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Malcolm Robert Andrew McLaren (22 January 1946 – 8 April 2010) was an English impresario, visual artist, performer, clothes designer and boutique owner, notable for combining these activities in a creative way. Born into a dysfunctional family, he attended a number of British art colleges and adopted the stance of the social rebel in the style of French revolutionaries, the Situationists. With a keen eye for trends, McLaren realized in the 1970s that a new youth style was needed, and largely initiated the punk movement, to which he supplied fashions from the Chelsea boutique 'SEX' (operated with his girlfriend Vivienne Westwood). After a spell advising the New York Dolls in the US, McLaren managed the Sex Pistols, to whom he recruited the nihilistic frontman Johnny Rotten. The issue of a controversial record, "God Save the Queen", satirising the Queen's Jubilee was typical of McLaren's shock-tactics, and he gained publicity by being arrested after a promotional boat trip outside the Houses of Parliament. McLaren also performed as a solo artist, initially popularizing hip hop and world music and later diversifying into funk/disco, the dance fashion for "vogueing" and merging opera with contemporary electronic musical forms. In his later years, he lived in Paris and New York, and died of peritoneal mesothelioma in a Swiss hospital. When accused of turning popular culture into a cheap marketing gimmick, he joked that he hoped it was true.

Wikipedia This entry is from Wikipedia, the user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors and is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. If you find the biography content factually incorrect, defamatory or highly offensive you can edit this article at Wikipedia.