Vivienne Westwood: The punk dame of British fashion is no longer with us

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Her provocative and sometimes controversial designs defined the punk aesthetic and Vivienne Westwood would become one of Britain’s most famous fashion designers

Vivienne Westwood she was the designer who blazed a trail in the fashion industry, although she preferred the title of activist.

The punk dame of British fashion, who was at the forefront of fashion for almost 60 years, characterized the creations of the punk subculture and had the acceptance of the industry, although she herself never succumbed to the conformism of fashion.

Vivienne Westwood passed away today at the age of 81, her family announced in an Instagram post.

“Vivienne Westwood died today, peacefully and surrounded by her family, in Clapham, South London. Vivienne continued to do the things she loved, until the very end, designing, working on her art, writing her book and changing the world for the better. He lived an amazing life. The innovation it has brought and its impact in the last 60 years has been enormous and will continue in the future,” the announcement states, among other things.

Her husband and partner, Andreas Kronthaler, said: “I will continue with Vivienne in my heart. We worked until the end and it gave me a lot to do. Thank you my love”.

Born in the Derbyshire village of Tintwistle in 1941, Westwood’s family moved to London in 1957, where she attended the School of Fine Arts for a semester. A self-taught designer with no formal fashion training, Westwood learned how to make clothes as a teenager by experimenting with patterns and second-hand clothes she found in the markets to understand their cut and creation.

She met band manager Malcolm McLaren in the 1960s while working as a primary school teacher after separating from her first husband, Derek Westwood. The couple opened a small shop on Kings Road in Chelsea in 1971, which became a hangout for many of the bands it equipped, including the Sex Pistols.

Designer Vivienne Westwood

Her provocative and sometimes controversial designs defined the punk aesthetic and Vivienne Westwood would become one of Britain’s most celebrated fashion designers, combining historical references, classic tailoring and romantic embellishments with harsher and sometimes overt political messages.

Westwood’s first runway show, in 1981, for the ‘Pirates’ collection, was a major step for the punk revolutionary to make her mark in the fashion world. He always tried to find ways to shock. The Statue of Liberty corset in 1987 was started by her as a trend to wear underwear as outerwear.

Even as Westwood’s design empire grew into a multi-million pound business, the designer never lost her activist bent. In 1989 she posed for the cover of Tatler magazine dressed as Margaret Thatcher, above a caption that read: “This woman was once a punk.” He later told Dazed Digital that “the suit I was wearing was commissioned by Margaret Thatcher from Aquascutum, but she then canceled it”.

Designer Vivienne Westwood

Since her early punk days, Westwood has been remixing and inverting imagery, derived from the British monarchy. When she was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1992, the designer accepted the honor from Queen Elizabeth II wearing a modest gray skirt suit. Outside Buckingham Palace, she twirled the waiting photographers, revealing to the world that she was not wearing any underwear.

Vivienne Westwood was invited back in 2006 to receive the even more auspicious title of ‘Dame Commander of the British Empire’.

In the mid-2000s, Westwood turned her political interest to the climate crisis. In 2007 he published a manifesto in which he wrote: “We have a choice: to become more cultured, therefore more humane, or to become a self-destructive animal, the victim of our own intelligence (To be or not to be).”

In 2015, he drove a tank to the home of then-prime minister David Cameron in a protest against fracking. As a vegetarian, Westwood lobbied the British government to ban the retail sale of fur along with other leading designers such as Stella McCartney.

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