5.11.1. Westwood+McLaren=SEX.
Upon assuming the post of Leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, Margaret Thatcher started to break away from the “post-war consensus” that for decades had maintained a welfare state, a nationalized industry and a regulated economy throughout the United Kingdom, and imposed a new political and economic agenda known as Thatcherism. Nigel Lawson, her Financial Secretary to the Treasury, defined it along these lines: “Free markets, financial discipline, firm control over public expenditure, tax cuts, nationalism, ‘Victorian values’… privatisation and a dash of populism.”1 As could be expected, these measures, which aimed to the modernization of the British economy, ended up hurting a large portion of the middle and lower middle class population that felt deeply alienated by their government.
A few years earlier, Malcom McLaren, an art school dropout, and Vivienne Westwood, a schoolteacher, set up a store in the Chelsea district of London, where they sold clothes inspired by fifties rebel fashion and which, as the economic environment of the country soured, became more aggressive and disdainful of traditional standards. By 1974, the store’s collections included latex and spandex trousers, t-shirts burned, ripped, and repaired with safety pins and garments openly inspired by sadomasochistic gear. SEX, the name of the store at the time, became the meeting place of the new punk subculture.
In fact, it is possible to see in the torn and mended garments of Westwood and McLaren the sad state of the social body of the United Kingdom (1.9). After decades of stability under a welfare state, a series of neoliberal economic measures were imposed upon it that not only teared it up like an old garment but also aimed to patch it up with free market economy and privatization. Regarding the sadomasochistic component of Westwood’s clothes, these reveal the biopolitical accent of punk aesthetics: in it the public and the private join together, so that the naked life (zoē) and political existence (bios) exchange roles. In the words of Agamben:
The growing importance of sadomasochism in modernity has its root in this exchange. Sadomasochism is precisely the technique of sexuality by which the bare life of a sexual partner is brought to light.2
Punk is perhaps the most sincere and concise aesthetic about the power relations of our time.
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