Who Was Vivienne Westwood?

One of the most important designers of the twentieth century, Dame Vivienne Westwood came from a working-class family and overturned the understanding of fashion for decades to come. She was a rebel, a non-conformist, and the mother of many trends—from 1970s punk to the revival of historical costumes in daily life. She passed away in December 2022, but her legacy as the fashion icon will linger for much longer than anyone could have expected. Read on to learn more about Vivienne Westwood’s incredible artistry and inspirations.

Vivienne Westwood was born in 1941 into a working-class English family. In her childhood and adolescence, making clothes from scratch and mending or repurposing old garments was neither a hobby nor a fashion statement but a harsh necessity created by wartime limitations. She demonstrated artistic inclinations from her early years and even enrolled in a London art school to study jewelry design, but she quit several months later. She became convinced that a working-class woman in need of supporting herself could not make any money from creating art. She then moved on to become an art teacher at school and she eventually got married and had a son.

However, the lifestyle of a housewife was never enough for the creative spirit of Vivienne Westwood. Her marriage dissolved after she met Malcolm McLaren, an aspiring music manager and ambitious entrepreneur. McLaren ran a dozen projects at once, which included a record store, a second-hand shop, and managing several bands including the Sex Pistols, New York Dolls, and other legends of the young punk scene. Together with her new partner, Westwood started to sew clothing based mostly on his designs.

The Early Years: From Punks to Pirates

Westwood implemented elements of bondage into suits and made tops out of latex. She and McLaren spelled words (mostly obscenities) on t-shirts with sewn-on chicken bones. SEX subverted the visual codes of femininity and masculinity. It did not invent anything new but instead revealed the hidden undercurrents of the public mind, provoking outrage and anger.

The controversial shop became the gravitating point of a very specific crowd, mainly young people dissatisfied with the political and social circumstances, with traditional family and career expectations. They were angry and confused and often hid their confusion with aggression and drug use. Vivienne Westwood’s project was pivotal in transforming a group of protesting youth into a full-blown subculture that would later take over podiums and mass media. Punk ridiculed everything sacred to the previous generations, from fashion to politics.

However, as her creation started to blend in with the mass culture, Westwood decided to step away from it. She studied fashion history and art, searching for new solutions and references that could transform her brand into something more sophisticated and complex. The new and final version of the shop received the name World’s End and it still operates under the same title today. The main inspiration for the shop came from pirates, the original punks of the old world.

The Pirate collection became the first one to be presented officially as a fashion show by the brand. To conceive it, Westwood researched the library archives of the Victoria & Albert Museum, looking into the history of piracy. She revived centuries-old patterns and prints by mixing them with modern cuts and shapes. Knowing the violent history of pirates’ world exploration and their clashes with the Indigenous peoples, the designer decided to transform appropriation into appreciation, referencing African and South American motifs in her work. Her protesting nature revealed itself in the deliberate opposition to the trends, with podiums dominated with tight skinny trousers, Westwood introduced a wide and baggy fit taken directly from the fashion history archives.

The collection had tremendous success with industry professionals and fashion lovers but not with the average public. Mainstream television shows started to invite Westwood to demonstrate her collections to their audience. Yet, their main intention was not to highlight the diversity of British fashion but to ridicule the supposedly tasteless and egocentric young designer. However, Vivienne was not offended by such coverage.

According to Westwood, her rebellion came not from the need to rebel on its own but from the desire to understand the mechanism of the normative and acceptable. As punk fashion, music, and ideology moved to the mainstream and were diluted by capitalism, she moved on to something radically different. But what was the ultimate opposition to the raw, dirty, loose-fitting nihilism of punk? Structure, tradition, and craftsmanship–all found in the centuries-old history of English tailoring.

Westwood’s references to the British aristocracy and their lifestyles brought up many controversies and misunderstandings. Some believed she was mocking the elites from her working-class perspective while discreetly envying them, while others insisted her works were made with great respect. Such an ambiguous approach brought her closer to some contemporary artists like Yinka Shonibare. Shonibare, a British-Nigerian artist, also works with the historical costume of the English elite from the position of an outsider. In that sense, his works represent both a voyeuristic obsession with the unattainable lifestyle and the desire to reveal its flaws. As for Westwood herself, after becoming famous she always insisted on her deep admiration of monarchy and aristocracy.

Vivienne Westwood and Rococo 

Over the years, Vivienne Westwood reinvented and reimagined elements of historical fashion, transforming it to modern aesthetic and functional requirements. One of her legendary collections from the 1990s titled The Portrait reintroduced corsetry, turning it from a mythologized restrictive element to a functional garment, manipulating body forms and silhouettes. The reputation of corsetry as a torture device imposed on women was never entirely true, since the eighteenth-century corsets allowed for mobility and helped distribute the body weight correctly, lowering the pressure on the spine.

Originally worn as undergarments, Westwood corsets were intended to be seen and admired. To further link the silhouette to its history and subvert its meaning, she covered them with prints of paintings by the famous French Rococo master Francois Boucher. Boucher was famous for his erotic imagery that was on the verge of what was acceptable, demonstrating intimacy and desire between his figures. For Westwood, this revelation of the intimate continues the idea of turning underwear into outerwear and questioning the limits of public and private.

The excessive, frivolous, and eccentric aesthetic of Rococo art and fashion was pivotal for Westwood’s signature style. Apart from reprinting paintings on fabric, she often took a more literal approach, directly taking dress designs from paintings by Thomas Gainsborough and Jean-Honore Fragonard. In 2019, Gainsborough’s House in Sudbury loaned four silk dresses from the designer and put them on display within their permanent exposition of Thomas Gainsborough’s works. These dresses were directly inspired by eighteenth-century designs featured in paintings, with their fabrics cut and treated in the same tradition.

Paintings from the centuries past were not the only artistic inspirations in Westwood’s long creative life. In 1982, she met Keith Haring and was immediately struck by his seemingly simple style. From simple figures, Haring designed patterns and complex tapestries of symbols reminiscent of ancient occult artifacts. As a result, Westwood and Haring designed a collection together. Titled The Witches, the 1983 show blended hip-hop, ancient hieroglyphics, Haring’s prints, and the new femininity. This was also the last collection Westwood ever created with Malcolm McLaren. The pressure put by McLaren was both professional and personal, resulting in domestic abuse and violence. Until his death in 2010, McLaren continued to bitterly insist that he was the real creative power behind the brand.

One of the most significant features of Westwood as a designer was her constant opposition to the normative and fashionable silhouettes of the season. The loose and voluminous garments from The Witches contrasted with tight-fitting and structured 1980s fashion. The crinoline skirts and corsets attacked the trendy form of accentuated padded shoulders. The concept of reinventing historical fashions for Westwood was a reaction to the continuous obsession with novelty that would later transform into her staunch activist position on sustainability and climate change.