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LONDON – Vivienne Westwood, an influential designer who played a key role in the punk movement, died on Thursday at the age of 81.
The Westwood fashion house announced her death on social media platforms, saying she died peacefully. The cause of death was not disclosed in the statement.
Westwood’s fashion career began in the 1970s with the explosion of punk, when her radical approach to urban street style took the world by storm. But she went on to enjoy a long career highlighted by a series of triumphant shows in London, Paris, Milan and New York.
The name Westwood became synonymous with style and attitude even as she shifted her focus from year to year. Her range was wide and her work was never predictable.
As her stature grew, she seemed to transcend fashion, with her designs appearing in museum collections around the world. The young woman who had scorned the British establishment eventually became one of its leading lights, and she used her elite position to lobby for environmental reform, even though she kept her hair dyed the bright shade of orange that became her trademark .
Andrew Bolton, curator of the Costume Institute at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, said Westwood would be noted for pioneering the punk look, combining a radical approach to fashion with the anarchic punk sounds developed by the Sex Pistols, managed by her partner of that time. Malcolm McLaren.
“They gave the punk movement a look, a style, and it was so radical that it broke away from anything in the past,” he said. “Torn shirts, safety pins, provocative slogans. It introduced postmodernism. It was so influential from the mid-’70s. The punk movement has never gone away – it’s become part of our fashion vocabulary. Now it’s mainstream.”
Westwood’s long career was full of contradictions: She was a lifelong rebel who was honored several times by Queen Elizabeth II. She dressed like a teenager well into her 60s and became an outspoken advocate against global warming, warning of planetary doom if climate change was not controlled.
In her punk days, Westwood’s clothes were often deliberately shocking: T-shirts emblazoned with drawings of naked boys and “bondage pants” with sadomasochistic undertones were standard fare in her popular London stores. But Westwood was able to make the transition from punk to high fashion without missing a beat, maintaining her career without stooping into self-caricature.
“She was always trying to reinvent fashion. Her work is provocative, it’s transgressive. It’s very much rooted in the English tradition of pastiche, irony and satire. She’s very proud of her Englishness and yet she delivers it,” Bolton said. . .
One of those offending and contested designs featured a swastika, an inverted image of Jesus Christ on a cross and the word “Destroy.” In an autobiography written with Ian Kelly, she said it was intended as part of a statement against politicians who torture people, quoting Chile’s Augusto Pinochet. When asked if she regretted the swastika design in a 2009 interview with Time magazine, Westwood said no.
“No, because we were just saying to the older generation: ‘We don’t accept your values or taboos and you’re all fascists,'” she replied.
She approached her work with gusto in her early years, but over time she seemed to tire of the hustle and bustle. After decades of designing, she sometimes spoke longingly of moving beyond fashion so she could focus on environmental issues and educational projects.
“Fashion can be so boring,” she told The Associated Press after unveiling one of her new collections at a show in 2010. “I’m trying to find something else to do.” At the time, she was talking about plans to start a television series about art and science.
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