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Vivienne Westwood, the yellow-haired, red-lipped iconoclast who pushed fashion forward in the statement punk era, died today at the age of 81 in London, surrounded by family and friends. often to the point of eccentricity), Westwood was always open, always original and never afraid to spit on our assumptions.
Westwood’s fashion career was special, partly because of its longevity, but mostly because of the longevity of its influence. In the 70s, she, along with Malcolm McLaren, architected fashion into a platform for activism through their boutique and clothing brand SEX. In the 80s, she plunged into mainstream fashion with twin suits and skirts that mocked the upper class (and whose attitude foreshadowed the nihilism of the 1990s); and in the 1990s and 2000s, her expertly cut romantic gowns became wedding gowns and red carpet staples. Her ruby-tipped fingerprints are on designers from John Galliano, Alexander McQueen and Martin Margiela to a generation of emerging talent including Glenn Martens, Matty Bovan and Nancy Dojaka.
Even today, its positions are harsh, confrontational. The press release announcing her death also shared a typically acid statement Westwood made shortly before she died: “Julian Assange is a hero and has been treated cruelly by the UK government. Capitalism is a crime. It is the root cause of war, climate change and corruption.”
Over the past decade, Westwood has become a hero to Gen Z fashion fans, who have made her corsets one of the most collectible pieces of the archival fashion movement. Prices for corsets vary from 2000 dollars to upwards of $6,000 for the most coveted examples with track pedigree. Even in her later years, when her former student and husband Andreas Kronthaler was at the helm of her brand of the same name, she happily sat in the front row of her shows, where the language she created – the form cheeky, obsessed with history, fused with an interest in the global world. costumes – was always visible. Last March, she took the stage at the finale of her show to accept a bouquet from Bella Hadid, who closed the show.
Westwood had the rebellious streak from her early years. Raised in the working class, she dropped out of art school and became a teacher, thinking there was no way she could make a living as an artist. After an early marriage that resulted in a child (and gave her the surname “Westwood”), she met McLaren, with whom she would open a clothing store in London that ran through several names and themes – Teddy Boy, rockabilly – in front of the couple. landed on live “SEX”. The shop became both a club and an incubator for London’s punk movement. The Sex Pistols – which McLaren founded after visiting New York and discovering raw, thumb-in-the-eye bands like Television and The Ramones – were appointed to help advertise the store. The commercial hawk eye that Westwood and McLaren always brought to their efforts complicates the common complaint that punk was somehow corrupted by attempts to capitalize on its appeal and that have dogged the genre from the time McLaren formed the Sex Pistols to at the Met Museum’s Costume Institute 2013. exhibit honoring punk’s contribution to fashion.
SEX marked the first project where Westwood would demonstrate her ability as, if not a fortune teller, then a woman consistently ahead of her time. Her instinct that fashion could be political, even a platform for social change and outrage, foreshadowed the mindset of what is now called streetwear, where fashion is not a subculture—as it was in the Paris designer ateliers that still ruled fashion when Westwood appeared- but an aspect of popular culture itself. She and McLaren, her co-designer, were also early champions of graphic tees. putting illustrator Jim French’s whimsical “Two Cowboys” on a slim, ragged-edged t-shirtAND a woman’s account of rape in regular italics on a film-like cotton flannel. The shop sold fetish clothing such as harnesses and patent leather shoes to sex workers and aspiring musicians, creating a loop of influence as they dared the musicians to adapt their wares, and the musicians dared them to take their clothes even further. One of their most fantastic creations was a strapped cotton shirt that suggested a parachute or straight jacket and featured a portrait of Karl Marx. It became an unlikely phenomenon: designers from Martin Margiela to Rei Kawakubo to Shayne Oliver to Rick Owens have paid homage to the piece.
In the 1980s, Westwood migrated into mainstream fashion, although this change had its effect more with influence, instead of a sale. In class-paranoid England, she took on the uniforms of the wealthy, from the pumps and waistcoats worn by 18th-century glamourous men to the wasp-waisted dresses and corsets that dotted 19th-century ballrooms – and turned them into something funny. they were cold. (Her partnership with McLaren ended in the middle of this decade.) In 1985, she introduced a small but comically wraparound miniskirt that she called the “mini crini,” adding the bushy layers of crinoline (hence the “crini”) supporting women’s clothing. long front dresses in past centuries under the sexy desperation of the miniskirt. Those skirts, even today, seem like a parody of our expectations of propriety and sexiness, and how these two qualities are rarely expected to meet. They were widely copied (and depoliticized) by more established designers, notably Christopher Lacroix. By the end of that decade, the puffy miniskirt was seen as an emblem of the folly of the decade’s capitalist excesses, an evolution that surely made Westwood raise her eyebrows with glee.
