Writer Cathi Unsworth documents the life and legacy of punk icon Jordan in their new book Defying Gravity. In this excerpt we get to know the fetishised community of SEX, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s boundary breaking 70s boutique.

The Secret Life of the Suburbs

What is so interesting, looking back, is how the worlds of fetish and popular culture came together so seamlessly in SEX, in the way that they wouldn’t really do again until the early 1980s at Skin Two.

What amazed me was that the very specialist types were quite happy to be in that shop, when it had all the other things in it. They certainly weren’t angry, like we were taking their space or their limelight. They had a very different mentality to the music-orientated customers.

MARCO PIRRONI: It was unbelievably suburban, the fetish world. There was no crossover into any sort of rebellion. They must have kept it secret from the neighbours because the neighbours wouldn’t have got it. I didn’t get it, either. But another thing about the shop, a reason that people remember it, was that it had a lot of elements to it, it had all these smells. Smells of the rubber curtains, which you can’t really say about any other shop. What did any other shop smell like? I can’t really say what Acme Attractions smelled like, or Johnson’s.

You can see the two sides to this very clearly in John Sampson’s 1977 documentary Dressing for Pleasure, half of which was filmed at SEX on the hottest day of the summer in 1976. Part of the alchemy of the shop was the way Michael and I ran things. We made it easy for people to just hang out, and it became a social hub. Obviously the main day was Saturday, when Vivienne would come in and Glen Matlock would be there with the two of us. It was a real party atmosphere. As Michael remembers, the fetish people would always talk to me first, because I could relate to them in away he couldn’t. I was wearing the same clothing as them for a start, but he also thinks they wanted to capture something of the way I presented myself.

Through stocking their preferred clothing, we got to meet the Wigan Society and the Rubber Duck Club, which was wonderful. The Rubber Duck Club, as Marco suggests, had certain people in it that you could just picture leaning over their garden fence, chatting to their next-door neighbour, like Les Dawson’s Cissie and Ada but in rubber, or Peter Cook’s E. L. Wisty wearing latex.

The Wigans were these lovely macs Malcolm got in, Wigan itself being a particular canvas with bonded latex on top of it. The Wigan Society are the people who go for long walks on muddy moors and marshland to splosh about in these macs; they like a bit of wet. I had a beautiful bright royal blue Wigan, lined with rubber, with lovely epaulettes and lapels and a nice thick belt. The only drawback was, because the rubber was a bit fine on top of the canvas, it did crack after a few years, where the sleeve bent. But it did also once help to save my life, as we shall see.

The tactile nature of rubber was always very important to me; I thought it made great clothes. But I wouldn’t think that everybody would look great or feel great in it. The rubberwear wasn’t just meant to shock. It was ready to wear. Only, you wouldn’t want to wear it unless you were really committed to it and felt happy in it. It was difficult to put on, it didn’t last, the number of rubber stockings I got through… The really important thing is that I wanted to appreciate the beauty of rubber and leather, not keep it behind closed doors. I wanted to treat it as normal, not a perversion – just an appreciation of the fabric itself. They were clothes to wear to the office, so I would get up in Seaford, put my rubber on and go. And, as with any office situation, there could be some unforeseen comedy moments…

Defying Gravity: Jordan’s Story is available here.

Cathi and Jordan are in conversation at our upcoming Idler Dinner on the 30th of October.

More information and tickets can be found here.