Fashion and Style Icon Vivienne Westwood Dies at 81
Last week, the world mourned as we lost another infamous legend.
British fashion designer and style icon Vivienne Westwood passed away peacefully last Thursday at her London home surrounded by family. She was 81.
To the media, Westwood was “the high priestess of punk” and the “Queen of Extreme.” To the fashion world, she was a beloved character who energized and pushed the boundaries of the industry until her death. She twirled sans culottes for photographers after receiving her Order of the British Empire from Queen Elizabeth II in 1992 and made the front cover of Tatler Magazine in April 1989, dressed in an Aquascutum suit that was intended for Margaret Thatcher.
Frankly, Westwood didn’t give a damn.
Born Vivienne Isabel Swire in Derbyshire, England on April 8, 1941, her mother worked as a weaver at local cotton mills, and her father came from a family of shoemakers. She began making clothes for herself as a teenager.
After a term at Harrow Art School, she worked as a primary school teacher and married a factory worker, Derek Westwood, in 1962. However, everything changed when she left her husband and met Malcolm McLaren in 1965.
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“I felt as if there were so many doors to open, and he had the key to all of them,” she told Newsweek in 2004.
In the 1970s, McLaren managed punk band the Sex Pistols, and from a shop on London’s King’s Road, Westwood helped develop a visual grammar for the punk movement. The shop changed names—Let It Rock; Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die; Sex; Seditionaries—but you couldn’t escape its impact on the street.
“It changed the way people looked,” Westwood told Time Magazine in 2012. “I was messianic about punk, seeing if one could put a spoke in the system in some way.”
Westwood’s clothes ranged from fetishistic bondage gear to massive platform shoes and slogan T-shirts. Seditionaries famously sold a T-shirt showing the Queen with a safety pin through the royal lip.
Eventually, the designer moved on, and in 1981, Westwood launched her first catwalk collection with McLaren. The gender-neutral clothes evoked the golden age of piracy, highwaymen, dandies, and buccaneers. Westwood studied old tailoring techniques and subverted them, an approach later imitated by other British designers like John Galliano and Alexander McQueen.
Over the course of the decade, Westwood eclectically inspired inspiration. She introduced the mini-crini (combining the tutu and Victorian crinoline), flesh-colored tights with modesty fig leaves, and signature corsetry worn as outerwear; she designed frocks for women with breasts and hips, and she would experiment with Harris tweed and tartan.
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In the eyes of John Fairchild, the then-all-powerful editor of Women’s Wear Daily, Westwood was considered one of the six most influential designers of the 20th century alongside Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, Giorgio Armani, Christian Lacroix, and Emanuel Ungaro. Westwood was the only woman, the only Brit, and the only designer on his list who was not already a multi-million-dollar brand.
According to Jane Mulvagh’s 1998 biography, Vivienne Westwood: An Unfashionable Life, in 1989, Westwood was still living in an ex-council flat in South London and was “virtually bankrupt.”
In 1992, Westwood married an Austrian design student, Andreas Kronthaler, 25 years her junior. They worked as co-designers before he took over her ready-to-wear line in 2016.
In a statement released with the announcement of her death, Kronthaler says, “I will continue with Vivienne in my heart. We have been working until the end, and she has given me plenty of things to get on with. Thank you, darling.”
Tributes honoring and remembering Westwood immediately poured in from around the world following the announcement of her passion. Model Bella Hadid posted photos taken with the designer on Instagram and wrote, “I will forever be grateful to have been in your orbit because to me and most, in fashion and humanity, you, Vivienne, were the sun.”
British Vogue editor-in-chief Edward Enninful also paid tribute on his Instagram, describing the designer as “a true icon of British fashion and an irreplaceable force in the industry.” And on Twitter, singer Boy George wrote “R.I.P. to the great and inspiring Vivienne Westwood who lead us through punk and beyond,” adding, “she is the undisputed Queen of British fashion.”
Westwood was a passionate activist on issues that ranged from the climate to free speech, and The Vivienne Foundation, a nonprofit company founded by Westwood, her sons, and granddaughter in late 2022, will officially launch next year. According to her spokespeople it will “honor, protect, and continue the legacy of Vivienne’s life, design, and activism.”
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