A truly revolutionary British designer

Vivienne Westwood: maverick designer, social commentator and iconic brand is a name synonymous with many of the most pivotal moments in British fashion, music and political history over the past 40 years. An uncanny ability to gravitate to the epicentre of a particular faction and dominate it; Westwood was central to the Punk movement in the mid 1970s, the New Romantics of the 1980s, at each juncture she ascended her Kings Road beginnings to the very top of the British fashion establishment. While there have been many occasions when Westwood has been out of step with the fashion world, she is a woman of great intellectual and self-taught creative vision who has thrived in a cutthroat environment because of her utterly authentic take on fashion and an unshakeable set of beliefs.

Influential Beginnings

It is difficult to think of the Punk movement without considering Westwood, her involvement and influence so strongly woven into its history. Her influence was in large part galvanised by her then partner Malcolm McLaren. Westwood and McLaren met in 1965 and their relationship is a creative partnership that has pervaded throughout popular culture. Guy Debord’s 1967 La Société du Spectacle had proven to be a source of inspiration for McLaren. Its subversive text and contradictory statements such as “be reasonable, demand the impossible” can be seen as providing a language to their creations within the many facades of their King’s Road store.

Throughout the 1960s, while many parts of central London was awash with boutiques selling ethnic attire, McLaren and Westwood opened 430 Kings Road, later renamed SEX. Acknowledging their conflict of interest with what they considered a middle-class notion, the store was undeniably intimidating: blurring the boundaries between an open fashion boutique and a concealed alternative culture. This was a place where perversity and curiosity merged, where voyeurs and punks congregated to create a unique clientele and no one encapsulated the SEX look better than The Sex Pistols; then managed by McLaren. The band provided an apt platform to showcase the couple’s designs and in doing so forged a lasting and turbulent relationship between image and style, identity and controversy.

1980 saw McLaren and Westwood’s interests diverge with McLaren gravitating toward music and Westwood to fashion and the 1980s became a key period in Westwood’s creative development. The Vivienne Westwood brand was beginning to crystallise, and an interest in contrasts – between type and form, constraint and overstatement– began to take shape. These elements have become staples of refinements, viewed like a seal of identity of her life’s work.

An Iconic Boutique

When many of London’s most remarkable and individual stores have closed around her, Westwood’s King’s Road store has remained, and it is a testament to the brand’s longevity and relevance to British fashion. The store has gone by many guises in the past 40 years: Let It Rock then became Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, which later became SEX before Westwood launched her apotheosis Pirate collection which inspired its current name, World’s End. Each identity the store consumed provided an outlet of something radically different to everything around it and the store itself is a staunch, in your face reminder that no one should settle for mediocrity.

The legendary World's End boutique

Through the Pirate collection Westwood wowed her peers and silenced her critics with swashbuckling clothes, dandies, buccaneers and the now infamous, billowing unisex shirt. Using history as an artistic reference afforded Westwood a plethora of techniques and ideas. Westwood’s inspiration has often emerged from plain tailoring in historical eighteenth century English menswear, hunting garments and tweed suits.

The unisex approach of the Pirate collection, much like Punk before it, eschewed the masculine profile of the 1980s and provided an alternative image as well as a cult following. The eye-lined and layered look was adopted by the New Romantics, entering mainstream fashion almost immediately. John Galliano reflected, “It’s impossible to think of the bands, the music and the spirit of both punk and the New Romantics without Vivienne’s work”. And while the creative reigns were edging closer to Westwood, McLaren was still an instrumental source of inspiration as Westwood attributed her of bra as outerwear concept to him. However, the use of corsetry as outerwear has chimed throughout the twentieth century in different forms by various designers, most notably Jean Paul Gaultier’s iconic satin cone bra designed for Madonna’s ‘Blonde Ambition’ tour to more recent adaptations by Comme des Garçons, used in their 2001 collection.

Westwood’s Influences

Westwood’s career is consumed with appreciation and reference to silhouettes, and in reviving colours, patterns and textures that other designers overlooked. In 1987 she created the Harris Tweed A/W collection, which would set the tone for her future work and confirm her place in the canon of British fashion over the subsequent ten years. Paying homage to another British institution Savile Row, the collection featured gabardine, knits and tweeds so suited to the British climate and sense of heritage; and the Westwood Savile jacket has become a constant thread in her collections ever since. Westwood highlighted the quality inherent in British manufacture and made heard-wearing fabrics fashionable again; paving the way for brands such as Barbour, Burberry and Paul Smith to utilise similar techniques.

Westwood is a woman with a strong social, if somewhat romanticised, conscious as well as an unparalleled eye for detail. No one would argue that Westwood is someone who speaks their mind; and in true Vivienne Westwood style, in 2007 she released a manifesto entitled Active Resistance to Propaganda. Even the word manifesto conjures Avant Garde notions, of extreme or politicised views and here Westwood is bursting with ideas on Art and Culture. The magnitude of Westwood’s ambition almost jumps off the page, with insights such as ‘’I make the great claim for my manifesto, that it penetrates to the root of the human predicament and offers the underlying solution.” However, sceptics may well ask if it is not hypocritical for a fashion designer to create clothes that encourage people to buy into a certain lifestyle while simultaneously discouraging the same group from consumerism.

But then that is part of our collective, enduring fascination with Vivienne Westwood: that contradiction of her own socialist views married with her high-end luxury designs, and the feeling that the clothes, much like their creator are an intricate tapestry of extremes, of detail and of intrigue.

2010/11 has seen Westwood bring her own brand of historicism to the catwalk with the Gold Label collection. As the models took to the stage with a flash of blue stockings, the scene was akin to a magical awakening, inspired by Prince Charming and extended to the painted moustaches that garnished the models faces. 2011 will see Westwood introduce the S/S Red Label and S/S Anglomania collections.

Vivienne Westwood's iconic catwalk designs have always been an intricate tapestry of extremes, of detail and of intrigue

The Designer’s Designer

While Westwood’s fashion clout has not always been acknowledged by the fashion elite – her work at one time often considered too remote, non-conforming or extreme. However, by the end of the 1980s she had cemented her status as the designer’s designer, championed by heavyweights such as John Galliano. Today, Westwood’s reputation is irreproachable with a global brand amassing an impressive turnover. Westwood’s star has been honoured with myriad accolades, including winning British Designer of the Year three times, while in 2004 the V&A museum produced a Vivienne Westwood retrospective so popular that has yet to stop touring.

An aptitude for design perpetuated by intellectual curiosity of the construction of things, their place in history and the extent to which something can be reused and relived – be that an idea, a fabric or a belief – it is Westwood’s approach to tradition and looking to the past has undoubtedly improved her own practice as a designer. History is the invisible thread stitched and imprinted into her designs; and at the V&A retrospective she commented that “the only thing I really do believe in is culture”.

Westwood applies a unique yet harmonious balance of the sensible – tartan and tweed and twin sets; with a wild imagination – fabric manipulating silhouettes, and proportions distorted, to produce an outlook on life and fashion so outrageous yet seems to make perfect sense. Her work is often imitated, yet Westwood remains at the forefront of fashion because she is a visionary who retains a rather individual sense of Britishness; which is an acute sense of heritage and tradition coupled with a wicked rebellious streak. From the shocking neon pink SEX sign to the unisex shirts and manifestos, when Westwood states that “you have a much better life if you wear impressive clothes” you sense it would be unwise to refute such good advice.

Vivienne Westwood’s Gold Label collection for Spring/Summer 2011