Curated By Alex michon

Our first dblspk guest curator is Alex Michon, an artist, writer and one of the directors of Transition Gallery in Hackney. From 1977 - 83 she was involved off and on with making a series of menswear collections for iconic punk band The Clash.

‘As a writer I was very interested to be asked to collaborate on this project for dblspk. I liked the idea of the wordplay element in the T.shirts which I contributed to. Steeped in the romance of the Situationists and their slogans and remembering the early back in the day Letterist slogans we used to stencil onto Clash shirts I was well up for it. For me there is a now-ness and then-ness involved in this contemporary culture jam playing around with semantics as an intervention into the whole Olympics thing where certain words and phrases have been forbidden was all part of the appeal. But there is also ambiguity and humour involved which is just as it should be.’

Alex Michon

July 2012

The Battle of Algiers

“When I was first going to make clothes for the Clash, Bernard Rhodes (their manager) said I had to watch this which I thought was a great idea for fashion inspiration!(a film about urban-guerilla warfare)”.