Vivienne Westwood did not feel pretty as a child, but while roaming a wood near her family home in Derbyshire she dreamt of becoming a beautiful tree fairy.
“I daydreamed that I would be walking in this wood and I would have this little house under these tree roots. I would have this fantastic dress and just come upon one or two little boys that I knew and they would just really be impressed by this dress. I always had this idea that some day I could make myself better.”
She did. As fashion designer, revolutionary, iconoclast and emblem of English eccentricity she essayed a career that started by creating the look of the punk subculture of the mid-Seventies and ended with her moving into the fashion mainstream.
She may have come to fashion design at the comparatively late age of 33 but made an immediate and shocking impact as one of the chief progenitors of the punk aesthetic.
To realise her original vision of “a rock’n’roller who was also an urban guerrilla”, Westwood produced an aesthetic of ripped “bondage” trousers held together by safety pins, “Tits T-shirts”, spiked dog collars, moth-eaten mohair jumpers and swastikas, which she defended on the basis that “we were just saying to the older generation we don’t accept your taboos and your values and you’re all fascists”, as Westwood put it in her polite and considered voice that never lost its Derbyshire inflection.
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Thus attired, the band the Sex Pistols and their inner circle were in effect Westwood’s first fashion show as they spread anarchy in the UK, snarling, pogoing, gobbing and generally disporting themselves to the outrage of Middle England. Disenfranchised youths wore her designs or made their own versions in homage. Many of these followers were in it for hedonism and nihilism.
Westwood, who was never “into drugs”, was politically motivated from the start. “It was the idea that the world was so mismanaged that we hated the older generation because they weren’t doing anything about it.”
In the Seventies, at the height of her notoriety, Westwood took her creative direction from her then romantic and business partner, Malcolm McLaren (obituary, April 9, 2010), manager of the Sex Pistols. Yet when McLaren abandoned her and their business to pursue the anarchist subcultures of New York, Westwood came into her own, developing her skills as a seamstress to become a world leader in fashion. Even then Westwood never stopped feeling like an outsider.
A voracious reader and lover of history, the liberated Westwood became increasingly preoccupied with refashioning past cultures in modern times, exemplified by the Victorian corset and crinoline. It was not to be worn as an undergarment but as outerwear, translating it from a symbol of female repression to its antipode.
In an age when female fashion empowerment was exemplified by the shoulder pads worn by Joan Collins in Dynasty, Westwood liberated the corset as part of the dress that became known as the “mini-crini” in 1985. The corset was combined with a miniature and far sexier version of the Victorian structured petticoat.
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Jasper Conran said: “Vivienne’s effect on other designers has been rather like a laxative: Vivienne does and others follow.” From Westwood’s corset came Jean Paul Gaultier’s black satin conical bra for Madonna’s Blond Ambition tour and the now-ubiquitous crop top.
• Creations by the grand dame of fashion were as unique as she was
She went on to develop a more recognisably British style, incorporating traditional indigenous fabrics into her repertoire, such as tweeds, tartans and Argyll knitwear in witty reimaginings.
The idea for her celebrated Harris tweed collection in the autumn of 1987 was inspired by “a little girl I saw on the Tube one day. She couldn’t have been more than 14. She had a little plaited bun, a Harris tweed jacket and a bag with a pair of ballet shoes in it. She looked so cool and composed standing there,” said Westwood, who herself was instantly recognisable for her apricot-coloured wispy curls piled atop a whitened face while wearing her avant-garde creations.
Under the umbrella of her eponymous brand, she developed the semi-couture line Gold Label, a ready-to-wear line Red Label, Vivienne Westwood Man and the diffusion line Anglomania. When the model Naomi Campbell toppled over in a pair of purple mock-croc platforms at a Westwood show in 1993, the fact that it greatly boosted the model’s career and Westwood’s renegade brand spoke volumes.
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“I think women can be icons of beauty, hourglasses of femininity teetering along on high heels and everything,” Westwood said.
Westwood’s special brand of patriotic iconoclasm earned her the sobriquet “the alternative Queen Mother”. She revelled in the irony when she visited Buckingham Palace in 1992 to be appointed OBE. She caused a sensation when posing for the paparazzi outside the gates of the palace as she spun around in her skirt without underwear.
“I wished to show off my outfit by twirling the skirt. It did not occur to me that, as the photographers were practically on their knees, the result would be more glamorous than I expected,” she recalled. “I have heard that the picture amused the Queen.” She was advanced to a damehood in 2006.
Vivienne Isabel Swire was born in Tintwistle near Glossop, Derbyshire, in 1941, the eldest of three children to Gordon Swire, who was descended from a long line of shoemakers, and Dora (née Ball). Her parents ran a greengrocer and post office in the town.
