Nazi Fashion Research

http://punkrocker.org.uk/punkscene/swastica.html

But most of you with enough
suss will realise the swastica was
never a direct political statement within
punk rock. It was part of the punks
desire to repulse a nation of

convention! 

Meanwhile, 6,000 miles away in Britain, the manager and
future svengali behind The Sex Pistols, Malcom McLaren,
and his designer girlfriend, Vivienne Westwood, were
running their clothing shop, Let It Rock, which had become
Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die in 1973 in London's
King's Road. The swastika had already cropped up in
Westwood's designs when she worked on the costumes for
Ken Russell's movie, "Mahler".
In a dream-sequence the composer meets his Nazi enemy
who is dressed in a black leather skirt with a swastika
studded onto it. Then came her "anarchist" shirts;
second-hand shirts which were dyed red and black and had
slogans painted on them and sometimes a small portrait of
Karl Marx or a swastika attached. The idea was to shock, and
the shirts were intended to be provocative, outrageous
statements in the tradition of the avant-garde Situatiohist art
movement.
By 1975, Westwood ana McLaren's shop had been
re-christened Sex. One employee was called Jordan who, in
Jon Savage's definitive history of punk, "England's Dreaming"
(Faber And Faber, ISBN0-571-I679I-8), gives
another reason for the appearance of the swastika, "Malcom
was in awe of the symbolism," she said. "He had a stock of
Nazi memorabilia, including Nazi Youth badges, gold SS
wedding rings and swastika hankies." Given that McLaren
was Jewish, anti-Semitism seems a very unlikely explanation
for this obsession. Westwood claimed they were setting out to
de-mystify the swastika. De-mystified or not, another Sex
employee, Alan Jones, was beaten up in Notting Hill for
wearing a swastika armband.