A single word can be more meaningful and more dangerous than a complete sentence. In Vivienne Westwood's case her early T-shirt with a simple message, "Destroy", a Nazi swastika, an inverted image of Christ on the cross, and a Queen Elizabeth II stamp with her head severed by an invisible axe, summarized Westwood's desire to dismantle old values and taboos, surpassing prejudices and discriminations with her anti-establishment punk ethos.
A creative force that defined fashion for decades, the British designer died yesterday at the age of 81, surrounded by her family, in Clapham, South London, as announced by the brand on its Instagram account.
Born in 1941 in Tintwistle, in the East Midlands, England, Vivienne Isabel Swire had a happy childhood, playing freely in the woods surrounding her family house, developing as a young child a passion for making clothes, embroidering and reading.
When she was 17, she enrolled in a fashion course at Harrow Art School (now the University of Westminster), but, frustrated by the fact that the course was about drawing rather than making clothes (an art she had learnt following patterns and taking apart second-hand clothes to learn more about their construction), she switched onto jewelry and silversmith. A term into the course she dropped out, then went to work at a Kodak factory and eventually trained to become a teacher. After specializing in art, she started working as a primary school teacher.
In 1962 she married her first husband, Derek Westwood, and they had their first child, Ben, a year later. But her life radically changed when she met Malcolm McLaren in 1965.
A friend of her brother, McLaren passed into history as the manager of the Sex Pistols, but he was also instrumental in a major shift of career in Westwood's life.
Together they co-owned the iconic shop on 430 Kings Road in London's Chelsea that saw many incarnations: launched as Teddy Boy clothing boutique Let It Rock (1973) it transformed into rockers' haven Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die (1973) and, by the mid-70s, turned into the S&M heaven Sex (1974) with its iconic sign in padded plastic pink letters (View this photo).
In 1976, the boutique changed its name again into Seditionaries, while bondage trousers, safety pins and Westwood's "Anarchy" shirt – an old striped shirt with several slogan patches, an image of Karl Marx and the sentence "Only anarchists are pretty" stencilled on the front – marked a key shift towards the punk aesthetics that, rejecting the establishment, ended up influencing generations of fashion designers in the years that followed.
After the death of Sid Vicious in 1979 and the collapse of punk, Westwood moved on: the boutique changed its name again turning into Worlds End, and, in 1981, Westwood debuted her first fashion show in London.
Entitled "Pirates" her first collection combined her passion for modern touches (her pirates' fave accessory on the runway was the Walkman cassette player), with her fascination with art and history, two inspirations that she kept on referring to throughout her life.
Punk was left behind in favour of bold and bright colours and gold shades (albeit the gold on the models' teeth was just the tinfoil of cigarette packets….).
This new androgynous and romantic mood was perfectly embodied by McLaren's new music project, Bow Wow Wow that in the video for "I Want Candy" sported Westwood's creations. Singer Annabella Lwin also donned in the video the "inter titty" T-shirt, that featured a sort of fabric tube that connected the breasts (View this photo). Yet, despite its playfulness, the collection was actually drenched in history as Westwood studied the past in volumes such as Wolfgang Bruhn and Max Tilke's Kostümwerk (A pictorial history of costume) to create her assemblages for the future.
In 1983 with her collection "Witches", Westwood launched the first proper fashion collaboration with an artist when Keith Haring allowed the designer to use for free his works for her prints and jacquard knits.
In the meantime, Westwood's relationship with the often abusive McLaren, who considered her just "a seamstress", came to an end in 1983. Westwood wished to sell the brand to Fiorucci in Italy, then signed in 1984 a seven-year licensing agreement with Giorgio Armani (who got exclusive rights to her name, but never produced anything and was eventually sued by Westwood in 1987 for failing to pay her).
Westwood's inspirations evolved in 1984 when she met Gary Ness who introduced her to Chinese paintings and ballet. Petrushka, staged for the first time in June 1911 by the Ballets Russes at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, became the starting point for Westwood’s spring 1985 "Mini Crini" collection. The latter featured an iconic garment, a pouf mini-skirt with a crinoline. Some of the designs included in the collection with their cartoonish polka dots also had a Minnie Mouse twist about them.
In 1986 Westwood's fascination with royalty inspired her the orb logo to which she added the ring of Saturn to symbolise her desire to take traditions into the future as she did a year later when she reinvented a traditional British fabric, Harris Tweed.
In her A/W 1988-89 collection, Westwood collaborated with the Wallace Collection and, getting inspired by its armours, created a series of jackets, corsets and coats with articulated fabric plates recreating the structure of personal body armours.
In 1988 Westwood started teaching at the University of Applied Arts Vienna where she met a student, Andreas Kronthaler, an Austrian 25 years her junior who became her third husband and collaborator.
Awarded an OBE from Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace in 1992, Westwood accepted it in a rather sober and conservative gray suit-skirt. Yet, while twirling to show off the photographers her outfit, she unintentionally revealed her bare crotch. Once a punk always a punk, you may argue, and indeed her anti-establishment attitude allowed her to preserve her rebellious stance even in formal occasions.
In 1989 she posed for the cover of Tatler magazine (April Fools edition) dressed as UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (in a suit Thatcher had ordered but not collected) to mock the politician she deeply disliked. The image was accompanied by the caption: "This woman was once a punk".
