Magazine
Essay Series “Walking Now” MISHIMAGAZINE #4 – John Dove and Molly White: Their Ideas Will Never Run Out
The original text was written in Japanese for MISHIMAGAZINE in May 2016. This post is an English translation and republication of the original article.
Before speaking about the uniquely formidable couple John Dove and Molly White, I want to begin with a recent piece of news from London. About a month ago, Joseph Corre announced a plan to burn a historical collection of clothes, records, and related materials from the 1960s onward, all symbolic of British punk.
For anyone who loves fashion or music, it is exactly the kind of collection that makes the hands itch. Its value was said to be around 800 million yen, and the news was picked up by major media, including The Guardian. The year 2016 marked the fortieth anniversary of the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.,” and various events around punk culture were being planned in Britain. What seems to have provoked Corre was the fact that figures of the so-called ruling class, including Queen Elizabeth and London mayor Boris Johnson, had expressed support for these events.
Looking back, punk was born among working-class youth. It was a social phenomenon in which those thrown off the rails of society, or those for whom getting onto the rails was difficult in the first place, expressed resistance to the ruling class and to the status quo. Ironically, with time, punk, once a symbol of anti-establishment and anti-mainstream energy, gained fans around the world and was accepted even by the royal family and the social elites it had originally attacked. It became recognized as one strand of “British culture.” Museums are, after all, very good at embalming things that once smelled dangerous.
That is precisely what fundamentalists like Joseph Corre find unbearable. His argument is that if punk is to be recognized by such people and sent to the museum, it would be better to burn it. His plan to burn an enviable collector’s archive all at once has provoked arguments for and against it, but I feel I can understand the attitude. Many people know Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, the figures often described as the architects of punk, but Joseph Corre is in fact their son.
T-shirts printed with radical words and images are now familiar sights on the street. Yet the punk movement is often cited as one of the reasons printed T-shirts became street fashion in the first place.
John Dove and Molly White, whom I introduce here, strongly influenced Malcolm and Vivienne. At the time, T-shirts generally carried corporate logos or advertising. John and Molly printed artworks onto T-shirts by silkscreen, reinventing the garment as an item for wearing self-assertion. In doing so, they quietly altered the current of fashion.
The fashion items they began making in the 1960s attracted rumor and attention among London youth and musicians. Before they became famous, Iggy Pop and Paul McCartney were among those who bought and collected their work. Today, most of their past works have gone to museums, but the works they produced through the 1970s became a major source of inspiration for Vivienne Westwood, who would rise to become a symbol of punk, and the idea of “punk fashion” gradually took shape. It is not discussed openly very often, but the name and concept of the legendary boutique SEX, opened by Malcolm and Vivienne, also seem to have emerged through their exchanges with John and Molly.
I met John and Molly in the winter of 2012. Derek Harris of Lewis Leathers, famous for its riders jackets and known to anyone who loves motorcycles, invited me, and on a clear afternoon during my stay in London we went to Paul Stolper Gallery, standing quietly in front of the British Museum.
Inside the white-walled gallery, in front of a Damien Hirst silkscreen of a skull, sat the two of them in black leather riders jackets, firmly occupying their chairs. They were already over seventy, but what I remember is the mischievous air of teenagers still clinging to them.
For about an hour they told me about various ongoing projects. The one that drew me in most concerned their friendship with Iggy Pop. The album Raw Power, released by Iggy Pop during his Stooges period, would turn forty in 2013, and they had a plan to reproduce the jacket Iggy wore on stage, designed by John and Molly. Iggy had apparently fallen on hard times in the 1970s and let go of the beloved jacket, so the plan was to present him with a new one on the album’s fortieth anniversary. It was stylish in the old sense, which is to say it had very little to do with style as a marketing department understands the word.
As I listened to their stories of old London, I somehow became involved in the project. Working with them changed my image of punk considerably.
Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Malcolm McLaren, Sid Vicious. They had already become legends before I was born and existed somewhere far away, almost without substance. Yet seeing John and Molly, who had created that age alongside them, brought the atmosphere of the time slightly closer to human scale.
Even after the project was completed, whenever an idea occurs to them they still use Adobe software and regularly send me emails saying, “Yusuke, what do you think of this?” with witty, sometimes excessively radical, new illustrations and artworks attached. Over seventy, unconstrained by common sense, tireless workers whose ideas do not run out. In their posture, resisting the current of the world and forcing a place in society with only ideas and their own bodies, I felt the existence of punk.
Working with John and Molly, whose ideas keep overflowing, was sometimes like collaborating with wild animals, and not always easy. But we were able to deliver jackets and T-shirts to Iggy Pop. I unfortunately could not attend the commemorative live performance, but later an unexpected surprise arrived: a letter of thanks from Iggy himself. Not forgetting that old-fashioned sense of obligation may itself be a punk attitude peculiar to their generation.
Three years have passed since that project, and by another turn of fate I am now preparing a new project with the wild animals John and Molly. We plan to reproduce, as an artwork by them, the jacket Paul McCartney wore during a performance of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” in June of this year.
The pleasure of work is always in meeting people who are walking now.
JOHN DOVE AND MOLLY WHITE
Artists and designers active in Britain since around 1960. They worked as fashion and textile designers through the 1980s and continue to work energetically as contemporary artists in Norfolk, northeast of London. Living witnesses of London punk culture. Damien Hirst is known as an avid collector of their work.
WONDER WORKSHOP
wonderworkshop.co.uk
The archive website of John and Molly, introducing the history of their many works. Most items have become collectors’ pieces and trade at high prices.
PAUL STOLPER GALLERY
31 Museum Street, London WC1A 1LH
paulstolper.com
The contemporary art gallery representing John Dove and Molly White. It also handles work by their friend Damien Hirst, Sir Peter Blake, famous for Beatles artwork, and Jamie Reid, known for the punk movement.