An issue of Gallery International (Volume 1, Number 4), the short-lived British erotic magazine, featuring a six-page article entitled “SADO Sex For The 70s,” documenting Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s legendary King’s Road boutique SEX. The article includes an extended interview with McLaren and is illustrated with numerous color photographs of shop employee Jordan (Pamela Rooke) wearing the shop’s provocative rubber and leather fetish clothing.

Gallery International was one of several British “top shelf” adult magazines that proliferated during the mid-1970s permissive era, having published only a handful of issues. Its very obscurity has made this particular article one of the rarest and most significant primary source documents from the pre-punk era.

The article’s importance has been widely recognized by scholars and historians. Cultural historian Paul Gorman — author of The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren — identified the Gallery International piece as a rarely seen but crucial document and preserved it in his personal archive. Gorman described it as one of several key articles published in sex magazines of the period that captured SEX at the height of its notoriety, alongside a contemporaneous feature in the British sex guide Forum. In 2022, the peer-reviewed academic journal Contemporary British History published “Whip in My Valise: British Punk and the Marquis de Sade, c. 1975-85,” which used the photographs and interview from this very issue of Gallery International as its opening image and point of departure. That article described Jordan as she appears in these pages — in a red-rubber bodice with dominatrix eyes and a Ricci Burns haircut evoking both Dusty Springfield and Moors murderer Myra Hindley — and noted that the article presented sadomasochism, as signified by the leather and rubber fetishwear sold in SEX, as indicative of an emergent cultural mood. The article further noted that Gallery International presented Jordan as the embodiment of “sado sex for the seventies.” The piece has also been cited in discussions of Vivienne Westwood’s queer legacy and the origins of punk’s confrontational aesthetic, with The Conversation referencing photographs from this issue as key visual evidence of the shop’s S&M-influenced identity.

Published a full year before McLaren would assemble the Sex Pistols, this article captures the moment when SEX — the shop McLaren ran with Vivienne Westwood at 430 King’s Road, Chelsea — was already generating shock and fascination. The boutique, which had evolved through earlier incarnations as Let It Rock and Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die, was by late 1975 fully committed to its provocative blend of fetish wear, bondage gear, and confrontational fashion. The shop sold rubber and leather designs by McLaren and Westwood alongside fetishwear from specialist suppliers including Atomage, She-And-Me, and London Leatherman. The interior was lined with a spongy, womb-like rubber material, the walls defaced with graffiti drawn from Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and other provocative texts, creating an environment designed to be as confrontational as the clothing itself.

Jordan, who famously commuted daily from Sussex to the shop in full theatrical makeup and outrageous attire — British Rail reportedly placed her in first class for her own protection — was the living embodiment of the shop’s aesthetic and the face of the store. She is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the pre-punk milieu, sometimes referred to as “the first Sex Pistol.” Her presence at SEX helped define the shop’s notoriety and drew a circle of young outsiders — among them Steve Jones, Paul Cook, Glen Matlock, and eventually John Lydon — who would form the nucleus of the Sex Pistols. Other notable figures in the shop’s orbit included Chrissie Hynde, Adam Ant, Siouxsie Sioux, and the Bromley Contingent.

Documents from this precise period, capturing McLaren’s world in the months before punk officially erupted, are exceptionally rare. Gallery International was not widely preserved, and this issue serves as a primary source for the aesthetic and cultural moment that directly preceded one of the most consequential movements in popular music history. The article’s significance is further confirmed by its use in peer-reviewed academic scholarship and its preservation in the Paul Gorman archive.

In Excellent condition.