Malcolm McLaren, the irreverent punk provocateur who launched the Sex Pistols and played a central role in shaping the attitudinal fashion that swept London in the 1970s, has died of cancer at age 64.

Born in London, McLaren grew up as part of an alienated postwar generation, working to find a way through the rubble and economic strife left in the wake of the blitz. "We were born alone of parents who didn't want to know us, you know — who met during the war, married during the war, gave birth right after the war, and broke up, because they only got married because they didn't think anything was going to happen," he said. "We were born into a very hard-nosed environment with very little love and very little sense of belonging. You always forever were an outcast, a rebel at school."

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McLaren attended art school at St. Martin's College and Goldsmiths, but after graduation he soon put aside aspirations of being a traditional artist in favor of pursuing a career in fashion.
Together with designer Vivienne Westwood, he opened a clothing store that cycled through a series of names, but which entered the annals of fashion history as SEX. There, he and Westwood pioneered an aggressive style that was partly influenced by the ragtag attire of the New York punk scene — particularly the torn-T-shirt look of Richard Hell — and partly by the bondage garb of London's reviled underground.

Then in the mid 1970s, after a stint managing the seminal punk band New York Dolls, McLaren brought together a group of antisocial, barely talented young musicians dubbed the Sex Pistols. Fusing a visual style of pure spit-in-the-eye aggression with anarchistic lyrics and a notable disdain for Her Majesty, the Queen of England, the band became the face of Britain's social and cultural turmoil at the time, and launched a movement. Johnny Rotten and the other surviving Sex Pistols was inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame in 2006.  (Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious died of an overdose in 1979.)

"See, it's very difficult for me to be objective about the Sex Pistols because frankly I invented them, and because frankly I came from art school with a very — I wouldn't say clear — but very angry and willful desire to destroy the culture," McLaren said earlier this year. "That was part of the chemistry we were creating. They bought into it, they liked it. Johnny Rotten was a willing conspirator to that."

After the band broke up in 1978, McLaren continued to work in music and fashion, embracing his image as an irascible, unpredictable pop Svengali (a term likely to appear alongside his name for decades to come). In the 1980s, he embarked on a solo music career that resulted in a series of louche, lounge-ready mixups of several genres, from hip-hop to classical crooning. In 1994 he had a hit with the song "Jazz is Paris" off the concept album Paris.

In recent years, McLaren began to pursue a third career, in the art world, which was astonishing for the assured hand and masterful pastiche that he brought to bear in his few — in truth, only two — completed projects: Shallow, a 2007 series of mashed-up videos and songs (he dubbed them "musical paintings") that was premiered at New York's I-20 Gallery, and Paris, Capital of the 21st Century, a remarkable film compiled of advertising clips from throughout the history of French film. Both works were commissioned by Art Basel, and the latter had its debut at New York's Swiss Institute in February to a packed crowd of art-world eminences, including Jeffrey Deitch, who, according to McLaren, had offered him a future show at MoCA in Los Angeles.

After the screening, McLaren said, "I was just told the other night, 'Your work, Malcolm, doesn't fit into art and doesn't fit into cinema — it doesn't fit into anything.' And that appeared to be a problem. My concern is that I don't find that necessarily a problem, because I'm not certain any longer what you're suggesting is art or what you're suggesting is cinema. That's not what you're doing it for, to start with. I'm just attempting to find a language to express my genuine thoughts, which more often that not are about bringing back forgotten desires, about building something you can't not fall in love with."