Clothing counterfeiters stitch up Damien Hirst

As manager of the Sex Pistols, Malcolm McLaren was the scourge of the Establishment. Now, 30 years on, the dapper 62-year-old is helping police with their inquiries.

Some of the era-defining punk clothing that he made in the mid70s with his partner then, Vivienne Westwood, is at the centre of a large-scale fakes fraud. Damien Hirst spent more than £80,000 on clothes that McLaren has identified as counterfeit, and the punk impresario believes that a major auction house and the New York Museum of Modern Art may also have been duped.

He tells People that the Metropolitan Police are investigating and he is helping them by identifying fakes. “I haven’t been in touch with Vivienne, but I think, to be frank, that the gravity of the situation is such that she will help, too,” he said.

McLaren says that Hirst came to him after some young fashion students who had been making copies of Sex and Seditionaries clothes told him he might have been sold copies instead of the real thing. The artist says he is bound by a court order not to talk about the situation. McLaren says: “A number of people have come forward to confess that they made them.”

Very few of the real clothes were made as they were stitched by him and Westwood on his kitchen table, and even fewer were sold. Most of these, he says, fell apart after a few wearings. “[Hirst had] bags and bags, big black bags, of them. Clearly they weren’t the fabrics we used 35 years ago and the stitching was different.”

Delegates filling out their application forms for this year’s Labour conference are given generous options for a name prefix. Alongside the usual Mr, Mrs, Dr and Rev sit Baron and Viscount. But as an optimistic example of brotherly solidarity there is one further prefix . . . HRH. Are they perhaps expecting the Duke of Edinburgh?

How did the BBC find out about Monday’s Weston-super-Mare pier blaze? “We watched the fire raging – live – on a . . . er . . . rival news channel,” admits Simon Waldman, morning editor on BBC News. “It was an uncomfortable hour, to be frank.” Fortunately, viewers sent in dozens of stills and video sequences to fill the breach. “To everyone who contributed, a big thank you!” blogs Waldman.

“There aren’t enough airports for all the men who would want to flee the country,” joked Harriet Harman when teased about her leadership aspirations. But what about her own family? Sarah Harman, Harriet’s solicitor sister, was spotted heading the early morning queue at the passport office in Victoria yesterday, urgently renewing her travel documentation. Bon voyage.

The Face Mike Myers

Mike Myers’ Love Guru, the titular character of his new film, out tomorrow, needs to spread a little of that love over the film critics.

The man who could once do no wrong – he managed the holy grail of a sequel funnier than the original with the second Wayne’s World and a hilarious trilogy in the Austin Powers movies – has, er, done wrong. One critic has described the film, a take on society’s reliance on spiritual guides, as “an overgrown dirt-patch of clunking juvenilia”, which surely was always what we liked about Mike Myers’ films. He has even managed to offend Hindu leaders, who find his depiction of the religion morally offensive and have called for a boycott of the film, which is all it needs after taking only $31 million in its first five weeks.

Postscript

Tough love for Doctor Who fans under the new series supremo, Stephen Moffat. At the Comic-Con convention in California, the writer of some of the more frightening episodes in recent series told fans: “If people are worried that because I’m taking over Doctor Who it’s going to be just really, really frightening, if that’s your concern then . . . tough.”

Unexpected perks for Lewis Hamilton, Britain’s grand prix wunderkind. He tells Hello: “I remember last year when I first met Beyoncé and she invited me to her concert. Things like that wouldn’t happen if I wasn’t a racing driver.” He adds: “Then I was in my car and my mobile went off – it was P Diddy and he invited me out for dinner.” Presumably not his racing car.

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