Much of the copy and pasting culture that defined punk is rooted in the Dada collages of Hannah Hoch, says Blauvelt. “Sterling was sourcing works from lifestyle magazines and making gender commentary in the posters,” said Blauvelt. “On one hand, it’s a revival of this cut-and-paste strategy, in another way, it’s a new time period.” The punk aesthetic also carries elements of futurism – just look at the constructivist posters of Kraftwerk – as well as German expressionism, Soviet-era posters, pop art and the Bauhaus design movement. McLaren's eye – as much as his ear – for pop talent was crucial. He once told a Ramones fan, Vic Godard, and his pals, "you look like a group", so they formed one called Subway Sect. His gift for turning notoriety into a promotional tool (inherited from the Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham and surely passed on to Factory Records' Tony Wilson and Creation's Alan McGee) loomed equally large in his next project. Three months ago, Westwood was noticeably absent from her Paris fashion week show. The collection has for some years been designed by Kronthaler, but she remained figurehead and muse, and each show would end with her husband presenting Westwood with a bouquet and taking her hand for a joint bow. How to encompass the vastness of her legacy? Her punk phase is eternally referenced, morphing onwards through generations, and turning up through time in the safety-pinned collections of Gianni Versace and many more. In the days following her death, hundreds of people have posted memories of how her clothes led to self-discovery. Fashion academics have told me that students today quote her as their inspiration, both as a designer and as an activist. Her allegiance to youth, and to what matters, passed on her courage to so many designers to be themselves, from John Galliano to Matty Bovan. That radical power of Vivienne’s will continue, undiminished, long into the future.

But those who knew him described a polite, dapper English gentleman who loved art, music and clothes with a passion – he was fond of tweed suits and Doctor Who-style scarves – and had an almost childlike enthusiasm for his projects and pranks. His death has melted one of music's most bitter feuds. "For me, Malc was always entertaining," Lydon said. "Above all else, he was an entertainer." Unless otherwise noted, all objects in this exhibition are courtesy of Andrew Krivine. The Museum of Arts and Design is extremely grateful for his support of this exhibition. Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976-1986is organized by Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and curated by Andrew Blauvelt, Director, with the assistance of Steffi Duarte. The presentation at the Museum of Arts and Design was managed by Curatorial Assistant Alida Jekabson. Graphic design is often a thankless job behind the brand name of the client, punk bands included. These names are rarely remembered beyond industry buffs, so putting the names of designers on the walls of a museum is not entirely common. However, the designers did much more than just sell an album. If you were a small-town punk, how did you connect with the community?” asks Blauvelt. “I can’t imagine today’s DIY culture emerging without punk. It felt liberating around the need to communicate the resistance.”On view until 18 August, these rare items hail from the collection of Andrew Krivine, a leading punk memorabilia collector. The Sex Pistols singer Johnny Rotten came to see the exhibition and told Rolling Stone that he has “no idea what they view as ‘punk art,’ and so why not?” She became a primary school teacher and in 1962 married Derek Westwood, a toolmaker with ambitions, which he achieved, to be an airline pilot. Their son, Ben, was born in 1963, but the couple separated soon after, divorcing in 1966. She returned to her parents, and began to make jewellery for a stall in Portobello Road. McLaren's Midas touch came and went throughout his career, but ideas never left him. He blended funk and orchestra on the 1989 album Waltz Darling and recorded the 1994 concept album Paris, which featured Catherine Deneuve. He wrote a song for Quentin Tarantino's film Kill Bill Vol 2 (2004), and secured a Hollywood deal as an ideas man for Steven Spielberg. He even became an outspoken critic of the burger industry by co-producing the 2006 film Fast Food Nation. He also channelled his bittersweet view of London into programmes for Radio 2 and Channel 4, but cancelled a plan to run for mayor of London in 2000. One of the inaccuracies around punk is that it’s a reaction to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, but punk starts before those regimes take power in the mid-1970s,” said the curator, Andrew Blauvelt. “Punk did become a reaction to neoconservative rule. It felt necessary at the time to provide a social resistance against some of those aspects against neoconservative policy, but had longer-lasting effects, as well.”

