Malcolm McLaren
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Malcolm McLaren (Malcolm Robert Andrew McLaren - ✦22 January 1946 – †8 April 2010) was an English impresario, visual artist, performer, musician, clothes designer, and boutique owner, notable for combining these activities in an inventive and provocative way. He is best known as a promoter and manager of bands the 'New York Dolls' and the 'Sex Pistols'.
Brought up unconventionally by his grandmother after his father, Peter, left the family home, McLaren attended a number of British art colleges and adopted the stance of the social rebel in the style of French revolutionaries the Situationists. McLaren realized that a new protest style was needed for the 1970s, and largely initiated the punk movement, for which he supplied fashions from the Chelsea boutique SEX, which he operated with his girlfriend Vivienne Westwood. After a period advising the New York Dolls in the U.S., McLaren managed the Sex Pistols, for which he recruited the nihilistic frontman Johnny Rotten. The issue of a controversial record, "God Save the Queen", satirizing the Queen's Jubilee in 1977, was typical of McLaren's shock tactics, and he gained publicity by being arrested after a promotional boat trip outside the Houses of Parliament.
McLaren performed with acclaim as a solo artist, initially focusing on hip hop and world music and later diversifying into funk and disco, the dance fashion for "voguing" and merging opera with contemporary electronic musical forms. When accused of turning popular culture into a cheap marketing gimmick, he joked that he hoped it was true. His first album, "Duck Rock" was certified silver in the U.K. and spawned 2 top-10 singles: "Buffalo Gals" and "Double Dutch".
In his later years, he lived in Paris and New York City and died of peritoneal mesothelioma in a Swiss hospital.
As fetish clothing designer
Fashion designer Malcolm McLaren created many items of BDSM-inspired clothing for the 1970s punk rock scene, in particular bondage trousers that connected the wearer's pants legs with straps.
Fetish or "bondage" chic can be traced back as far as the 1930s with the creation of the hobble skirt, and arguably other earlier fashions such as the vogue for tight corseting can be viewed as fetishistic precursors of fetish fashion.
Personal life
Following the end of his personal relationship with Vivienne Westwood in 1980 with whom he has son Joseph Corré, McLaren was romantically involved with Andrea Linz, who was studying fashion at Saint Martin's School of Art. Linz had been a member of the German pop-disco act Chilly and went on to become a fashion designer and model. Their relationship ended when McLaren moved to Los Angeles in 1985.
In Los Angeles, McLaren became the partner of the model/actress Lauren Hutton and they lived together in Hollywood for a number of years. "Malcolm was extraordinary," said Hutton a few months after he died. "Irreplaceable. I'll miss him forever. He was a dragon's egg, a rare bird, and one of the great unsung heroes of England."
Hutton ended the relationship to deal with personal issues in the late 1980s and McLaren was then engaged to the fashion agent Eugena Melián, with whom he lived in Los Angeles and Paris. They worked on a series of projects together; it was at Melián's urging that McLaren recorded his 1994 album Paris.
Subsequently, McLaren was the partner of the architect Charlotte Skene-Catling - to whom he was also engaged - until the late 90s when his relationship with Young Kim began.
Later life and death
McLaren met Young Kim at a party in Paris; she was his girlfriend for the last 12 years of his life. She moved in with him in 2002, and they lived together in Paris and New York.
He was diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma in October 2009, and died of the disease on 8 April 2010 in a hospital in Switzerland. McLaren's last words were said by his son Joseph Corré to have been "Free Leonard Peltier".[Note 1]
Tributes poured in from friends, associates, and fans – including John Lydon {Johnny Rotten), who had been at odds with McLaren since the demise of the Sex Pistols. "For me, Malc was always entertaining, and I hope you remember that. Above all else, he was an entertainer and I will miss him, and so should you," he said in a statement as Johnny Rotten.
In a coffin sprayed with the slogan "Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die", McLaren's funeral was attended by Westwood, Sex Pistols bandmates Paul Cook and Glen Matlock, and celebrities such as Bob Geldof, Tracey Emin, and Adam Ant. The funeral was held at One Marylebone, a deconsecrated church in central London.
Geldof told Lydon, "that, at that funeral, there was a huge row between Vivienne [Westwood] and Bernie. I mean, the man's dead – what are you people doing? And hearing this, and the way Bob told it – so Irish and brilliant, so full of humor – I felt really, really sorry for Malcolm at that point. That these sods couldn't even let him die in peace. They were out for their own little angles."
McLaren's body was buried in Highgate Cemetery, North London, to the strains of the Sid Vicious version of "My Way".
In 2012, probate was granted to Young Kim by McLaren's will, which excluded his son Joe Corré from the inheritance.
In April 2013, a headstone was placed on McLaren's grave featuring the slogan "Better a spectacular failure, than a benign success", a paraphrasing of McLaren's claim that the best advice he received came from an art-school teacher, "It is better to be a flamboyant failure than any kind of benign success".
Notes
- ↑ An American-Indian activist convicted of two life-terms for the death of two FBI agents
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