Anarchy and $$$ in the Vintage Punk Clothing Market


“He’s enraged,” said Ms. Kim. “He felt very strongly about protecting and defending his business. It was very valuable to him.” After the partnership between Mr McLaren and Ms Westwood was dissolved in 1984, the two had a long and high-profile feud that was never resolved, and the tension created a vacuum for the crooks.

Mr Howard and Mr Parker received a suspended sentence in the Banksy case, but the case regarding the fake clothing was dropped when Mr McLaren died in 2010 as he was the key witness to the prosecution in the area.

However, as it turns out, Ms. Westwood’s family may have unwittingly created or fueled the industry around fake punk. “I created limited edition prints of some early designs to raise capital to start Agent Provocateur,” said Joe Corré, son of Mr. McLaren and Mrs. Westwood, who opened his lingerie business in 1994.

“We recreated the chicken bone letter T-Shirts and the studded ‘Venus’ T-Shirts,” said Mr. Corré. “They were labeled as limited edition copies, made 100 prints and sold to the Japanese market.” Before these elaborate and expensive copies came into existence, copies of the work were limited to obvious silkscreen prints on wholesale T-shirts, produced quickly and sold quite cheaply.

Mr Corré said that the reproductions were authorized by Vivienne Westwood. Mr. McLaren was angry. In an email dated 14 October 2008 to a group including journalist Steven Daly, who was investigating a potential story about fake punk apparel for Vanity Fair, Mr. McLaren wrote: “Who gave them this permission? I told Joe to stop immediately and wrote to him. I was angry.”

Mr. Corré has recently become director of the Vivienne Foundation and “sympathetically abused the copyright of his work to raise money for various reasons”. He said he would investigate how to “stop” the fakes. Ms. Kim continues to fight for Mr. McLaren’s legacy and believes she has been repeatedly erased from her own past.



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