Vivienne Westwood, who died December 29 in London at age 81, is broadly credited for being the “excessive priestess of punk.” However she was a lot greater than that. Westwood was a visionary whose designs at all times led, by no means adopted. She was a wit who might skewer aristocratic snobbery with a shrewdly mangled plaid. She was irreverent and provocative, receiving her Order of the British Empire at Buckingham Palace panty-less and placing the Queen with a security pin by way of her lip on a T-shirt. However past being style’s foremost provocateur, Vivienne Westwood is the rationale corsets, crinolines, rubber, leather-based and latex are accepted features of recent gown.
“She was revolutionary in so some ways,” says George Antonopoulos, FASHION’s artistic and style director. “She took historic parts like corsets and coquette silhouettes and made them supercool and thrilling.” S&M gear and fetish put on turned “normalized” in her palms. “And again within the ‘80s, she was the very first gender bending designer,” he says. “She created unisex clothes and confirmed males’s and girls’s collectively on the runway and all of it made sense.” She was additionally one of many first designers to make use of her platform to boost consciousness for political and social points together with nuclear disarmament and local weather change.
Ever the non-conformist, Westwood appeared to get specific pleasure from sending up British tradition. “She took conventional parts like tailoring and tartans and Harris tweed and turned them the other way up,” Antonopoulos says, including that Westwood was the primary designer he ever spent cash on as an adolescent. “I beloved how disruptive she was. She was the designer that made me fall in love with style.”
Within the ‘70s, Westwood met Malcolm McLaren, supervisor of the Intercourse Pistols, and collectively the pair formed the punk motion — he with the music and she or he with the garments. They had been romantic companions too, although Westwood later married her present husband Andreas Kronthaler, a designer who has labored alongside her since they married in 1992. In typical Westwood style, the union raised some eyebrows — he was 25, she was 50. However she might hardly care what others thought — a theme that ran all through her profession.
Maybe that’s the reason Westwood can also be one of the crucial revered creatives of our age and one whose concepts have been referenced by so many who adopted her. “She was a designer’s designer,” Antonopoulos says.