When punk first hit the market, it terrified the record industry, “but it generated a market,” said Blauvet. “There became an opening for graphic designers to design without any rules. Typographic designers had more freedom. Album covers could be totally conceptual. You didn’t use a corporate approach, or if you did, it was ironic.” People ask: where does this movement come from?” said Blauvelt. “It was all against the systemic control of the music system. This idea of provocation in the streets, the field of punk was a social protest, elements of that still exist.” In October 1986, when asked about the plans for her S/S87 collection, Vivienne Westwood told The Face, “I’m using my shop as a crucible. The stuff that’s in there is what will sell elsewhere… It’s kind of market research…” Westwood and her then partner Malcolm McLaren had opened their first Chelsea-based boutique in 1971, and it operated not only as a testing ground for global sales, but as a location of diverse and famed retail incarnations, selling the uniforms of socio-economic rebellion. Since its rebellious inception in the 1970s, punk has always exhibited very visual forms of expression," said Andrew Blauvelt, Director of Cranbrook Art Museum and Curator-at-Large for Design at MAD.I really have no idea what they view as ‘punk art,’ and so why not? Let’s have a go at it.”—John Rotten Lydon in Rolling Stone By this time Westwood was broke, but with practical help and a modest loan from family and friends, reopened the shuttered Worlds End, lit by candles after the electricity was cut off, and easily sold her limited supplies. The store was kind of disposable in a way. Vivienne and Malcolm would pull out one thing and put in another,” explains the architect David Connor, who took over the design of Seditionaries from Ben Kelly in 1974, his first commission after graduating from the RCA at age 26. With an intimidating opaque façade and an interior depicting the air-raided scenes of Dresden, Seditionaries was the ultimate rejection of West End consumerism, a topic that McLaren had explored in his unfinished 1970 film Oxford Street, and which was listed as a hate on Westwood’s ‘hates’ and ‘non-hates’ T-shirt. “You had to be really brave to go through the door,” Connor explains. “We put white glass in the front windows, so that you couldn’t see inside… Some people actually thought it was a betting shop.”

Westwood’s heart had moved on from fashion in the last decade of her life, which she devoted to political causes. But fashion never fell out of love with Vivienne Westwood. Among those sharing a rented flat with her brother, Gordon, was a charismatic art student, Malcolm McLaren. Westwood and her son moved in, too, and she became McLaren’s first girlfriend, soon pregnant with their son, Joe, who was born in 1967 – but only, Westwood claimed, after she had decided against an abortion and spent the money on a cashmere sweater instead. No fashion designer ever had a Paris show like the one staged by Vivienne Westwood in 1991. Although she was by then 50 and had been making clothes for sale for 20 years – and the British Fashion Council had named her designer of the year – she stitched much of that collection on her own sewing machine in her shabby south London flat, hand-finishing it in the van that transported her, and the models, to France, where the couturier Azzedine Alaïa had invited her to guest-show. Despite those limitations, the collection was a major success.The punk-infused exhibition moves from the sobriety of a stripped down minimalism to the expansive color palettes and expressive forms of new wave as it examines punk through the lens of graphic design created by both professional and amateur designers.

The exhibit also features Saville’s legendary Joy Division covers, alongside works featuring David Bowie, the Clash and Iggy Pop. Perhaps her self-conviction and resilience were there from birth. Vivienne Swire was born in 1941, in Tintwistle, Derbyshire. A northern war baby who grew up during rationing, she taught herself to sew clothes from the smallest amount of fabric. She moved to London with her parents, and briefly went to Harrow Art School, but diverted, needing to earn, to become a primary school teacher. At 21, she married Derek Westwood, and had a son, Ben, in 1963. Dissatisfied with domesticity, she left to live with her brother, who fatefully introduced her to McLaren. She gave birth to their son, Joe Corré, in 1967. When the album rose to number one on the music charts, it was proof “there was genuine opposition to what was going on,” Reid previously told the Guardian. Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976-1986” on view at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) from April 9 through August 18. Explore the punked up visual fest here. In 1979, Westwood and McLaren’s store was reinvented as Worlds End, a name taken from the area of Chelsea it is located in, viewed in the 18th century as being on the very outskirts of the city. “Even at the time, people didn’t really walk much further than the Old Town Hall, which was about halfway down from Sloane Square,” Costiff explains.Amid the tortured souls of punk, Westwood carved out her own path, one that was full of humour, beauty and joy. Her clothes – like her worldview – were anti-establishment, but never nihilistic. They were deliberately off-kilter – partly by dint of being ahead of their time – but they were always elegant. He is survived by Young Kim and his son by Westwood, Joe Corré, who set up the lingerie chain Agent Provocateur, which continues to parade McLaren's own risque and somehow thoroughly English identity in our high streets. Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die charts punk's explosive impact on design and examines its complex relationship with art, history, and culture," commented Chris Scoates, MAD's Nanette L. Laitman Director.