'Cambridge Rapist' T-Shirt

One of the most notorious objects produced at SEX, 430 King's Road. The 'Cambridge Rapist' T-shirt — designed in 1975 — overlays an enlarged news photograph of the leather hood worn by Peter Cook, a serial offender arrested in 1975 and the subject of saturation British press coverage that year, with the slogan "It's been a hard day's night" and the dates of his attacks. Westwood and McLaren intended the design in order to deliberately provoke, and it stands as one of the foundational documents of the SEX shop's anti-establishment programme.

The design proved among the most enduring and most contested of the entire Westwood/McLaren run, drawing condemnation at the time and entering the academic and museum record in the decades since. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, holds an example of this design in its permanent collection. Surviving SEX-period examples are scarce, and rarer still in good condition.