“I saw her as an English archetype,” he continued. “Like a parody of a 1950s suburban housewife crossed with a dominatrix, the mirror image of Margaret Thatcher.”
Ms Mooney, he said, was a figurehead for a generation of disaffected teenagers during the grim Thatcher years. She was heroic in a way, a superhuman and quite fantastical creation of her own making, an Amazon to kick the pale and wimpy Twiggy types who had gone before her to the limit. Ms Mooney said she saw herself as a walking art project and, like her punk sisters, was liberated by the idea that women could be threatening. Punk, anarchic but unisex, was a great equalizer.
ms. Mooney also worked as a manager and stylist for the glam punk band Adam and the Ants. She also often performed with them, yelling a song called “Lou,” a critique of Lou Reed that she wrote after being disappointed by one of his shows.
She was a muse to filmmaker Derek Jarman, appearing memorably in his campy punk allegory “Jubilee” (1978), dancing to pointe in a fluffy “Swan Lake” tutu in a rough back yard, before a bonfire in which the Union Jack hisses.
Mr Jarman filmed her 1981 marriage to Kevin Mooney, who was briefly the bassist for the Ants. She was 26 and Mr. Mooney 18, and when Mrs. Westwood heard the news, she fired her. (The shop, which had been renamed Seditionaries in 1976, was known at the time as World’s End.) The marriage, Ms. Westwood felt, was an awkward civil construct, and for Ms. Mooney to step into it was an unforgivable transgression of philosophy. of the shop and Mrs. Westwood’s own beliefs.
The marriage was not a happy one, marked by the couple’s heroin habits — Mr Mooney at one point sold her clothes and once threw her kitten against a wall — and Mrs Mooney escaped after two years. She detoxed on her own, at her parents’ house in Seaford, and told them she had the flu. She stayed in her hometown and reinvented herself as a Burmese cat breeder and vet nurse.