The political statement was an integral part of Vivienne Westwood’s fashion – at times to the chagrin of husband and co-designer Andreas Kronthaler. “She likes clothes to have a message,” the Austrian said in the 2018 documentary Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist, directed by Lorna Tucker. The British woman was married to the 25-year-old man, her former fashion student, for around 30 years. The Queen of Punk, as she was affectionately known in Britain, died on Thursday at the age of 81.
Looking back on her life story and her career seems to have horrified Westwood. “Do we have to discuss all this?” she complained in the documentary. “It’s so boring.” Hardly anything in Westwood’s life was boring. The fashion anarchist and activist caused a stir throughout her life with provocative messages and flashy outfits. Her whole career was built around royal robe-inspired, freaky, glamorous dresses, which helped her break through. Her name stood for the proverbial English eccentricity.
The daughter of a cotton spinner and grocer from the English county of Derbyshire had always been a bit unusual. Born Vivienne Isabel Swire on April 8, 1941 in Tintwistle near Manchester, she is said to have even made fashion changes to her school uniform. The good life was not for her. At 21, she married dancer Derek Westwood, with whom she had a son, photographer Ben Westwood.
But then she met art student Malcolm McLaren, founder and manager of the punk band Sex Pistols. Westwood’s path was paved. Together with McLaren, she opened her first boutique on London’s King’s Road in 1970. The shop quickly became the heart of the young punk scene. The name changed like fashion: “Let it rock”, “Too fast to live, too young to die”, “Sex”, “Seditionaries” (inciters) and finally “World’s end”.
Westwood created the first outfits for Johnny Rotten and Co. with safety pins, mesh shirts and studded bracelets – and thus created the iconic punk look. Even after she split from McLaren, with whom she also has a son – Joseph Corre, co-founder of lingerie brand Agent Provocateur – she remained true to her rebellious creativity. Above all, inspiration from the fashion of the 18th and 19th centuries was her trademark – albeit in shrill, offbeat, eccentric variations.
“I didn’t consider myself a fashion designer at all, but I found I was very talented,” Westwood says in Tucker’s documentary. “I wanted people to know that the stuff they see on the runway in Paris is mine. And I figured, I need to get into this business and really sell the clothes, present them to the journalists and be a fashion designer. I knew I could do it.”
Fashion alone was never enough for Westwood. In any case, she didn’t originally have a career in the industry in mind. “I didn’t want to be a fashion designer,” she clarified in Time magazine in 2009. “I preferred to read and do intellectual things.” She dropped out of art studies after just one semester to train as a teacher – with art as her major. Her plan: “I will try to become an artist. And if I can’t be an artist, I’ll become a teacher.”
London’s Victoria and Albert Museum described Westwood as a “revolutionary and rebellious force in fashion”. British culture minister Michelle Donelan praised the designer as an “outstanding personality”. She set new standards with her punk style in the 1970s. Westwood has “stayed true to her own values throughout her life,” the minister added on Twitter.
Westwood made her breakthrough as a designer in 1981 with a show where she presented her legendary “Pirate Collection”. She turned provocation into an art form. Top model Kate Moss, for example, sent her down the catwalk with bare breasts and eating ice cream. Their colleague Naomi Campbell nearly fractured an ankle when she couldn’t stand up straight on a pair of 9-inch platform heels.
In her punk days, Westwood deliberately wore shock effects with her clothing: T-shirts with drawings of naked boys, “bondage pants” with sadomasochistic overtones. She made the transition from punk to haute couture without a hitch. “She was always trying to reinvent fashion,” says Andrew Bolton, curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “Your work is provocative, it transcends boundaries. It is very much rooted in the English tradition of satire and irony and satire. She’s very proud of her Englishness, and yet she ridicules it,” Bolton said.
One of her borderline and controversial creations featured a swastika, an inverted image of Jesus Christ on the cross, and the word “Destroy.” In an autobiography written with the support of Ian Kelly, Westwood, citing former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, said the work was part of a statement against politicians who torture people.
When asked by Time magazine in an interview in 2009 whether she regretted the swastika design, she said no. “I don’t because we just said to the older generation: ‘We don’t accept your values or your taboos and you are all fascists'”.
Westwood had been married to the Austrian Kronthaler, who was 25 years his junior, since 1992 and took over the artistic direction of her fashion label in 2016. During her long career, the designer also designed wedding dresses, including for Sarah Jessica Parker’s character Carrie Bradshaw from “Sex and the City”. In 2014, Westwood designed new uniforms for Virgin Atlantic flight attendants.
For a long time, the punk pioneer with the pale skin was committed to human rights, peace, animal welfare and the fight against the climate crisis. The big show was always part of Westwood’s staging, because it guaranteed her attention. In 2015, she was driven in a white tank to the home of then British Prime Minister David Cameron to protest against fracking gas production. Last year, she caused a stir with a protest for the release of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange: in a bright yellow outfit, she sat in an oversized birdcage in front of a courthouse in London.
Initially ridiculed at home and even laughed at on television in the late 1980s, Westwood was named British Designer of the Year in 1990 and 1991.
Her difficult relationship with the British establishment is perhaps best illustrated by her trip to Buckingham Palace in 1992, where she received the Order of the British Empire: She was not in her underwear and posed for photographers in a way that made this obvious. Apparently the Queen wasn’t offended: Westwood was invited back in 2006 to be knighted by Elizabeth II as Dame Commander of the British Empire – the female equivalent of knighthood.
While Dame Vivienne, as she was officially called, was still punk at heart, her fashion had long been part of the establishment. The Queen’s granddaughter, Princess Eugenie, wore a Westwood dress to William and Kate’s 2011 wedding. Even former Prime Minister Theresa May wore one of her pants suits. Nevertheless, she did not become the court fashion designer of the royals. She recommended that style icon Duchess Kate reduce the number of her outfits – for reasons of environmental protection.