Rest in Power Vivienne Westwood Punk Queen and non conformist

 

At the end of 2022, on December 30, God summoned two great people from the world to come to him. One is Pele, the king of football, and the other is Vivian Westwood, the fashion godmother. Sad news. Two delightful people with superb skills.indeed. 

Vivian  passed away peacefully, surrounded by her family, at her home in London on Thursday, aged 81 according to a statement from her eponymous company — two legends gone in a day.“Vivienne continued to do the things she loved, up until the last moment, designing, working on her art, writing her book, and changing the world for the better."

RIP to punk queen. non conformist. fashion designer, activist and iconoclast.Westwood was born Vivienne Isabel Swire to a working class family;on April 8, 1941 in the English Midlands town of Glossop, Westwood grew up at a time of rationing during and after World War II.  In the late 1950s, Westwood enrolled in the Harrow School of Art but dropped out after the first term.

“I didn’t know how a working-class girl like me could possibly make a living in the art world,” she said. Those blue-collar roots would inform her radical approach to urban street style, which would take the fashion world by storm.

A recycling mentality pervaded her work, and she repeatedly told fashionistas to “choose well” and “buy less.” From the late 1960s, she lived in a small flat in south London for some 30 years and cycled to work.

When she was a teenager, her parents, a greengrocer and a cotton weaver, moved the family to north London where she studied jewellery-making and silversmithing before re-training as a teacher.

While she taught at a primary school, she met her first husband, Derek Westwood, marrying him in a homemade dress. Their son Ben was born in 1963, and the couple divorced in 1966.

Now a single mother, Westwood was selling jewellery on London’s Portobello Road when she met art student McLaren who would go on to be her partner romantically and professionally. They had a son, Joe Corre, co-founder of lingerie brand Agent Provocateur.

They believed that, together, they could wage a social revolution through fashion and rock, and opened their Let It Rock shop on London’s King’s Road in the early 1970s. It became a gathering spot for the punk scene and England’s counterculture boasting customers like the four original Sex Pistols, Chrissie Hynde, Adam Ant, and London post-punk act Siouxsie and the Banshees. Westwood and McLaren’s shop changed its name and focus several times, including rebranding as Sex, a symbolic middle finger to the establishment that prosecuted them – the pair were fined in 1975 for an “indecent exhibition” there – as well as Worlds End and Seditionaries.

Together they defied the hippie trends of the time to sell rock ‘n’ roll-inspired clothing. They moved on to torn outfits adorned with chains as well as latex and fetish pieces and used prints of swastikas, naked breasts and, perhaps most well-known, an image of the queen with a safety pin through her lips. Favorite items included sleeveless black T-shirts, studded, with zips, safety pins or bleached chicken bones.

 The designer was also the mastermind behind the legendary punk image of the Sex Pistols,who Malcolm was managing and  helping to coin the iconic ‘British punk look’ that would define generations to come.

“There was no punk before me and Malcolm,” Westwood said in her biography. “And the other thing you should know about punk too: it was a total blast.”

During the 1980s, even while she enjoyed mainstream success, Westwood’s work continued to display an anti establishment flair. She famously posed for Tatler magazine cover in 1989 as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, styled in a suit that Thatcher herself had ordered but later canceled. In her 2016 book, “Get a Life,” Westwood wrote about the controversial magazine cover, criticizing Thatcher’s conservative economic policies and involvement in the oil industry and its role in climate change.

“You need heart and head to have vision and that’s why I call her a hypocrite: she did not care and used her status as a woman to pretend she did,” Westwood wrote. and later drove a white tank near the country home of a later British leader, David Cameron, to protest against fracking.

The name Westwood became synonymous with style and attitude even as she shifted focus from year to year. Her range was vast, and her work was never predictable.

As her stature grew, she seemed to transcend fashion, with her designs shown in museum collections around the world. The young woman who had scorned the British establishment eventually became one of its leading lights, and she used her elite position to lobby for environmental reforms, even as she kept her hair dyed the bright shade of orange that became her trademark.

