Vivienne Westwood once said: “You have a more interesting life if you wear impressive clothes”. Her own life was testament to the theory.
Fashion’s great iconoclast, who has died at the age of 81, began her career as a primary school teacher but would go on transform the way young Britons, and much of the wider world, dressed.
Alongside then-partner and Sex Pistols band manager Malcolm McLaren, she established the look of punk in the mid-1970s. And in so doing, she also changed conceptions of how clothing could be used to express — or in Westwood’s case, reject — social and political norms and shape group identity.
“[She] not only defined an epoch, but shaped ensuing generations’ reactions to the world around them, both aesthetic and ideological,” FT men’s fashion critic Alexander Fury wrote in his book Vivienne Westwood Catwalk: The Complete Collections.
Her work routinely defied convention. She sent frayed and distressed clothes down the catwalk during the if-you’ve-got-it-flaunt-it years of the 1980s, and dreamt up lavish, French Rococo-inspired collections as fashion pivoted to minimalism in the 1990s.
She was insatiably curious about British historical dress, often incorporating Irish linens and Scottish tartans and tweeds into her designs. In this she influenced the work of later designers including John Galliano and the late Lee Alexander McQueen.
But in later years it was her activism, rather than her clothes, that made headlines. In 2015 she rode up to then-prime minister David Cameron’s house in an armoured vehicle to protest his government’s fracking policy, and in 2020 locked herself in a giant bird cage to protest WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s proposed extradition to the US. She was also an outspoken critic of capitalism even as her own fashion business expanded, with stores in a dozen countries.
Her rebelliousness occasionally took a humorous turn. She showed up knickerless to receive her OBE at Buckingham Palace in 1992.
Vivienne Isabel Swire, the daughter of a factory worker and cotton weaver, was born in Derbyshire in 1941 and for five years taught in primary school.
She met McLaren in the early 1960s after separating from her first husband Derek Westwood, and taught herself how to cut, drape and sew. In 1971, the pair began selling their designs in the heart of the British upper-class establishment, at 430 King’s Road in Chelsea, in a shop first called Let It Rock. The Sex Pistols wore their clothes, and as they shot to fame in the mid-1970s, so did Westwood and McLaren.
The Teddy Boy clothes of their early years gave way to designs inspired by sexual fetishism — bondage trousers with a zip in the crotch, cleaning maid’s dresses of black and red rubber, stilettos with spikes.
Westwood and McLaren enjoyed shocking the public, and succeeded: tees and muslin shirts printed with provocative printed slogans led to their prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act. In response, they renamed their shop Sex.
“It was about smashing all of the values,” she recalled of those first designs, “all the taboos of a world that was so cruel and unjust, mismanaged and corrupt.”
The pair’s entrée into high fashion began in 1981 with the debut of their first catwalk collection, Pirate, which was inspired by 17th- and 18th-century portraits and initiated the “New Romantic” look that was to sweep the fashion world.
By the end of the 1980s she was, in the estimation of John Fairchild, publisher of Women’s Wear Daily, one of the six most important designers in fashion. In his 1989 memoir Chic Savages, Fairchild described her as “the designer’s designer . . . copied by the avant-garde French and Italian designers because she is the Alice in Wonderland of fashion and her clothes are wonderfully mad”.
In 1988, she met fashion student Andreas Kronthaler. They co-designed her spring/summer 1991 collection, and in 1992 they married.
In later years Kronthaler took full responsibility for the collections, which he always dedicated to Westwood and were inspired by her archives. At his shows she sat in the front row where, each season, he would present her with a bouquet of flowers before taking a bow.
“I will continue with Vivienne in my heart,” Kronthaler said in a statement. “We have been working until the end and she has given me plenty of things to get on with.”
Her family said it planned to launch the Vivienne Foundation next year “to honour, protect and continue the legacy of Vivienne’s life, design and activism”. The not-for-profit will focus on issues related to climate change, war, human rights and capitalism.