Minimize it.
In the 1990s, Westwood continued to pillage English fashion history to chilling effect. She took to tartan and mutton-sleeve jackets and dressed in wild noises that seemed pointless and silly until the model spun on the runway and the clutch fabric suddenly accentuated her erotic sway. This was the decade in which she reclaimed the corset, challenging the view of feminists and fashion historians that the undergarment was a tool of oppression, a trick that constricted women into creatures that moved the first torso. In Westwood’s hands, it was outerwear, not a secret weapon of feminine pain hidden behind a blouse or dress, and she used flexible fabrics instead of stiff bones to make it more comfortable. She printed a number of paintings from London’s Wallace Collection in pieces, turning them into decorative canvases intended to be displayed as an instrument of liberation. She seemed to like the idea that a woman was welcome to squeeze or sculpt or alter her body with clothes or shoes if it made the choice to do so. The famous photo of Naomi Campbell strutting down the runway in ridiculous platforms and laughing is from Westwood’s fall 1993 show. Last season, in a show titled Cafe Society, Westwood sent Kate Moss in a striped micro-skirt with her arm draped over her bare chest as she licked a bar of Magnum ice cream. (A version of the skirt is available on 1stDibs for nearly $4,000.) The audience applauded. It’s hard to imagine any female designer doing this today without controversy (or even wanting to!). But her dedication to making bold statements no matter how they’re expected is what made her a formidable fashion talent.
While most designers who rose to prominence in the 1970s or 1980s had faded by the mid-2000s, Westwood remained a staple. Who can forget Gwen Stefani fantasizing about her 2004 hit “Rich Girl”: Clean Vivenne Westwood, in my Galliano dress…? Stars like Jennifer Aniston, Kim Kardashian and Dita Von Teese have worn her dresses with their busts expertly draped.
Westwood was a lifelong activist, and her unapologetic positions were sometimes seen as outlandish, especially in her later years. (New York Times published an account of one of her protests in support of Assange in 2021.) As consumers and climate activists have become more aware of how the global supply chain and chemical-derived synthetic fabrics create environmental waste, Westwood has often been criticized for making its clothes in China with plastic and polyester. Close followers of high-fashion Twitter and TikTok commentary know that fashion’s newest followers are a house apart in Westwood; Is she a quintessential rebel, or someone who’s played it both ways, protesting environmental catastrophe while partaking in the excesses of the fashion system? Still, her work from the past three decades is beloved by Gen Zers, leading the archival fashion movement, and her death will surely add to the collection of her vast contributions to fashion history.
And that’s probably how she’ll be best remembered, once the dust settles about the validity of her political positions. Even today, the fashion industry is populated by very few female designers, and Westwood’s work throughout her career was consistently significant for its outrageous statements about how the female body was believed, theorized, or politicized. The display of breast-printed T-shirts she and McLaren sold at SEX, or the corsets she made two decades later, seemed to curl their lips and bark. I know what you’re thinking. She had an obsessive, magical relationship with the history of fashion, taking popular costumes with all their semiotic hooha and commenting on them in terms of how we see ourselves and insistently insisting that no article of clothing has any “fixed” meaning. everyone shares. Instead, her work suggested, a designer’s job is to add constantly, and above all else complicate, our assumptions about style, identity and clothing, reinterpreting and recontextualizing clothing. This is also what made her a true original: she raged against the status quo while reveling in the beauty of historical costume. And she could do this with a joyful tension, because she didn’t seem to see the creation of art and clothing as a tug of war between creating something new and tradition. Instead, she ran into what seemed to be non-negotiables—bumps, corsets, frocks, and even what words were suitable for wearing a blouse – with sizzling sticks of dynamite and apply them with a couturier touch.
Rachel Tashjian is the Fashion News Director at Harper’s Bazaar, working across print and digital platforms. Before, she was GQthe first fashion critic and worked as deputy editor of GARAGE and as a writer in Vanity Fair. She has written for publications including Book Forum AND Artforumand is the creator of the invitation-only Wealthy Tips newsletter.
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