Vivienne Westwood sowed never-ending revolution all through the fashion world

Number 430 King’s Road, where London’s Chelsea swerves towards Fulham, was a shop you entered in the 1970s only if you dared. The couple who ran it, Vivienne Westwood and her on-off partner Malcolm McLaren, liked it that way. Shocks to the system were their stock in trade. Any system, more or less.

First the shop had catered to Teddy Boys, then to Rockers. In 1974 it became SEX, with frightening staff who might greet you with a middle finger or a parade of naked rumps. By 1977 it was Seditionaries, a punk shop. More than that, it was the centre of punk’s empire. McLaren had recruited punk’s premier band, the Sex Pistols, who paraded their nastiness on stage by swearing, spitting, reviling the status quo and breaking things. Vivienne, who had appeared in SEX in a see-through rubber negligee, was in charge of their look, and the shop stocked it: ripped shirts and bondage trousers, held together with chains and safety pins. She created the logo too, a brash red A for Anarchy in a crude red circle. It all shouted the glamour of nihilistic destruction.