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Pamela Rooke, the style icon and legendary figure in the British punk scene better known as Jordan, died yesterday at the age of 66, her partner confirmed to Brighton and Hove News earlier today. “She died peacefully a stone’s throw away from the sea in her hometown of Seaford, East Sussex, in the company of her loving family at 9 p.m. last night,” he wrote, adding that her passing followed a short period of illness due to a rare form of bile-duct cancer. “Jordan was a wonderful woman and will be remembered for countless decades to come.”
Born in Seaford in 1955, Rooke began her journey to the heady heights of the 1970s punk movement in London when she changed her name to Jordan as a rebellious 14-year-old—inspired by what she called the “powerful androgyny” of Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby—soon after which she was suspended from school for her eye-popping outfits. With her trademark shock of white hair, which she usually styled into a vertiginous bouffant or dramatic vertical spikes, and her playful approach to makeup—she pioneered the extreme kohl-rimmed eye most recently seen on Julia Fox and would often paint geometrical lines across her face as if marked up by Picasso—Rooke instantly caught the attention of those within London’s nascent punk scene.
Commuting to the city from East Sussex every day, Rooke made her first major entrée to the world of fashion after she walked into Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s recently renamed Sex boutique on King’s Road. (To register her interest in working at the store, she infamously wore a bullet bra, fishnet skirt, and pair of gold stilettos.) After a brief stint working at, of all places, the storied Knightsbridge department store Harrods, Rooke was hired by McLaren’s deputy Michael Collins. Soon, her inimitable style and imperious approach to selling clothes became one of the store’s signatures.
Through her tight-knit friendship with McLaren and Westwood, Rooke was introduced to some of the most significant musicians and bands of her day. They included the Sex Pistols, for whom she became a de facto stylist, helping to shape their signature look of studded leather jackets, ripped T-shirts, and black suede creepers. She also served as an influential figure in the early years of Adam and the Ants, acting as the band’s manager during their iconic Kings of the Wild Frontier days and even serving as a guest vocalist on their song “Lou,” an ode to Lou Reed, during a BBC Radio 1 session overseen by the agenda-setting DJ John Peel. After marrying Rooke, bassist Kevin Mooney split off from Adam and the Ants to form Wide Boy Awake, which Rooke continued to manage throughout the 1980s.
Another pivotal friendship forged during these years—and arguably the one for which Jordan herself is best known—was with Derek Jarman, the genre-defying filmmaker and activist now remembered for his collaborations with a young Tilda Swinton in Caravaggio and Edward II. Rooke appeared in Jarman’s debut film, Sebastiane, a queer retelling of the Saint Sebastian myth, before starring as the nihilistic Amyl Nitrate in his sophomore feature, Jubilee, the cult classic that pays homage to the rip-roaring spirit of ’70s London punk. (She also made an appearance in the highly controversial first airing of the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.” on British national television, standing at the front of the crowd in a T-shirt that read “only anarchists are pretty.”)
Following the deaths of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen and her divorce from Mooney in 1984, Rooke retreated from the scene that made her name, returning to East Sussex to live a significantly quieter life as a veterinary nurse and a breeder of Burmese cats. “Things had become too hectic,” she told The Guardian in 2019. “It sounds really corny, but normality saved my life.” In recent years, she had begun a return to the spotlight with the 2019 release of her memoir, Defying Gravity: Jordan’s Story, for which she made a number of public appearances and began granting interviews once again.
So too is there set to be a revival of interest in Rooke’s life story with the release of Danny Boyle’s FX miniseries Pistol, a retelling of the Sex Pistols’ rise to notoriety in which Rooke is played by Maisie Williams of Game of Thrones. Among those who paid tribute to her today were Glen Matlock and Boy George, who honored both her fearlessness and her pioneering sense of style. “The world seemed very gray, and I was determined to brighten it up a bit,” she told Another Magazine in 2017. With her enduring legacy across the worlds of music and fashion, Rooke did just that.
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