Vivienne Westwood, an influential fashion maverick who played a key role in the punk movement, died on Thursday aged 81.
Westwood’s eponymous fashion house announced his death on social media platforms, saying he died peacefully. The cause of death was not disclosed.
Westwood’s fashion career began in the ’70s with the explosion of punk, when his radical approach to urban street style took the world by storm. But she enjoyed a long career highlighted by a series of triumphant catwalks in London, Paris, Milan and New York.
The Westwood name became synonymous with style and attitude, although it changed focus from year to year. His range was wide and his work was never predictable.
As her stature grew, she seemed to transcend fashion, with her designs displayed in museum collections around the world.
The young woman who had scorned the British establishment eventually became one of its leading lights, using her elite position to lobby for environmental reforms, while keeping her hair dyed a bright orange shade which became his trademark.
Westwood, shown in 2007, was known for years for her bright orange hair. (Benoit Tessier/Reuters)
Race of contradictions
Andrew Bolton, curator of the Costume Institute at New York’s Metropolitan Museum, said Westwood would be celebrated for pioneering the punk look, combining a radical fashion approach with the anarchic punk sounds developed by the Sex Pistols, who were managed by her then partner, Malcolm McLaren.
“They gave the punk movement a look, a style, and it was so radical that it broke with anything in the past,” Bolton said.
“The torn shirts, the safety pins, the provocative slogans. She introduced postmodernism. She was very influential from the mid-70s. The punk movement has never dissipated, it has become part of our vocabulary of fashion. Now it’s mainstream.”
Model Grace Bol wears a dress designed by Westwood at London Fashion Week on February 22, 2015. (Alastair Grant/The Associated Press)
Westwood’s long career was full of contradictions: she was a lifelong rebel who was honored several times by the Queen. She dressed like a teenager even in her 60s and became an outspoken advocate for the fight against global warming, warning of planetary doom if climate change was not controlled.
She was also a vocal supporter of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Westwood, center, poses for photos during a protest in support of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange outside the Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court, on September 7, 2020. (Frank Augstein/The Associated Press)
In his punk days, Westwood’s clothes were often intentionally shocking: T-shirts emblazoned with drawings of naked boys and “bondage pants” with sadomasochistic undertones were standard fare in his popular London stores.
But Westwood was able to make the transition from punk to haute couture without missing a beat, maintaining her career without leaning into self-caricature.
Work called “demonstrative”, “transgressive”
“She was always trying to reinvent fashion. Her work is provocative, it’s transgressive. It’s very rooted in the English tradition of pastiche, irony and satire. She’s very proud of her Englishness, and she still delivers,” he said. Bolton. .
One of those transgressive and 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, he said it was intended as part of a statement against politicians who torture people, citing Chile’s Augusto Pinochet. When asked in a 2009 interview with Time magazine if he regretted the swastika design, Westwood said no.
“No, because we were just saying to the older generation, ‘We don’t accept your values and your taboos, and you’re all fascists,'” he replied.
A model wears a Westwood design at London Fashion Week on February 21, 2016. (Kirsty Wigglesworth/The Associated Press)
He approached his work with gusto in his early years, but over time he seemed to tire of the clamor and buzz.
After decades of designing, he sometimes spoke wistfully of moving beyond fashion to focus on environmental issues and educational projects.
“Fashion can be so boring,” she told The Associated Press after presenting one of her new collections at a show in 2010. “I’m trying to find something else to do.”
At the time, he was discussing plans to start a television series about art and science.
His catwalks were always the most stylish events, attracting stars from the glittering worlds of film, music and television who wanted to bask in Westwood’s reflected glory. But he still spoke out against consumerism and conspicuous consumption, even urging people not to buy expensive, well-made clothes from him.
“I just tell people to stop buying clothes,” she said. “Why not protect this gift of life while we have it? I don’t accept the attitude that destruction is inevitable. Some of us would like to stop it and help people survive.”
Westwood’s activism extended to supporting WikiLeaks founder Assange by putting him in a giant birdcage in 2020 to try to stop his extradition to the United States over the organization’s release of classified military records . He even designed the dress Stella Moris wore when she married Assange last March in a London prison.
Stella Moris, Assange’s partner, is pictured in her wedding dress designed by Westwood on March 23, 2022. The couple married in a London prison. (Dylan Martinez/Pool/Reuters)
World “a less interesting place” without her
Westwood was self-taught, with no formal training in fashion. She told Marie Claire magazine that she learned to make her own clothes as a teenager by following patterns. When she wanted to sell 1950s-style clothing in her first store, she found vintage clothes at flea markets and took them apart to understand the cut and construction.
She met Malcolm McLaren in the 1960s while working as a primary school teacher after separating from her first husband, Derek Westwood. She and McLaren opened a small shop in Chelsea in 1971, the end of the “Swinging London” era ushered in by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
The shop changed its name and focus several times, operating as ‘SEX’ – Westwood and McLaren were fined in 1975 for ‘indecent exposure’ there, and ‘World’s End’ and ‘Seditionaries’.
A model wears a creation designed by Westwood at its ready-to-wear fashion show in Paris on October 2, 2021. (Vianney Le Caer/Invision/The Associated Press)
Among the workers at her store was Sex Pistols bassist Glen Matlock, who called Westwood “a unique, driven, determined and talented woman” in a statement to The Associated Press.
He said it was a privilege “to have coincided with her in the mid-’70s in what was the birth of punk and the worldwide waves it created that still resonate and resonate today for the disaffected, hip, and savvy from all over the world.”
“Vivienne is gone and the world is a less interesting place,” Chrissie Hynde, frontwoman of rock group The Pretenders and another former employee, posted on Twitter.
A model wears a creation designed by Westwood at its ready-to-wear collection in Paris on September 30, 2017. (Francois Mori/The Associated Press)