Wild, Wild Westwood

As fashion meccas go, 430 Kings Road, Chelsea, must be one of London's holiest: Vivienne Westwood's treasured shop is home to some of the most epoch-defining clothes of all time. Now, on the eve of a V&A retrospective of the designer's work, the shop has become almost as legendary as the fashion.

The shop that is now World's End began life as Let It Rock, a badly stocked vintage clothes store at the wrong end of Kings Road. It was here, in 1971, that Malcolm McLaren began selling 1950s memorabilia: posters, Brylcreem and Teddy Boy suits. In an age when the hippy hangover of the 1960s was being swept away by glitter and glam, Let It Rock was deeply unfashionable.

But, then, that was always the point. 'The intention ultimately was to fail, and fail in the most flamboyant manner possible,' McLaren claimed. 'If we could fail fabulously, we would succeed.' Yet, rather than fail, patrons such as David Bowie and Ringo Starr became future icons.

Bare bones

When stock ran low, McLaren turned to Westwood, his schoolteacher girlfriend from Derbyshire, to make more. Together, they studded T-shirts, added kitsch fur collars to drape jackets and, perhaps most famously, used boiled chicken bones from a nearby Polish restaurant to applique slogans.

Appalled by their increasingly violent Teddy Boy clientele (and, weirdly, by Lionel Blair who became a persistently unwelcome customer), in 1973 the pair reopened the store as Too Fast To Love Too Young To Die, a phrase McLaren pinched from a biker's jacket. He and Westwood worked at becoming as anti-fashion as possible - deconstructing rock'n'roll T-shirts by trampling them under foot and scrawling clothes with Situationist soundbites such as 'Be Reasonable - Demand The Impossible'.

Inspired by the shock-rock androgyny of shop regulars and glam group The New York Dolls, McLaren transformed the store into SEX in 1974. Among its clientele of MPs and pervs was a sullen gang of teenagers who later became the Sex Pistols. SEX manageress Jordan (a vision of Mondrian war paint and skyscraper hair) and Johnny Rotten (who auditioned in front of the shop's jukebox) became the visual embodiment of punk.

When punk went mainstream, the store became Seditionaries, morphing into a nerve-testing den of dark nihilism.

Its final - and present - guise takes an altogether more romantic approach. Courtesy of architect David Connor, Westwood's 1979 Pirates collection (which triggered the New Romantic movement) was given the backdrop it deserved: sloping floors and a backward-beating 13-hour clock turned the shop into a sea-faring galleon.

Kings Road may have blanded out but there's a little pocket of Chelsea forever flying the skull and crossbones.

Vivienne Westwood: 34 Years In Fashion is at the V&A until July 11. Tel: 020 7942 2000.