1978 Sid Vicious' Cuff and Pin-Back Badge | One Size

Two personal effects worn by Sid Vicious during his final months in New York — a hand-painted black leather snap-cuff wristband and a pin-back badge, both carrying his name in the specific DIY vocabulary that defined the first wave of punk's visual language. The cuff is cut from a single flat strip of black leather and finished with four silver studs at one end and a double row of snap closures at both ends; "SID" runs across the center of the strap in red brushed paint, faded and worn unevenly from true period use rather than reproduced after the fact. The badge is a standard 1970s button-back with "SID VICIOUS" rendered in black across an off-white ground, the serif capitals tilted at an off-kilter angle, the pin fastener and visible oxidation on the metal back consistent with four-and-a-half decades. Both pieces come directly out of the New York punk scene's immediate working circle.

The provenance runs through Mariah Aguiar, the late CBGB and Max's Kansas City photographer embedded in the Bowery scene through the second half of the 1970s, who was gifted the items by Vicious himself in 1978. In a 1996 handwritten letter — composed on the reverse of a flyer for the New York band Helen Wheels — Aguiar confirms that Vicious gave her three objects that year: a sketch in his own hand, this leather wristband, and the hand-lettered button bearing his name. The sketch has since sold separately at auction; the wristband and pin remain together as presented here, examined and formally authenticated by London's Fame Bureau on November 20, 2011, with the original handwritten letter and Fame Bureau COA accompanying the lot. The window these pieces come from is historically compressed and historically weighted. Vicious arrived in New York with Nancy Spungen in the summer of 1978 after the Sex Pistols' January dissolution, played his handful of post-Pistols shows at Max's Kansas City across September and early October, lost Spungen at the Chelsea Hotel on October 12, and was himself dead by February 2, 1979. Personal items physically worn by Vicious during that final New York window and surviving in wearable condition nearly five decades later — sit among the top-tier material in the entire Sex Pistols and first-wave punk collector market.

Accompanied by COA, available upon inquiry.