Young Punks

Forty-four years after their implosion, The Sex Pistols their music, fashion, and attitude still matter. This May, a new limited series brings the band's incredible story to life. Here, the cast of the show wears summer's new crop of sharp suits, proving there's nothing more punk, right now, than dressing up.

- By Caryn Rose. Photographs by Roger Deckker

The Sex Pistols didn't invent Punk Rock. That honor goes to American upstarts at CBGB. But the Pistols deserve and accept the blame for bringing it to the 'burbs. When a teen turns up with spiky hair, a dog collar, and a leather jacket, the response is “What are you, the Sex Pistols?” It's a generic term now, like Xerox or Kleenex. The band blazed that trail. With flamethrowers.

The Pistols' antiestablishment attitudes sprouted from their working-class upbringing. Steve Jones was a prolific thief who claims to have walked off with David Bowie's equipment and used it to start the band. Paul Cook was bound for the electrical trades. In the early seventies, the two childhood friends frequented a London clothing store called Let It Rock. Its owners, designers Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, saw fashion as a method of individual expression and cultural disruption, and they helped position the Pistols for just that. They also found bandmates, John Lydon-soon to be Johnny Rotten-caught McLaren's eye because Lydon was wearing a Pink Floyd tee over which he had emblazoned I HATE in ballpoint pen. Westwood noticed John Simon Ritchiewho would become Sid Vicious among the parade of shop customers. He couldn't play bass, but he looked the part: pale and lost, with a padlock-fastened dog chain around his neck.