The near-impossible task of honouring Vivienne Westwood has to begin by saying this: above all, she was a great Englishwoman – a unique designer who pushed fashion history forward, and who then used all of her power to stand up for the future of the world. Her death, on 29 December 2022, sent waves of images reverberating through memory. Vivienne as the provocateur of punk. Vivienne pioneering Pirates and mini-crinis. Vivienne as a modern-day Boudicca in a magnificent cape, riding a tank past the constituency home of then-prime minister David Cameron to protest against fracking in 2015.
It feels only right to quote Vivienne’s call to action – one snippet of speech in her nonstop campaigning – which her family and husband, Andreas Kronthaler, posted on their announcement of her death. “Stop climate change. This is a war for the very existence of the human race. And that of the planet. The most important weapon we have is public opinion.” She commanded, “Become a freedom fighter!” At 81, Vivienne Westwood was as aligned to what young people care about as ever; the grandmother battling forward in her hand-scrawled Buy Less T-shirt, and to hell with the establishment.
As a young journalist, I had a crick in my neck looking up to her. Partly, that was because she set her catwalks high. It certainly was on the unforgettable day she sent Sara Stockbridge and Susie Bick (now Cave) waltzing out, throats dripping with pearls and bosoms bouncing above corsets printed with François Boucher’s rococo painting Daphnis and Chloe. Risqué bloomers bedecked in tassels and luscious bows flirted along. Hourglass dresses were gilded with elaborate 18th-century patterns. It was 1990, her Portrait collection. The astonishing thing – our mouths were open in wonder, watching it – was how many times one woman was capable of turning the tide of fashion, eyes sparkling with conviction, against the travails of pennilessness and public derision. Instead of some underground presentation, there we were under chandeliers in Pall Mall, in the grand home of the Institute of Directors.
It was something of a shock, in true Vivienne mode. She hadn’t, as she explained, “sold out”. Instead, she had turned to high culture – studied at London’s Wallace Collection, and through deep classical and philosophical reading – to introduce radical thinking to a dullard modern world dominated by minimalism. “Orthodoxy is the grave of intelligence,” as she mellifluously quoted from Bertrand Russell in the introduction to Painted Ladies – her eye-opening documentary series on fashion, costume and art.
That latest turn, as she saw it, was merely the intellectual continuation of her life’s mission: “The only reason I’m in fashion is to destroy the word conformity.” By the time I came in, she’d already radicalised a generation of teenage punks and scandalised the nation with the fetish and bondage suits, Naked Cowboy and God Save the Queen T-shirts that streamed out of 430 King’s Road, the ever-changing shop she presided over with Malcolm McLaren. First called Let It Rock in 1971, then Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die a year later, it became Sex in ’74 and, in 1976, Seditionaries. By the early 1980s, it was renamed Worlds End, as it remains – a place of pilgrimage where teenagers have forged their identities, and found their people, for more than 50 years.
Yet it was only when Vivienne left McLaren that she came into her own. Their break-up was a painful one. McLaren had no scruple about dismissing her as his mere seamstress; and she was to battle against disrespect and outright ridicule as an untaught designer – even as she continued to design collection after influential collection.
Mark Tarbard, the expert pattern-cutter whom Vivienne asked to help with 1981’s Pirate collection, saw the originality of her technique firsthand at her Clapham flat. “She’d made everything herself, on herself. No drawings, patterns. She had a mini-crini with one of her kid’s Hula Hoops as the boning. Her method was completely alien to classical fashion education. I was literally shaking as I watched,” he testifies. “Her genius was that her cut fitted anybody, any size, any sex, and made them look incredible.” Ever confident, Tarbard recalls, “She was convinced her punk followers would swarm to be pirates overnight – and they did.” He remembers too how the Pirate collection was “rejected by everyone. They were all afraid of her – except Grace Coddington, who photographed it in British Vogue. That made a huge difference.”
Perhaps her self-conviction and resilience were there from birth. Vivienne Swire was born in 1941, in Tintwistle, Derbyshire. A northern war baby who grew up during rationing, she taught herself to sew clothes from the smallest amount of fabric. She moved to London with her parents, and briefly went to Harrow Art School, but diverted, needing to earn, to become a primary school teacher. At 21, she married Derek Westwood, and had a son, Ben, in 1963. Dissatisfied with domesticity, she left to live with her brother, who fatefully introduced her to McLaren. She gave birth to their son, Joe Corré, in 1967.
In the late ’80s, Vivienne was appointed a professor of fashion at the Vienna Academy of Applied Arts. There she met Andreas Kronthaler, a student whom she eventually married. He would codesign on her label too, which, from autumn/winter 2016 onwards, became known as Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood. In 2006, Queen Elizabeth II made Vivienne a Dame Commander of the British Empire, an upgrade from the OBE she received in 1992, swirling knickerless in a circle skirt outside Buckingham Palace.
How to encompass the vastness of her legacy? Her punk phase is eternally referenced, morphing onwards through generations, and turning up through time in the safety-pinned collections of Gianni Versace and many more. In the days following her death, hundreds of people have posted memories of how her clothes led to self-discovery. Fashion academics have told me that students today quote her as their inspiration, both as a designer and as an activist. Her allegiance to youth, and to what matters, passed on her courage to so many designers to be themselves, from John Galliano to Matty Bovan. That radical power of Vivienne’s will continue, undiminished, long into the future.
The last time I saw her was in October. On a street in Kensington, I heard an unmistakable voice loudly discussing the politics of international finance following Liz Truss’s appointment as prime minister. I turned and saw it was Vivienne, strolling with Andreas. As they walked away, I saw they were holding hands.
