JO CORRE spent much of his childhood in a dustbin. Jo, 27, is the son of fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, the punk poseur who managed the Sex Pistols. The first time Jo jumped into a dustbin was with his brother Ben, to retrieve the toys Malcolm had thrown away because he wouldn’t tidy his room. ‘Once we’d discovered this place where you found loads of other stuff as well, we were, like, always in the dustbins,’ says Jo. ‘Most parents wouldn’t let their children play with us because we were really dirty.’

Jo’s parents never married (‘If anyone thinks they’re worse off because their parents aren’t married, they’re mad’) and Ben was sent to live with his father, Derek Westwood. Jo went to nine schools until he left home, aged 16. ‘I was sent to boarding schools from the age of five because my parents didn’t have any money. They’d put me in schools like Dean Grange or Bellon House for a couple of terms then come in the middle of the night and take me away so that they never paid the fees.’

Malcolm refused ever to let Jo call him ‘Dad’. (Malcolm hardly saw his own mother until he was a grown man, shared his grandmother’s bed until he was 10 and was raised without a sense of family.) ‘I remember calling him Dad once when I was five and he told me my father was the milkman. So I started calling the milkman Dad, until I realised that was wrong too.’ Malcolm also insisted Jo have the surname Corre, Malcolm’s mother’s maiden name.

We’re sitting on a roll of carpet above Agent Provocateur, the Soho lingerie shop Jo and his girfriend and business partner Serena Rees opened last week. They sell Vivienne’s prostitutes’ shoes with 12-inch heels, balcony corset tops with granny knickers and bunny cages and a £900 brass chastity belt. Serena offers us Nipple of Venus chocolates then goes off to ‘nail varnish Diane’s nipples because they don’t show enough.’ Diane is a shapely mannequin in the window in football net stockings.

Jo wears an olive cord suit, banker’s shirt, wannabe beard, long sideburns and a face of Vivienne intensity. He has a missing tooth (‘it fell out when it got rotten’), dirty nails and an ear pierced seven times. He speaks to the wall in a grating voice, and drops his aitches. But he has a genial disposition although he claims to have a ferocious temper. We return to the subject of his childhood. His parents believed in allowing him his independence. When he was eight and Ben just 12, they set off alone on their bikes to see their grandparents. The brothers lived in London. Their grandparents lived in Devon. And the journey took a week. ‘We stayed in youth hostels and tents. We had these really shit kids’ bikes with one gear, piled high with all this heavy stuff.’ Didn’t their mother think it dangerous? ‘No, it was an adventure. I mean like Mum always said if anyone tries to mess around with you, scream and make a fuss and don’t go quietly.

‘Anyway, we were looking for somewhere to pitch our tent in the middle of the night and the police went past. They saw these two young boys with all this stuff and thought we were runaways. They called our grandparents, then let us put our tent in the back of the police station.”

Two years later, he went to the South of France with a 10-year-old friend. ‘After four days, we were only quarter of the way to Paris. We couldn’t make it, so turned around and went to Boulogne and made a hut out of driftwood on Boulogne beach and stayed there for three-and-a-half weeks.’

HE STARTED working, aged 16, as a market trader, moved into dispatch riding then worked with his mother for nine years. Nowadays Jo lives in a rented Pimlico house with Serena and four others and spends his free time getting ‘completely smashed. But not drugs. I did a bit of pot from when I was about 12 and bits and bobs here and there when I used to go out seven nights a week.’

Jo is fiercely protective of his mother. Vivienne, who wears six-inch platform heels and peroxide pin curls while chainsmoking Gitanes, is the sort of parent who would mortify most offspring. ‘I was never embarrassed by her.’ He’s enthusiastic about her having a toyboy second husband, 25 years her junior. ‘It’s brilliant. Until recently Vivienne’s mother had one 40 years her junior.’

And sympathetic towards Vivienne turning up, aged 50, at Kensington Palace in a see-through dress. ‘She didn’t intend to. She wore a dress that she thought was beautiful and when you put camera flash on it, it went transparent. The same thing happened when they caught her at Buckingham Palace with no knickers on.’

But Jo scarcely sees Malcolm. He once paid for Jo to go on a school skiing trip, but insisted he read a book on the Sex Pistols first. ‘The day before I was due to go skiing, he wouldn’t let me go because I hadn’t read the bloody boring book.’

In the late Sixties, Malcolm and three friends dressed up as Father Christmas and went to Selfridges toy department where the store’s Father Christmas was already working. ‘They went through the department giving toys to all the kids. The staff were tearing around trying to find out which was the real Father Christmas. When the assistants tried to take back the toys, the mothers yelled, ‘How dare you, Father Christmas gave it to him’.’ His parents like to shock the stuffy English.