Destruction of Purity T-shirt

A 1982 screen-printed cotton sleeveless T-shirt by the London designer Susan Clowes — a deliberately confrontational composition in which a golden cross is set against a sprayed pink-and-blue halo, with eight silhouetted military bombers arranged across and around the cross, framed at the corners by clusters of yellow-gold roses on green leaves.

The image works the post-punk visual logic that ran through London independent design across the early 1980s — religion, militarism, and the cosmetics of decay layered against one another inside a single composition. Clowes worked within the independent-design ecosystem running alongside the Westwood-McLaren retail line and the broader Kitsch-22, BOY and Fifth Column print network, producing one-off and small-edition shirts for the wider scene around Camden, Soho and the King's Road.

24 13/16 × 18 1/8 inches (63 × 46 cm)