The child would spend long hours reading by the warmth of the range as her mother cooked while exclaiming of her daughter to no one in particular: “Oh, she’s in her glory.”
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It was an idyllic childhood in the Peak District in which her happiest times were spent climbing and jumping out of trees.
“I wanted to be a hero and saw no reason why I couldn’t be one,” she recalled. Vivienne first learnt to be a seamstress at the knee of her mother, who made clothes for the family. Bright enough to attend Glossop Grammar School, she was making tailored suits by 16.
A year later, Vivienne’s parents moved to Harrow, northwest London, to become postmasters. Westwood was unhappy at her new London school because she felt self-conscious about her Derbyshire accent. Tall and striking with long, dark hair, she had a very particular but conventional dressing style.
After school, she embarked on a silversmithing course, but it was short-lived because she was more interested in earning a wage. She learnt to type and found work as a secretary.
The green-eyed Westwood’s favourite pastime was rock’n’roll dancing, for which she made her own dresses and padded her bras to ape the glamorous and voluptuous look sported by stars of the late Fifties such as Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren. In later years, Westwood’s clothes would make women look sexy and curvaceous. “Fashion is about sex,” she said.
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It was while jiving in late 1961 that she met Derek Westwood, an accomplished dancer and tool shop apprentice. In 1962 the handsome pair were married and they moved to a house on the same street as her parents. A year later she gave birth to Ben Westwood (today a soft-porn photographer) and took on a teaching position at a primary school in Willesden, where she felt a kindred spirit with the “naughty ones”, who were often from the poorest families, and would take them on camping weekends.
Her husband was devoted to her but a life driven by convention left Westwood feeling claustrophobic and unfulfilled. In 1965 she left Derek despite his pleadings because “I was not learning from staying with him”. A few months later, she moved into a squat with her brother and met a student called Malcolm McLaren, who was also living there.
He was 19 and known to his contemporaries as “Talcy-Malcy” on account of the talcum powder he applied to his head in an attempt to disguise his red hair. She struck up an unlikely friendship with McLaren that led to her taking his virginity.
Westwood became pregnant in early 1967. McLaren obtained money from his grandmother to procure what would still have been an illegal abortion, but on the way there Westwood had a change of heart and spent the money on a coat from Bond Street. She and McLaren set up home in south London.
McLaren was angry with the world and his lot in life, having been abandoned by his parents at an early age. He enrolled at art school, evangelical about art’s political power and obsessed with cult fashions. A natural svengali, he encouraged her to supplement their meagre income, a composite of state benefits and student grants, by designing jewellery and selling it on a stall in Portobello Road market.
“I latched on to Malcolm as someone who opened doors for me,” she recalled. “I mean, he seemed to know everything I needed at the time.”
He also advised her to abandon her “dolly-bird” aesthetic and don the uniform look that was to remain a recurring Westwood motif. Five years later, again on his advice, Westwood took a razor to her hair, dyed it flame-red and created a style that would not only be popularised by David Bowie but would also become the hallmark of punk.
In November 1967 Westwood gave birth to Joseph Ferdinand Corré (co-founder of Agent Provocateur in 1994). McLaren did not take easily to fatherhood and refused either to be present at the birth or for the child to later call him “Dad”.
For the next decade, father and mother were intermittently together. Money was so scarce that at times Westwood was forced to scavenge Clapham Common for food and pack the children off to boarding schools with no intention of paying the bills. When her sons were aged 13 and 9, she ordered them to cycle to Devon to visit their grandparents, sleeping in a tent on the way. When Ben arrived home on Mother’s Day and gave her some daffodils, Westwood threw them away in front of him and told him that Mother’s Day was a load of “bollocks”.
By 1971, after McLaren had graduated from art school, they scraped together enough cash to take over the shop floor of 430 Kings Road in what was then still an affordable and bohemian Chelsea.
The Westwood-McLaren partnership first traded under the name Let It Rock and sold an eclectic mix of Fifties vinyl, memorabilia and clothing that had either taken their fancy from market rummaging or that Westwood had copied and run up on her sewing machine. Signature pieces were drainpipe trousers and brothel-creeper shoes. Despite it being the heyday of the hippy chic popularised by Ossie Clark, this was a shrine bravely devoted to a world of bubble-gum popping youth fashions and musical tastes of the late 1950s. The shop found an instant niche, and by 1973 it had become cool enough to supply the wardrobe for Ringo Starr in That’ll Be the Day.
