Pink LePen

Jordan Mooney, better known as simply Jordan, a glowering, beehived Valkyrie in rubber and spiked heels who became an avatar of punk style when she presided over the transgressive London boutique that hatched the Sex Pistols and other provocations, died on April 3 in Seaford, East Sussex. She was 66. Her brother, Roger Rooke, said the cause was bile duct cancer. Ms. Mooney was just 19 in 1974 and working as a shop girl at Harrods, but she was already a presence when she walked into the store Sex, at 430 King's Road, with a peroxide bouffant, green makeup and belted Mackintosh. "You were like a little icon," her new boss, Vivienne Westwood, told her years later, adding, "I'd never seen anything like you before." With its puffy pink vinyl sign, seditionary manifestoes, rubber and leather fetish wear and T-shirts emblazoned with fragments of text from S&M novels, among other slogans, the store was also something not seen before. It was a laboratory for its proprietors: Malcolm McLaren, an art school dropout and music impresario, and his girlfriend, Ms. Westwood, who made the clothes to her own skewed, wildly original and sometimes problematic vision - they might include swastikas, or photographs from pornographic journals. The couple would later be known as the godparents of punk, and Ms. Westwood would earn an Order of the British Empire award for her contribution to fashion. "Moral discomfort," Cathy Horyn wrote in The New York Times in 1999, "was their pleasure." Ms. Mooney, a muscular former ballet student and track star, became the living embodiment of the store and also its gatekeeper, embracing its anarchic ethos - particularly its rubber wear - with gusto and flair. She was an imposing figure, her hair swooped up in a stiff bouffant, her eyes swathed in black like a superhero's mask. Commuting each day by train from her parents' home in East Sussex, she invited outrage and often cleared entire cars, sporting outfits like a see-through ensemble with bra, underpants and fishnet stockings she had customized by burning holes in them with a cigarette. Sometimes the conductors would move her for her safety into the first-class car, where she would find herself surrounded by businessmen pretending to read their newspapers.