About Wemblex
Originally started in the late 50s and beloved of beatniks, teddy boys and mods alike, worn by the Kinks, the Stones, and Desmond Dekker and ubiquitous at the Ad Lib in Leicester Square. Its famous/infamous round collar with small pinhole was a handsome welcome for the personal stylist.
Going into the seventies there was a lull as the collars along with the flares got bigger and bigger. When original mods Malcolm, Roger and Stephane got wind of dead stock Wemblex in a warehouse in Portsmouth, Roger and Steph were down there in record time.
Unfortunately the shirts they got were very quickly co-opted by car washes and window cleaners as they were small sizes and a funny collared version. Later on in 1975 they got wind again that there were more Wemblex available; they got there to find a hip looking rock and roll expert who never stopped talking, with ginger hair and funny clothes, had taken them all to the pair's chagrin.
Roger Burton, wheeler dealer, archivist and super mod, and Stephane Raynor of Acme Attractions, one of London's hipper stores (Jeanette Lee and Don Letts worked there — nuff said), second only to Malcolm and his partner Vivienne Westwood's Let It Rock / Sex boutique down the World's End ends. Yes that was deliberate.
When Malcolm found the prototype of the first anarchy shirt painted by Vivienne down the back of a radiator, she thought he was going to be mad at her, but to her surprise he said it was brilliant — this is it! The bloody piece, you're a genius. Bugger Einstein. He's a moron in comparison. Now let's go sell some shirts. Lucky they had boxes of mint Wemblex on standby to paint, cos otherwise John Collier and Double 2 would just never have worked.
Sources for the story above: Mr. McLaren and Mr. Roger Burton — both heroes, both deceased.
“I'm a stylist.” — Jerry Lee Lewis
“I love me a Wemblex.” — Guy Stevens
“Great shirts.” — Chris Spedding
“The real McCoy.” — Douglas Hartt
“Where's my money, Malcolm.” — John Lydon
“McLaren always looked great.” — Bobby Gillespie
Barnzley
Teenage Barnzley ran away from his eponymously misspelled hometown of Barnsley in the late seventies and made a beeline for World's End, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's shop on the King's Road — then the centre of the world for baby punks.
He didn't hang about. In Leeds he loaded gear at the F Club for The Cramps and company, then spent a few months in the Bow Wow Wow van, listening to the cut-and-paste of early hip hop on tapes Malcolm had brought back from New York.
Back in London in the early eighties he applied the same technique to second-hand clothes, cutting them up and rebuilding them. People at the Wag and the Mud Club kept asking to buy what he was wearing. The sideline became a job at i-D, and the job became styling — until one especially trying shoot for an early boy band, which he left by climbing out of the bathroom window. His styling days, he swore, were over.
They weren't. In the late eighties he ran into Shawn Stüssy on a New York street corner, and went on to help set up the London Stüssy Tribe shoots: an early architect of what became streetwear.
That eye took him to Tokyo, where he spent several years as a buyer and consultant to Japanese brands and retailers. His own shops and labels, alone and with friends, include Door Dog, Acupuncture, People's Wardrobe, Zoltar the Magnificent, The Child of the Jago, Thunders, House 33 — and now Wemblex.
“I had around thirty of them. By the time I got to the Dome, which used to be the Roebuck on the corner, all of them had gone.”— Barnzley, KULTUR No. 5
“I went up there fuming, threatening this chump with total annihilation for having the audacity to bootleg my bootleg.”— Barnzley, KULTUR No. 5
“No mobiles, no internet, no social networks. All done on the fly…”— Barnzley, KULTUR No. 5
Proprietors · WBLX 011 / 012
