“He was outraged,” Ms. Kim stated. “He felt very strongly about protecting and defending his work. It was precious to him.” After the partnership between Mr. McLaren and Ms. Westwood was dissolved in 1984, the two had an extended and high-profile feud that was by no means resolved, and the rigidity created a vacuum for forgers.
Mr. Howard and Mr. Parker acquired a suspended sentence in the Banksy case, however the case regarding the pretend clothes was dropped when Mr. McLaren died, in 2010, as he was the key witness for the prosecution in this space.
As it seems, nonetheless, Ms. Westwood’s household could have inadvertently created or fueled the business round pretend punk. “I created limited-edition runs of some early designs to raise capital to launch Agent Provocateur,” stated Joe Corré, the son of Mr. McLaren and Ms. Westwood, who opened his lingerie enterprise in 1994.
“We recreated T-shirts with chicken bone lettering and the studded ‘Venus’ T-shirts,” Mr. Corré stated. “They were labeled limited-edition replicas, made in editions of 100, and sold to the Japanese market.” Before these detailed and costly replicas appeared, copies of the work had been restricted to apparent screen-prints on wholesale T-shirts, produced shortly and bought pretty cheaply.
Mr. Corré stated Vivienne Westwood licensed the reproductions. Mr. McLaren was indignant. In an e-mail dated Oct. 14, 2008, directed to a gaggle together with the journalist Steven Daly, who was researching a possible story on pretend punk garments for Vanity Fair, Mr. McLaren wrote: “Who had given them this permission? I told Joe to stop immediately and wrote to him. I was furious.”
Mr. Corré lately turned a director of the Vivienne Foundation, “to sympathetically exploit copyright of her work to raise money for various causes.” He stated he will likely be exploring find out how to “bring an end” to the fakes. Ms. Kim continues to battle for Mr. McLaren’s legacy and believes he’s being airbrushed repeatedly out of his personal historical past.