The rebel was inducted into Britain’s establishment in 1992 by Queen Elizabeth who awarded her the Order of the British Empire medal. But, ever keen to shock, Westwood turned up at Buckingham Palace without underwear — a fact she proved to photographers by a revealing twirl of her skirt.

It’s important to acknowledge that the reason alternative culture as whole looks the way it does is because her genius and innovative ideas in fashion. She really was one of the most influential designers of all time.pushed fashion in the direction of her raw, edgy notions of beauty, her eclectic politics and her determination to kick out the jams and subvert all norms. 

 “The only reason I am in fashion is to destroy the word ‘conformity’,” Westwood said in her 2014 biography. “Nothing is interesting to me unless it’s got that element.”

Westwood remained politically vocal in the final decades of her life and used her public profile and fashion to champion issues including nuclear disarmament, climate change. Palestinian rights and to protest against anti-terrorism laws and government spending policies that hit the poor. She held a large “climate revolution” banner at the 2012 Paralympics closing ceremony in London, and frequently turned her models into catwalk eco-warriors. She was a staunch supporter of imprisoned journalist Julian Assange. After his 40th birthday celebrations, she would make regular cycle visits to the Ecuadorian embassy, where the WikiLeaks founder remained an asylee tenant for seven years. As with her other causes, she managed to combine heavy-accented symbolism with a fashion statement, the catwalk repurposed for radical transparency. In 2012, she created a unisex “I’m Julian Assange” T-shirt, available for purchase for £40.

As extradition proceedings mounted by the United States became ever more serious for Assange, Westwood was again on the scene. In 2020, during trial proceedings, she spent part of a day suspended in a cage outside the Old Bailey in London, kitted up in a yellow suit to signify the canary in the coalmine. “If the canary died, they all got out. Julian Assange is in a cage and he needs to get out. Don’t extradite to America.”

Little wonder that Assange is now seeking leave from the authorities in Belmarsh Prison to attend her funeral. Given the practice of UK institutions, specifically regarding Assange, this dispensation is unlikely to be granted.

Westwood also left a touching tribute to Assange’s wife, Stella: a wedding dress. In of itself, it was a striking statement of fashion and the act of naughty defiance and constant mischief: the publisher’s partner dressed in the activist’s genius.

Westwood  also long criticized the role of capitalism and its contributions to the climate crisis and was aware of the fashion industry’s role within the crisis, leading to more sustainable production of her clothes. She also called on consumers to buy less, even of the clothes she designed

“I’ve always had a political agenda,” Westwood told L’Officiel fashion magazine in 2018.

“I’ve used fashion to challenge the status quo.”

Up until the end, Westwood wrote regularly on issues of climate and social justice on her website No Man’s Land http://climaterevolution.co.uk/wp/.The website draws upon a busy life beyond design, speaking about activism over two decades in support of “hundreds of causes, NGOs, grassroot charities and campaigns, including Amnesty International, War Child and Liberty” in addition to launching the campaigning movement Climate Revolution. Last month she made a statement of support for the climate protesters who threw soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, writing: “Young people are desperate. They’re wearing a T-shirt that says: Just Stop Oil. They’re doing something.”

Her life.will continue to inspire for generations. A true Warrior who never compromised or traded her independence. There will never be another one like her. But we can all continue to play our part like Vivienne in creating change.

“Capitalism is a war economy. If we want to save ourselves, stop arms sales, stop arms production, stop war! If we can achieve this, we can save the world and everything will fall into place"  

 

"Our economic system, run for profit and waste and based primarily on the extractive industries, is the cause of climate change. We have wasted the earth's treasure and we can no longer exploit it cheaply."  

 

Rest in Power Vivienne Westwood. Stay fabulous,Your talent and fighting spirit will be missed.