time that article in Jackie hit the stands, McLaren already had the keys to the storefront and the era of Paradise Garage was over.

Malcolm McLaren told Architect’s Journal about the space in 2008, “It is magical. When I arrived there I felt I had found my home, somewhere I could practice my alchemy. There isn’t another place in the world like it.”

McLaren was Vivienne Westwood’s boyfriend at the time. She was working as a school teacher and had a knack for designing clothes in her off time. The two of them furnished the store like a debaucherous 1950s living room littered with porno mags. Alongside clothing like Teddy Boy creepers and velvet zoot suits, they sold records and kitschy 1950s American memorabilia.

McLaren to Architect’s Journal again: “Within a year, I was bored with it all. Bored with the same surrogate suburban Teddy Boys that drifted in from God knows where. Bored with the hippies and refugees of Chelsea’s swinging 60s looking for charity and kindness. Bored with the demands of the BBC wardrobe department and their dreadful revivalist TV shows. I felt like Steptoe and Son. I was lost in dead tissue. I wanted something new.”

So, as would become their way, they changed absolutely everything about their store.

Let it Rock became Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die. It was a slogan often worn by American bikers on their jackets as an homage to James Dean. Their new logo was a skull and crossbones, and they ditched the kitschy memorabilia.

During this era, Vivienne Westwood experimented with customizing sleeveless black t-shirts with raunchy slogans spelled out in safety pins, glitter, or bleached chicken bones. She sold shirts with PERV, ROCK, and SCUM across the chest, alongside black drainpipe jeans and vests with zips open to expose the nipple.

Here is where my cognitive dissonance begins. According to many sources, those ripped-up t-shirts were Insanely Expensive. Allow me to work out my thoughts here.

I always think that artists should be compensated for their work. Of course. OF COURSE.

I just wonder why they were so expensive. It makes me feel weird, and that’s probably because I over-romanticize the early days of punk. It’s supposed to be a bunch of working-class kids, fed up with the system, ripping and glittering their t-shirts on the floor of their shitty apartments. Maybe it feels like stolen valor? And what’s the point of charging an inordinate amount for your products when your message is about the failures of capitalism and the society born from it?? I mean, they sold patches with Karl Marx’s face embroidered on them!

Anyway, it was a massive success. And in 1974, they reinvented the whole place again.

Robert Elms writes in his book The Way We Wore: A Life in Threads, “The latest incarnation of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s retail adventure was an altogether more imposing emporium; it was just about the weirdest, scariest place I’d ever seen.

The windows were all blacked out, covered with grills because they were constantly getting smashed, and a huge pink, rubberized sign simply saying SEX hung above the place…

Finally I decided to brazen it out, but the minute I entered the place, all black leather drapes and rubber curtains, wild slogans scrawled across the walls, dark mysterious areas and blinding neon, with these dirty, taboo clothes everywhere, I shrank, my head sinking into my shoulders as I tried to blend in with the blood-red carpet.”

From 1974 to 1976, the shop was just called SEX.

Glen Matlock, bassist for the Sex Pistols and sales associate at the shop wrote for the Guardian, “They were fed up with the rightwing mentality of the teddy boys and I helped with the sign outside. I’d learned how to silk-screen, so they asked me to do two images: a big red baseball player with a massive dick and another of two cowboys with their willies touching. I said I’d give it a go. It took too long and Vivienne got all dogmatic, saying I was trying to censor her work when I wasn’t at all. If you got on her wrong side, she’d let you know.”

McLaren, the Simon Cowell of his time, put together England’s next biggest boy band in 1975 and operated as their manager. Even though they lasted less than 3 years as a group, the Sex Pistols are one of the biggest reasons punk rock stepped out of the darkness of basement shows and into the forefront of pop culture. Westwood outfitted the band, and her style became the arbiter of the punk aesthetic.

And then, at the top of their game, they changed the store entirely. Again.

Architect Ben Connor was given his first commission after graduating from art school: transform the shop into a post-bomb Dresden.

“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.” The store was renamed Seditionaries, and the elaborately strappy fetish gear of SEX became elaborately strappy military gear.

Westwood made some of her most iconic commercial pieces during this era. One of my favorites is a long sleeve shirt bearing a portrait of Marilyn Monroe, with the word PISS written across her face several times. And, of course, the shirt had a pair of photorealistic dick and balls on the elbows. Because of course!

As the 1970s came to a close, Vivienne set her sights on becoming a true capital-F Fashion Designer.

“We just spent 10 years re-assimating the ’30s through the ’70s,” said Westwood at the time. “The ’80s will be a technological age for which we need to equip ourselves with a feeling of human warmth from past ages—of culture taken from the time of pirates and Louis XIV.”

She put on her first runway show with the Autumn/Winter 1981 collection: Pirate. It was a new way of critiquing the establishment. Instead of doing the most shocking thing, like writing PISS on Marilyn Monroe’s face, they took a more nuanced, historical approach to art and storytelling. The Pirate collection was meant to be commentary on Britain’s history of plundering the Third World.

With a new era came a new retail concept, of course. This time it was called World’s End, in reference to the store being so far away from Central London.

“We decided the store was going to challenge time and space, which is an amazing concept for a tiny shop,” says Connor, who also designed Worlds End. The floor was slanted to feel like the galleon of a ship. The façade was made to look like a ye olde curiosity shoppe of sorts, with a 13-hour clock that ticked backward.

This would be the final iteration of the shop, and it’s what you’ll see today if you visit.

Westwood and McLaren split in 1983. Her designs only became more tailored, more inspired by history, and truly - she did her best work in the decade following their break up. He focused on music and filmmaking and…. whatever. He sucks and I don’t want to talk about him anymore. He physically and emotionally abused his partners. He plagiarized music. He tried to run for mayor of London and he lost.

After sitting in darkness for 2 years, World’s End quietly reopened in 1986. Vivienne’s mum worked the register and customers came flooding back. To this day it operates as a sort of beta testing for Vivienne Westwood stores around the world, trying out new products and merchandising techniques to see what should be stocked in other locations. It’s also the home to archival pieces and unique new pieces made from deadstock fabric left over from old seasons.

It’s hard to wrap my mind around the fact that one tiny shop (truly tiny - it’s about 10ft by 25 ft) can live so many lives and witness so many movements, somehow always at the forefront of the zeitgeist. It has been the vessel for business acumen and artistic brilliance, all the while sporting anti-establishment slogans spray-painted across its façade.

Vivienne Westwood passed away in 2022 at the age of 81. She left behind a legacy of incredible design. She also did a lot of weird shit in the name of being contrarian, like publicly disavowing the Labour Party in favor of the Conservative Party, and shortly thereafter disavowing the Conservative Party for the Green Party (who publicly rejected her, citing her tax evasion via offshore accounts). She committed the mortal sin of eating pizza with a fork and knife in public. She held up signs and marched in climate protests, even 2 months before her death. She is true chaos. And yet, that chaos begot a lot of really beautiful things.

I think that many things can be true at one time. Fashion is exciting. The world doesn’t need new clothes. Vivienne Westwood made wacky and badass pieces that gave the finger (sometimes literally) to the capitalist establishment. Vivienne Westwood made a lot (a lot a lot) of money selling them. Punk rock is corny and hard to listen to. Punk rock is exhilarating. I cannot afford to shop at Vivienne Westwood’s store. But by god, next time I’m in London, I’ll be there.

xx Ruby