Johnny Thunders Rebel No. 6 T-Shirt

Rebel No. 6 in John Dove and Molly White's 1978 Kitsch-22 series. Johnny Thunders was the hottest rock-and-roll guitarist of the 1970s — the lead inspiration for Steve Jones, and the source of the 'Too Fast To Live — Too Young To Die' tattoo Malcolm McLaren took on as a punk slogan. Thunders had played London for the first time in 1972 as the New York Dolls' guitarist; by 1978, when Dove and White closed Kitsch-22 for three months to design the Rebel collection from scratch, his image was already central to the visual grammar the series was built on. The design is constructed in the Rebel method — a montage of mass-media photographs cut and scanned onto film, painted into a saturated black ground so the figure appears to evolve from the cloth — and printed by hand on the studio's print-table. In 1984 Thunders himself visited Dove and White's studio to collect his Rebel T-shirt: his manager raised the question of royalties, which Thunders waved off, applauding the studio's commitment to rock-and-roll print and saying he was delighted to be in the collection. Dove and White subsequently made him a black-on-black snakeskin suit for his UK tour.

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From the personal archive of John Dove and Molly White