I was 13 years old when I discovered Vivienne Westwood. The music came first. From the moment I heard the album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, I was hooked. Within a few months, I was spending my pocket money on a knock-off Westwood design – tartan bondage trousers. My punk look was completed with ripped t-shirts held together with safety pins, a denim jacket customised with bullet holes in the back, and Doc Martens boots.

It’s only recently that I’ve come to understand that what appealed to me most about the punk aesthetic, pioneered by Vivienne Westwood in the mid-to-late 1970s, was its queerness. From the start of her career in design, Westwood’s clothes challenged and undermined gender norms, and it’s probably for that reason why she is so revered by the LGBTQI+ community.

Westwood began selling clothes at a shop at 430 Kings Road, Chelsea with her then boyfriend, Malcolm McLaren in 1971. The third and most radical incarnation of that shop SEX, sold rubber and leather fetish gear alongside designs by McLaren and Westwood, including the original bondage trousers that I coveted as a teen.

This is where the queer, S&M aesthetic of punk came from.

Queer aesthetic

Queerness as a theoretical and cultural idea was brought into prominence in the 1980s by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. Simply put, queer theory is study of everything that sit outside of the heteronormative.

Heteronormativity places heterosexual desire as the normative (how things ought to be) system of society. This includes the belief in binary gender, and presupposes defined male/female, masculine/feminine behaviour. Anything else, including sexual behaviours perceived as deviant such as sadomasochism, is aberrant (queer).

It was at the shop SEX in 1975 that McLaren and Westwood first sold the iconic gay cowboys T-shirt. A subject chosen more for its shock value than for reason of allyship. It features a design appropriated from American artist Jim French with two men in cowboy clothes without pants, penises almost touching, while one arranges the handkerchief around the neck of his friend.

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