Metal Genitalia Pendants

A pair of cast-metal genitalia pendants displayed in the cabinet at SEX, 430 King's Road, in 1976 — the moment Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren were closing the SEX shop concept and opening Seditionaries on the same premises. The pendants were made for the shop by a London silversmith Westwood was working with directly, off-catalogue and off-line, and were never put into wider production.

The fetish-jewellery vocabulary the SEX shop ran across 1974–76 — bondage straps, safety-pin fastenings, latex, the explicit graphic shirts — was the precise terrain on which Westwood and McLaren built the visual logic that would feed straight into the punk scene These pendants belong to the most specifically SEX-period strand of that work: small, hand-made objects that crossed the line between adornment and provocation, and were sold one at a time across the counter rather than wholesaled. No further example has been recorded.