Vivienne Westwood, an influencer fashion style who played a key role in the punk movement, died Thursday at the age of 81. Westwood’s fashion house of the same name announced her death on social media platforms, saying she was gone. peacefully. A cause has not been disclosed. “Vivienne continued to do what she loved, until the very end, designing, creating art, writing books and changing the world for the better,” the statement read.
Westwood’s fashion career began in the 1970s when her radical approach to urban street style took the world by storm. But she has gone on to enjoy a long career marked by a string of successful runway shows and museum exhibitions.
Name Westwood became synonymous with style and attitude even as she shifts focus from year to year, her scope is wide and her work is never predictable. As her stature grows, she seems to transcend fashion. The young woman who once despised the British establishment has finally become one of its leading lights, even as she still dyes her signature bright orange hair.
Andrew Bolton, curator of the Costume Institute at New York’s Metropolitan Museum, said Westwood and Sex Pistols curator Malcolm McLaren – her one-time associates – “gives a face to the punk movement. looks, a style, and it’s so radical that it breaks everything in history. past.” (Also read | Vivienne Westwood combines a message of ecology with regal Parisian fashion)
“Tear-up shirts, pins, provocative slogans,” Bolton said. “She introduced postmodernism. It’s been very influential since the mid-’70s. The punk movement has never gone away — it’s become part of our fashion lexicon. Now it is mainstream.
Westwood’s long career was full of contradictions: She was a lifelong rebel honored several times by Queen Elizabeth II. She dresses like a teenager despite being in her 60s and has become an outspoken advocate against climate change, warning of the destruction of the planet.
During his punk days, Westwood’s clothes were often deliberately shocking: T-shirts emblazoned with drawings of naked boys and sadistic “tights” were standard items. in her famous stores in London. But Westwood was able to transition from punk to high fashion without missing a beat, keeping her career going without the need for caricatures herself.
“She is always trying to reinvent fashion. Her job is provocative, it’s outrageous. It is very much rooted in the British tradition of ridicule, irony and satire. She’s very proud of her English, and she still sends it on,” Bolton said.
One of those controversial designs featured a swastika, an inverted image of Jesus Christ on the cross, and the word “Destroy.” In an autobiography written with Ian Kelly, she said that meant as part of a statement against politicians torture people, citing Augusto Pinochet of Chile. When asked if she regrets the swastika in one 2009 interview with Time magazine, Westwood said no.
“I don’t, because we just wanted to say to the previous generation, ‘We don’t accept your values or your taboos, and you are all fascists,'” she replied. .
She approached her work with gusto for the first few years, but then seemed to tire of the hustle and bustle. After decades of designing, she sometimes talks wistfully about moving beyond fashion to focus on environmental issues and educational projects.
“Fashion can be boring,” she told The Associated Press after presenting one of her new collections at a 2010 show. “I’m trying to find something else to do.”
Her runway shows are always the most luxurious, attracting stars from the glittering worlds of film, music and television who want to bask in Westwood’s reflective aura. . But she still speaks out against consumerism and conspicuous consumption, even urging people not to buy her beautiful, expensive clothes.
“I just tell people not to buy clothes anymore,” she said. “Why not protect this gift of life when we have it? I am not of the opinion that destruction is inevitable. Some of us want to stop that and help people survive.”
Westwood’s activism extends to supporting Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, posing in a giant birdcage in 2020 to try to prevent his extradition to the US. She even designed the dress that Stella Moris wore when she married Assange this past March in a London prison.
Westwood was self-taught, with no formal training in fashion. She told Marie Claire magazine that she learned to sew her own clothes as a teenager by following patterns. When she wanted to sell 1950s-style clothes at her first store, she found second-hand clothes at the market and took them off to understand the cut and construction.
Westwood was born in the village of Glossop, Derbyshire on 8 April 1941. Her family moved to London in 1957 and she attended art school for one semester.
She met McLaren in the 1960s while working as a primary school teacher after breaking up with her first husband, Derek Westwood. She and McLaren opened a small shop in Chelsea in 1971, the end of the “Swinging London” era opened by The Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
The store has changed its name and focus several times, operating as “SEX” – Westwood and McLaren were fined in 1975 for an “indecent exhibit” there – and “World’s End” and “Seditaries” “.
Among those who work at their store is Sex Pistols bassist Glen Matlock, who called Westwood “a gifted, driven, uniquely minded lady” in a statement to the Associated Press.
He said it was a privilege “to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with her in the mid-’70s as the birth of punk and the global waves it created continued to resonate and reverberate until now.” today to the disgruntled, discerning and wise across the globe.”
“Vivienne is gone and the world has become a less interesting place,” Chrissie Hynde, the Pretenders heroine and another former employee, wrote on Twitter.
Westwood switched to a new design style with the “Pirates” collection, which was showcased during her first catwalk show in 1981. That foray is said to have catapulted Westwood into a more traditional direction. , demonstrating her interest in incorporating historic British designs into contemporary clothing.
It is also an important step in the ongoing partnership between Westwood and the fashion world. The Rebel eventually became one of its most famous stars, known for reinterpreting opulent dresses from the past and often finding inspiration in 18th-century paintings.
But she still managed to shock: Her 1987 Statue of Liberty corset is remembered as the beginning of the “underwear as outerwear” trend.
She eventually expanded into a range of businesses, including an alliance with Italian designer Giorgio Armani, and the development of her ready-to-wear Red Label line, her more exclusive Gold Label line, the collection. Men’s clothing and perfume collection called Boudoir and Libertine. Westwood stores are open in New York, Hong Kong, Milan and several other major cities.
She was named designer of the year by the British Fashion Council in 1990 and 1991.
Her uneasy relationship with the British establishment is perhaps best illustrated by her 1992 trip to Buckingham Palace to receive her Order of the Order of the British Empire: She wore no underwear and pose for photographers in a way that clearly shows that.
Apparently the queen was not offended: Westwood was invited back to receive the even more auspicious title of Lady Commander of the British Empire – the equivalent of a female knight – in 2006.
Westwood is survived by her second husband, Austrian-born designer Andreas Kronthaler, with her branded fashion line, and two sons.
The first, fashion photographer Ben Westwood, is her son with Derek Westwood. The second, Joe Corre – her son with McLaren – co-founded the high-end lingerie line Agent Provocateur and once burned what he said was a multi-million dollar collection of punk memorabilia: “Punk never was. , never meant nostalgic,” he said.
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