The world lost an icon like no other yesterday when Malcolm McLaren passed away from mesothelioma in Switzerland. He was 64 years old. Of course, he was best known for forming and managing the Sex Pistols and Bow Wow Wow, but through the ’70s and ’80s McLaren wielded influence in realms well beyond punk rock, bringing hip hop and world music to greater notoriety in Great Britain with his own solo work and radicalizing the realm of fashion alongside longtime partner Vivienne Westwood.
     McLaren and Westwood ushered in a renaissance of Edwardian fashions with their clothing shop Let It Rock, which opened in 1971. Traveling to New York the next year on business, McLaren met the New York Dolls whom he would soon manage. That partnership lasted just a few years, culminating in McLaren’s controversial decison to drape the Dolls in Soviet-themed leather regalia for a concert — the backlash of which contributed to the band’s breakup. In the meantime, McLaren reinvented his fashion business under the monicker SEX, which sold S&M styles and certainly influenced Agent Provocateur, the lingerie retailer co-founded by McLaren and Westwood’s son Joseph Corré.
     McLaren’s management roles came to involve the band the Neon Boys (which included future Television founders Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell) and the Strand, who would soon be renamed the Sex Pistols, after a green-haired chap named John Lydon was discovered while wearing a shirt on which “I hate Pink Floyd” was scrawled.