Watching fashion-week runway footage from seasons past usually means pulling up whatever clips you can find on YouTube, often grainy or muted. How often can we say we’ve actually seen iconic shows from decades ago with the original music and atmosphere intact, let alone with a behind-the-scenes look? It’s an experience only offered in museums. Seeing them in theaters with popcorn and a Diet Coke? Impossible.

And yet, recently rediscovered footage of the complete Worlds End Paris catwalk collections that Malcolm McLaren designed with Vivienne Westwood is screening for the very first time in New York as part of Anthology Film Archives’ Malcolm McLaren retrospective. The archival footage documents the four World’s End prêt à porter (ready-to-wear) collections presented in Paris between 1981 and 1984: “Nostalgia of Mud,” featuring the Buffalo Gal (1981), “Punkature S/S” (1983), “Witches A/W” (1983-84), and “Worlds End S/S” (1984). These collections show a clear jump from the in-house offerings of McLaren and Westwood’s famous Sex, then Seditionaries, then Worlds End store in London, as the designers fleshed out their worldview to complete runway shows. Everything from Blade Runner stills mixed with eighteenth-century toile de Jouy (vintage printed cloth) to self-described, handcrafted “hillbilly” looks was fair game, and nothing was off limits. The result set the fashion establishment on fire.

Best known as the provocateur who formed the Sex Pistols and Westwood’s partner in crime (and briefly, in love), McLaren’s influence extended beyond music and fashion into film. These newly resurfaced reels reveal the theatricality of the Worlds End label, which came after McLaren and Westwood’s infamous 1980 Paris debut with their “Pirates” collection. The film shows models with seemingly boundless energy leaping across the runway sporting silhouettes shaped by Westwood’s encyclopedic historical knowledge, all set to McLaren’s evolving demo tracks for Duck Rock, his first solo album.

This double feature offers a rare glimpse into McLaren’s obsession with “the look of music and the sound of fashion,” and into the early visual world that helped shape punk, fashion, and British style at large, a multimedia approach that predated today’s anything-goes runway shows. The Worlds End presentations treat clothing more as ideology than product, driven by an authentic desire to thrill (or shock). But the footage highlights a creative peak, it also marks a period of growing strife. By the time of “Witches A/W,” McLaren and Westwood’s personal and professional relationship was coming to an end, leaving space for Westwood to shift her focus to her eponymous label. Westwood left Worlds End to McLaren as she pioneered a pairing of historical dress and futurism in her first truly independent collection, “Hypnos,” in 1984.

Running until January 28,  the Malcolm McLaren retrospective doesn’t focus on his relationship with Westwood, though she does appear in two recently rediscovered works that will be screened publicly for the very first time: McLaren’s unfinished art school film project, Oxford Street (1969–71), and the documentation of his 1980s Worlds End catwalk shows in Paris with Vivienne Westwood. The latter is of particular note for true Westwood devotees: it’s one thing to glimpse rare runway footage, it’s another thing entirely to take a peek behind the curtain.

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