Malcolm Mclaren

“Buffalo Gals” is the groundbreaking single from Malcolm McLaren’s 1983 legendary album, Duck Rock which introduced world music, hip hop, and rap to a wider audience and inspired several fashion collections for his shops, Worlds End and Nostalgia of Mud.  This iconic track has been sampled and covered by myriad artists from Eminem to Nelly Furtado to Kanye West.  

As always, McLaren’s lifelong obsession with what he called “the look of music and the sound of fashion” meant he took the visual ideas and inspiration from the music research (Africa, South America, Appalachia, New York City—especially emerging graffiti artists Richard Hambledon, Dondi White and Keith Haring) and applied it not only to the record artwork but to fashion, launching a whole new look and trend featuring the “Buffalo Gal” wearing her Buffalo hat, made fashionable again when worn by Pharrell Williams over 20 years later.