The shop would have four reincarnations: in 1972 it was renamed (in tribute to James Dean) Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, then Sex, in 1974, to taunt a prudish public with its sale of fetish gear. Westwood, dressed in the garb that adorned the rails, would police the shop like a dominatrix, ordering customers to leave if they so much as raised an eyebrow at what was on sale.
In 1976 the shop became Seditionaries in response to her and McLaren being sued for sedition for the anti-royalist designs that featured the Queen’s face. In 1981 the shop was finally renamed Worlds End — a name that remains today.
In 1976 McLaren had taken on the management of the Sex Pistols. While the group were brilliant publicists for the shop, his interest in them indicated his mind was straying from his ventures with Westwood.
His absence gave her an opportunity to take centre stage. She put their teenage son, Joe, in charge of her fledgling fashion business and in 1981 she created her first collection for the autumn/winter of London Fashion Week. Westwood had always slaked her thirst for knowledge by lapping up art and literature, and she called the collection Pirate in reference to her buccaneering through history to plunder inspiration from dandy highwaymen, French revolutionaries and the traditional costumes of Native Americans. The collection would greatly influence young British designers including John Galliano and Alexander McQueen and help to fire up a movement that would put British fashion on the global map.
The collection inspired the look of New Romantic bands such as Spandau Ballet and Adam and the Ants. She had a show the next year in Paris, the first British designer to do so since Mary Quant in 1963. Lady McAlpine, whose husband was a Conservative Party treasurer, was an early patron and earned particular compliments from Margaret Thatcher when she turned up in Downing Street in a Westwood creation.
Buoyed by her growing profile, Westwood opened a second shop called Nostalgia of Mud on St Christopher’s Place near Bond Street. However, her early fame did not lead to financial success and Westwood was struggling with bills: she was often forced to pay her employees in clothes.
By 1984 the business was on the brink of bankruptcy as the second shop was forced to close and McLaren finally left to pursue his musical interests in New York. They had been a couple off and on for nearly 20 years and McLaren had often been verbally and physically abusive. He did not give her the credit she deserved for creating the look of punk, referring to her as “my seamstress”. He had, however, given her a parting gift of encouraging her to start a fashion business in her name in their last years together.
At about this time Westwood met Carlo D’Amario, an Italian businessman who had been impressed by her work and amazed by her lack of cash. He saw in Westwood a business opportunity, bought 30 per cent of the company and became managing director. He also became her lover.
By 1984 the romantic union between Westwood and D’Amario had ended, although he continued in his position at the helm of an ever-expanding and now international brand. In 1990 Westwood had been appointed professor of fashion at the Vienna Academy of Applied Arts.
It was an important appointment not only because it vindicated her creative achievement, something that Britain only later did through two exhibitions of her work — first in 2000 at the Museum of London and then in a retrospective at the V&A in 2004 — but because it was through this that she met her future husband, Andreas Kronthaler. Westwood, who had been largely single since the final break-up with McLaren nearly a decade before, married the student 25 years her junior in 1993.
Kronthaler, who survives her along with her children, became a creative director of the business. Westwood said of her marriage: “I’ve never been more sure of anybody in my life than Andreas.” With her husband in charge of the day-to-day running of the house of Westwood, she focused more of her time and energy on campaigning for action on climate change, protesting against fracking and declaring her support for Julian Assange.
For all the opulence of her clothes, Westwood lived an unpretentious life outside fashion that was remarkable for its lack of extravagance. Despite owning the considerable part of a business that had a multimillion-pound annual turnover, she lived with Kronthaler for several years in a former council flat in Clapham because it was convenient for cycling to and from her studios in Battersea. She did not own a mobile phone or read newspapers, and cadged other people’s cigarettes. She could quote Bertrand Russell at the drop of a hat.
Westwood did not retire. By 2015 she was reported to have 12 retail outlets in the UK and 63 worldwide and had plans to open big outlets in Manhattan and Paris. Some commentators wondered how she could square her environmental and “anti-fast fashion” credentials when she was increasingly growing her global empire and moving into more affordable retail. When she appeared in a feature-length documentary about her life and work, Vivienne Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist, in 2018, she was noticeably more prickly than her hitherto charming persona, but the film demonstrated her enduring appeal. Her estimated personal wealth was $185 million and in recent years she was the largest donor to the Green Party.
Westwood said using her platform to campaign for the causes she cared about was part of the same thread that had motivated her and McLaren to shock Britain in the Seventies. “What I’m doing now is still punk,” she said. “It’s still about shouting about injustice and making people think, even if it’s uncomfortable. I’ll always be a punk in that sense.”
Dame Vivienne Westwood, fashion designer, was born on April 8, 1941. She died on December 29, 2022, aged 81
