The death yesterday of Dame Vivienne Westwood, aged 81, marked the departure not only of one of the fashion industry’s most iconoclastic personalities but also of Britain’s most influential designer to date.
Naomi Campbell, Helena Bonham Carter, Nigella Lawson and Kim Kardashian are but a few of the women who have worn her famously rigorous and boned underpinnings. Inspired by the fashions of the 18th century, Westwood’s cocktail frocks owe more to the Old Masters of that period than its corsets in their consideration of the voluptuous bodies beneath. When it came to dressing real-life curves, Vivienne Westwood was a rare progressive. This made a sell-out success of her eponymous label, which soared from 1970s street punk to big screen Sex and the City status in the 2000s.
Westwood was ahead of her time in other ways too. From the early days of punk in the late Seventies to the birth of climate activism in the Noughties, she was a pioneering force in deciding not just what was cool but also what was worth believing in. She was one of the first to outline her worldview on a T-shirt — and to persuade others to buy them in their droves.
Back then, they read “SEX” or “Seditionaries”, but in recent years the slogans included pleas to keep emissions below the 1.5 degrees needed to halt climate change and her own motto — unheard of among most fashion brands motivated by sales — “buy less, choose well, make it last”.
With sex, safety pins and a healthy dose of irreverence, Westwood was at the forefront of London’s punk movement for the must-have slashed and distressed T-shirts she and her partner, the impresario Malcolm McLaren, who also managed the Sex Pistols, sold from their boutique in Chelsea.
Advertisement
● Read more: Vivienne Westwood obituary
Her first few collections in the early Eighties brought the cutting-edge looks of Chelsea’s coolest kids and the art school crowd to the masses with buckled pirate boots, swagged poet-sleeved blouses and the buccaneer-cut wool coats that her label still sells.
Yet Westwood’s career soon transcended London’s pavements to its catwalks, where the northern-born, straight-talking designer put her own rebellious spin on ideas knowingly filched from high art as well as haute couture.
Her 1990 “Portrait” collection printed François Boucher’s 18th-century nymphs and shepherdesses on to bustiers and her own patented mini-crini(oline) skirts to present a modern take on rococo sexiness. Forget the delicate slippers of Fragonard’s The Swing — Westwood’s version of baroque comeliness came with visible knickers and suspender belts; it was her 9-inch stacked platforms from which Naomi Campbell famously fell in 1993.
As this paper’s fashion editor, I know Westwood’s fashion week shows as one of the few brands that were regularly stormed by the capital’s design students. They turned up swathed head to toe either in her creations or those inspired by her “make do and mend” aesthetic. While she sold luxury items for thousands of pounds, Westwood also encouraged her acolytes to knit, chop, graffiti and stitch in their bedrooms to create the same look, inspiring a generation of internationally acclaimed British designers who came in her wake, such as Dior’s Kim Jones, John Galliano and Gareth Pugh.
Advertisement
Many of them started their careers as interns at her studio in Stockwell, where Westwood told her team to take Fridays off to visit galleries in order that they might find inspiration on their walls. As her career matured, Westwood’s own passions moved beyond paintings and into the political, with many of her collections in the past decade highlighting environmental issues and arguing for the importance of freedom speech.
Famously, in 1992, she collected her OBE from Buckingham Palace sans underwear beneath a beautifully tailored dove-grey skirt suit.
For all her irreverence and anarchy, Westwood was also an ambassador for British style and eccentricity.
Despite her DIY punk beginning, she became one of the first British designers to earn a slot on Paris’s prestigious haute couture schedule. Westwood wove British imagery into her design DNA, first in mockery and then in earnestness — her 1987 collection “Harris Tweed” was a sexy urchin take-off of stuffy upper class tradition that gave the Scottish woollen mill a new lease of commercial life and cool that it continues to enjoy.
Of the woven tweed crown that model Sara Stockbridge wore on the cover of the style bible i-D that year, Westwood said: “It’s comic, but terribly chic.”
Advertisement
Perhaps it is fitting then that this designer, often styled ironically in pincurls and pearls, and so involved with the pop cultural desecration and modern rebrand of British heritage, should depart in the same year as the woman whose image she once helped lance with a safety pin.
In pictures