A committed activist, Westwood tirelessly campaigned for climate and social justice throughout the 2000s: in 2011 she often turned up at the anti-capitalist Occupy the London Stock Exchange camp at St Paul's Cathedral; in 2013, Westwood attended a protest outside the Russian Embassy in London in support of the 30 Greenpeace activists charged with piracy at a Russian oil platform in the Arctic; in 2015, she drove a tank to the house of the then Prime Minister David Cameron in Oxfordshire, in a protest against fracking. She also lobbied the British government to ban the retail sale of fur and was an outspoken supporter of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Never afraid to speak her mind in a fashion world where too many designers simply choose to shut up afraid they may otherwise lose their customers, Westwood often sent out to fashion fans anti-consumerist messages, encouraging people to buy fewer but better clothes or simply to stop buying new garments.
Quite often her climate emergency slogans appeared on T-shirts at her runway shows as did her politics: in September 2014, the designer sent out on her Red Label collection runway models wearing "Yes" badges hinting at the Scottish independence referendum.
Westwood actually harboured a special passion for Scotland, and often employed tartan in her creations. She produced her own pattern - the "Westwood MacAndreas", incorporating in it her name and her husband’s.
Developed for her Autumn/Winter 1993 "Anglomania" collection, the tartan was officially recognised in the Scottish Register of Tartans and woven by the world's leading tartan manufacturer, Lochcarron of Scotland.
In 2021, on her 80th birthday, Westwood made a short film entitled "Do Not Buy a Bomb" for CIRCA, which commissions artists to create new works for Europe's largest screen in London's Piccadilly Circus. In a written address accompanying the film, Westwood launched an appeal to stop wars that now, with the war in Ukraine approaching its first anniversary, sounds prophetic.
In the appeal she stated: "I have a plan 2 save the World. Capitalism is a war economy + war is the biggest polluter, therefore Stop War + change economy 2 fair distribution of wealth at the same time: NO MANS LAND. Let's be clear, U + I can't stop war just like that. But we can stop arms production + that would halt climate change cc + financial Crash. Long term this will stop war (…) I have always combined fashion with activism: the one helps the other. Maybe fashion can Stop War. 'Buy Less Choose Well Make it Last' Don't buy a car Don't buy a bomb!"
Celebrated in a retrospective at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2004, the designer has often been considered the Alice in Wonderland of fashion: her clothes were indeed deemed "wonderfully mad" or "fantastic enough to be worn at the Mad Hatter's tea party," in John Fairchild's 1989 memoir "Chic Savages". In the book Fairchild considered Westwood one of the world's six greatest designers, the only woman along with the likes of Yves Saint Laurent, Giorgio Armani, Karl Lagerfeld, Emanuel Ungaro and Christian Lacroix.
Westwood's radical approach to fashion inspired many designers including John Galliano and the late Alexander McQueen.
But you can bet that her creations - including her tailored Harris Tweed suits, her kilts and corsets; her gold prints on velvet reminiscent of Madame Gallenga's experiments and her ballet costumes; or her perilous platform shoes such as the 5in platform soles and 12in heels that caused a young Naomi Campbell to take a tumble during Paris Fashion Week in June 1993, or her iconic Rocking Horse ballerina platforms - will keep on inspiring younger generations to rediscover her modus operandi and her passion for history.
There are indeed never-ending connections between art and history in her collections, in particular in her "Portrait" collection (A/W 1990-91) that featured palettes borrowed from the landscapes in the background of Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough's paintings, golden motifs inspired by the decorations on the back of a mirror by cabinet maker André Charles Boulle and François Boucher's painting Daphnis and Chloe (View this photo) replicated on corsets.
Her "Cut and Slash" collection presented at Pitti Uomo in July 1990 referenced instead 1500s menswear with slashed doublets made in denim donned by dancer and choreographer Michael Clark who appeared for the occasion on the runway, recreating the Ghillie Callum dance (that he had already performed during Westwood's "Time Machine" A/W 1988-89 show).
This collection also featured other art correspondences: in particular a white knitted jacket called to mind the attire in Giovanni Battista Moroni's Il sarto (The Tailor, 1565), while the pink jackets with geometrical slashes evoked the palette of Moroni's portrait of Gian Gerolamo Grumelli (also known as Gentleman in Pink, 1560).
Westwood is survived by Kronthaler who will bring her vision forward, and by her two sons, fashion photographer Ben Westwood (her son with Derek Westwood) and Joseph Corré, co-founder of lingerie company Agent Provocateur (her son with Malcolm McLaren).
Britain loses its last punk designer with Westwood, but her spirit lives on in the punk aesthetics you may encounter in London, in particular in the creations of Herbie Mensah, a catwalk regular for Westwood, who now sells his designs made from second hand clothes in Portobello Market, London, and through his website, and in the collections of younger designers à la Matty Bovan and Charles Jeffrey Loverboy.
Times changed, fashion mutated, but Westwood never lost her passion for pedagogy: she was often quoted saying that the best fashion accessory is a good book.
So, as a tribute to her, you may want to spend the last hours separating us from the new year with a good book, maybe re-reading her 2016 "Get a Life: The Diaries of Vivienne Westwood", a collection of her online posts chronicling her involvement with art, politics and the environment, and her adventures - from driving in a tank to David Cameron's house to going to Naomi Campbell's birthday party.
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