Jon Savage, the British cultural critic observed about her and her influence on the style of the late 1970s: “There are people who embody a time and a place.They don’t leave a body of art or writing, but their image is such that they might as well have. Jordan was that impressive. Her physical presence was that powerful.”
For her first job in London after school, she commuted daily from her hometown on the train. With her trademark vertiginous peroxide hair, racoon make-up, a net skirt with tattered black stockings punctured with cigarette burn holes and suspenders underneath, she caused quite a stir: “I had some real bad dos on the train. I had tourists trying to pay me for my photo . . . mothers saying that I’m upsetting their children and debauching them and how dare I get on a train looking like that. Somebody tried to throw me off the train one day, literally out the door, so British Rail told me to go sit in first class, (to) get out of trouble.”
She first met Westwood and her partner McLaren in 1973. Six months later she started work at their boutique SEX (re-named Seditionairies” in 1976) in the Kings Road selling fetish wear, bondage trousers and ‘tits T-shirts’. She established herself as a dominatrix-style saleswoman, wearing latex, brandishing a whip and generally terrifying unsuspecting customers: “We tried to present a feeling that the shop was a place that, if you had the guts to walk in, you could just hang out. Like the coffee shops of the 1950s, or the cafés of Prague, where philosophers would go to chew things over.”
If she did not think an item looked good on someone, she refused to sell it to them. Anyone considered to have a bad attitude was ejected, including Bianca Jagger. The ITV newsreader Reginald Bosanquet, who regularly bought fetish wear, was allowed in. McLaren wisely harnessed Mooney’s ideas for ripped t-shirts held together by safety pins, torn fishnets, tatty mohair sweaters and black suede creepers to create a look for his new rock band, the Sex Pistols.
At the end of 1976, she went over to New York to visit a friend, eventually staying at the Chelsea hotel in Manhattan. She went to visit The Factory and got to meet Andy Warhol who was very taken with her styling. As she says of that time: “We had breakfast together. We actually got on very well, and he did take some photos of me. I met him three more times after that . . . and I always enjoyed his company. He was very, very inquisitive and also very kind.”
By 1977 when the Sex Pistols were mainsteam news, she was living in a flat with Jonny Rotten, Sid Vicious and his girlfriend Nancy Spungen, to whom Mooney became close. The following year she briefly appeared in Derek Jarman’s seminal film about the punk scene Jubilee, with other parts played by Adam Ant (Stuart Goddard), Siouxsie (of the Banshees) and Toyah Wilcox. Jarman called Jordan “the original Sex Pistol” and she accompanied him to the Cannes Film Festival that May, wearing a figure-hugging latex skirt that inadvertently became a live art installation as it melted in the heat.
She was deeply affected when Spungen was murdered in 1978 (in the Chelsea Hotel where Mooney had stayed a few months before), followed by the death of Vicious from a heroin overdose. The Sex Pistols imploded and she went on to manage Adam and the Ants at Goddard’s request. She created his signature Native American-inspired warpaint make-up and outfits (used later by Westwood in her 1981 Pirate collection), but continued to work at Seditionaries. The Ants went on to release their acclaimed 1980 album Kings Of The Wild Frontier and the following year she married Kevin Mooney the band’s bassist. She was 26 and he was 18.
When Westwood heard the news, she fired her on the grounds that marriage was a burdensome bourgeois construct, and for Mooney to enter into it was an unforgivable transgression of the shop’s philosophy. The marriage was not a happy one though, marked by the couple’s heroin habit. By 1984 they had broken up and in an effort to escape drugs and still traumatised by the deaths of Spungen and Vicious she moved back in with her parents in Seaford to dry out.
She spent the rest of her life there, living quietly as a veterinary nurse and breeding Siamese cats. Despite finding contentment in her rather reclusive life, Jordan continued to subvert the genteel East Sussex resort with her outfits: “I will always wear my tits T-shirt” she declared proudly“I fill it out very nicely.”
Find out more about her book Defying Gravity here.
