The Gorko Gazette

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thegorkogazette

7.27.2026 6:27 AM

Excerpt from Tempest Miller

DEDOL

Let it Rock, Too Fast to Live Too Young To Die,
SEX, King’s Road, London, this is
where it was and what it meant to
be gorgeously jackleg. Vivienne Westwood
and Malcolm McLaren understood mobility
and accomplishing it through the vocular.
SEX’s boutique – a mangled word,
especially in property – terraformed
urban staidness. It was the wearables
to cross streams, gorges, arch dams,
enfilade and above all trample
thorns barefoot. To do this in an apricot jacket,
wearability undermined by knowing
that pleasure is a pressure.
Westwood encyclopaedic on banditry.
It is not historicism, it is overture,
the snare shots remaining redoubtable.
Chicken bones comes back
to its influences and the skeleton
lays denuded in
overt naturalistic homage
come to boot.
Westwood was pre-punk, hence talking
dinosaural about ‘Rock’,
and was expediting ahead of the Giest
of a London which was to be
the bearer of monsters
on rumble strips.

Architecturally, SEX resembled a peace shop.
It emulated Brutalism in its interior
by repurposing school gymnasium bars,
lining the walls with posters of Dresden
carpet-bombed (doing so at a time
when the genealogy of proportionality in
war was abstruse, doing so perhaps
from an unpatriotic pitch,
burgeoning CND au courant) and grey floors.
Brutalism is itself naturalistic.
There can be no neobrutalism
because there are no new age
igneous rocks, nothing beyond geoheritage,
no advancement on blowholes,
salt spray, mountaintops, swales.

Westwood’s Brutalism came both barrels with Seditionaries.
The shop’s greatest era.
Redesigning the poet shirt to
a tank top blocked with stanza, font,
black-out.
Marx and slogans. That word, that attribution: Rock.
In any capacity. Rock defenestrated, made
into Rok.
Dyed in store. Printed around back.
As a storefront, it was more rapacious
under its former name. Chicken wire, neo-decadent,
fissured scrawl – they made
the mistake of injuncting their brutalism,
mistaking it for minimalism and the disparate.
Mistaking deconstruction and the
for-sale openness of caulking
for brutality.