Malcolm Mclaren
Malcolm Robert Andrew McLaren (22 January 1946 – 8 April 2010 ) was a British musician, impresario, visual artist, performer, clothes designer and boutique owner, notable for combining these activities in an inventive and provocative way. Raised unconventionally by his grandmother after his father Peter McLaren left the family home, McLaren attended a number of British art colleges and adopted the stance of the social rebel in the style of French revolutionaries, the Situationists. With a keen eye for trends, McLaren realised in the 1970s that a new youth style was needed, and largely initiated the punk movement, to which he supplied fashions from the Chelsea boutique 'SEX', operated with his girlfriend Vivienne Westwood. After a spell advising the New York Dolls in the US, McLaren managed the Sex Pistols, to whom he recruited the nihilistic frontman Johnny Rotten. The issue of a controversial record, "God Save the Queen", satirising the Queen's Jubilee was typical of McLaren's shock tactics, and he gained publicity by being arrested after a promotional boat trip outside the Houses of Parliament. McLaren also performed as a solo artist, initially popularising hip hop and world music and later diversifying into funk and disco, the dance fashion for "vogueing" and merging opera with contemporary electronic musical forms. When accused of turning popular culture into a cheap marketing gimmick, he joked that he hoped it was true. In his later years, he lived in Paris and New York City, and died of peritoneal mesothelioma in a Swiss hospital.