Westwood, Vivienne

▪ 2005

      On April 1, 2004, a retrospective devoted to the creations of Vivienne Westwood opened at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. “Vivienne Westwood: 34 Years in Fashion” was the largest exhibition the museum had ever dedicated to a British designer. Westwood was best known, however, for her association with Malcolm McLaren, the manager of the Sex Pistols, the 1970s punk-rock band that captivated hordes of disaffected youths with its anger-laced politically subversive anthems.

      Vivienne Isabel Swire was born on April 8, 1941, in Glossop, Derbyshire, Eng. She was a schoolteacher before she married in 1962 and had her first child. A self-taught designer, in 1965 Westwood met and moved in with McLaren when he was an 18-year-old painting student, and they pursued a career in fashion together. Initially, they operated Let It Rock, a stall selling secondhand 1950s vintage clothing, along with McLaren's rock-and-roll record collection. “He took me by the hand and made me more stylish,” claimed Westwood of the charismatic McLaren, who fathered her second child and encouraged her to style her hair into an avant-garde spiked, peroxided crop. She produced clothing designs based on his provocative ideas, and their customized T-shirts—ripped and emblazoned with shocking antiestablishment slogans and graphics—rubberwear, and bondage trousers—black pants featuring straps inspired by sadomasochistic costume—flew out of the London shop of which the couple became proprietors in 1971. Their boutique— variously named Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die; Sex; and finally Seditionaries—was a youth fashion mecca. Their erotically charged fashion image enraged Britain's right-wing press, however. Soon after Westwood and McLaren staged Pirates, their first commercial ready-to-wear collection, in 1981, they ended their personal relationship. They remained professional partners for an additional five years, but Westwood soon established her identity as a leading independent designer. Her “mini-crini” design—a thigh-grazing crinoline produced in both cotton and tweed that debuted as part of her spring-summer 1985 collection—marked a turning point. For the next two decades she created collections that took inspiration from classical sources, notably the paintings of Jean-Honoré Fragonard, François Boucher, and Thomas Gainsborough, as well as historical British dress, including the 19th-century bustle, which Westwood incorporated under elaborate knitwear dresses and tartan miniskirts. Though Westwood's later collections (in collaboration with her second husband, Andreas Kronthaler) were no longer consistently at fashion's cutting edge, her accomplishments were recognized in 1992 when she was made OBE. A year later she was appointed professor of fashion at the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin.

      Independently, Westwood built her own eponymous mini fashion empire, operating boutiques in London and Hong Kong and producing two menswear and three women's wear collections annually as well as bridal clothes, shoes, hosiery, eyewear, scarves, ties, knitwear, cosmetics, and two perfumes, Boudoir and Libertine.

Bronwyn Cosgrave

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