Sid 'N' Nancy T-shirt

A 1979 Fifth Column screen-printed T-shirt produced in memorial to Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen — the era's most publicly destroyed couple, dead within four months of one another across the autumn of 1978 and the winter of 1979. The composition is built as a four-panel checkerboard alternating black-and-white photographic portraits of Vicious and Spungen across white and red grounds, with a single tattooist's-style rose floating at the centre where the panels meet.

Spungen was found stabbed to death in Room 100 of the Chelsea Hotel on October 12th, 1978; Vicious, who would be charged with her murder, died of heroin overdose in New York on February 2nd, 1979. The shirt sits at the precise moment punk's most public tragedy hardened into iconography — Fifth Column working the four-panel format that had defined a strand of British political T-shirt graphics since the late 1970s, repurposed here as a piece of immediate mourning.

27 15/16 × 15 3/8 inches (71 × 39 cm)