LUXURY NOW / (DE)SIGN OF THE TIMES / MALCOLM MCLAREN: AGENT PROVOCATEUR

A leading light with a terribly wide perspective on creation, Malcolm McLaren showed fashion and music, and popular culture at large, that being bad could be so good. With culture and intelligence, he expressed the energy of youth.

Master of appropriation, pop entrepreneur, unpredictable champion of youth that elicited the vital energy in street and high culture, Malcolm McLaren always expressed a provocative vision of culture, that captivated the feeling in the air and made it more of what it essentially was. “I’m more of a magician than a magician,” he had once said. While the magician is gone, we view here a small part of the magic he left behind.

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McLaren worked fluidly between the genres of music and fashion, across the roles of performer and producer, designer and entrepreneur, long before this became the way of contemporary entertainment. Above all, he was an artist with a creatively wild spirit who amalgamated the culture of his time into new forms of fringe and popular culture.

Having studied art at several colleges in London throughout the 1960s, he ended his career with an entry into the art world after making significant impact on fashion and music along the way. He produced a series of “musical paintings” – entitled Shallow (1-21) – and another film that manipulated archived footage and musical scores – entitled Paris, Capital of the 21st Century – that went to Art Basel in 2008 and later that year to Art Basel Miami Beach. It was rumored that Jeffrey Deitch was interested in his work for a future show at MoCA in Los Angeles; he was scheduled as a member of the jury at The Festival of Hyères before his April 8th, 2010 passing.

Between the beginning and the end of his career, he defined the London punk movement alongside designer Vivienne Westwood (their son together is the founder of London lingerie leader Agent Provocateur – clearly something runs in the family) with their joint 1970s Kings Road London boutique that passed under many names before finally settling on SEX that sold fetish objects, teddy boy and punk style fashion.

McLaren went on to manage the New York Dolls and made the leading punk band, the Sex Pistols. By the 1980s, he launched a solo music career that was utterly diverse and celebrated, as always, the Zeitgeist. It was the perfect expression of the paradox of McLaren – a punk dandy, a gritty aesthete. His music picked up on the burgeoning music coming from New York’s South Bronx, hip-hop and turntablism, then crossing the Atlantic, he later produced a 1994 concept album about Paris in which he performed with the likes of the glamorous Catherine Deneuve, Françoise Hardy and Amine.


The year 2010 witnessed the passing of Malcolm McLaren who tested and teased cultural boundaries with his rapid energy, rebellious vision, and broadly eclectic projects.

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