On the death of Dame Vivienne Westwood

For fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, age was just a number. Age-appropriate clothing? At 78 she was seen in a kilt, with bare knees over colorful knee socks, sneakers and a wildly patterned jacket.

She didn’t care what people thought. And what she wore didn’t have to be new. Because Westwood, who still cycled through London in her old age and lived modestly in the smallest of living spaces for a long time, was recycling long before it became fashionable. Now the woman who set trends throughout her life has died at the age of 81.

“Buy less – choose well – make it last!”

Westwood loved provocation – no interview with her was complete without her often astonishing confessions. She had made the decision early on to ignore compulsions and just say whatever was on her mind. Whatever that might be. She lived with it well and for a long time. It suited her to swim against the tide.

Vivienne Westwood belonged to an almost forgotten species of Englishness: she was an eccentric. She liked telling people where to go. Especially when it came to environmental protection, civil rights and nuclear disarmament. Long before celebrity activism became acceptable and trendy, she took to the streets and championed it.

She gave her own customers the slogan “Buy less – Choose well – Make it last!” on the way. In English: «Buy less, choose well, wear it long!» All of that – looks, demeanor, pithy statements – became part of their brand image. Because Westwood was that, too: a good businesswoman.

The elementary school teacher makes punk

Westwood was by no means born with a career as a fashion designer and builder of a clothing empire. Born in 1941 into lower middle-class circumstances, she trained to be a primary school teacher and married at the age of 21. A year later she gave birth to her first son. The marriage ended when Vivienne met punk impresario and Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren. The two became a couple, and in 1967 Westwood’s second son was born.

Fashion came along with McLaren. In their council flat in London, the two first designed teddy boy clothing inspired by the 1950s and later punk fashion inspired by fetish wear.

The wild pieces were sold in her shop at King’s Road number 430. “Let it Rock” was the first name of the cult shop, which after further renaming has been called “Worlds End” since 1981, and it still exists today and is a spiritual home of the designer has stayed.

“If you don’t read, you don’t understand the world”

To the very end, the queen of punk believed in the transformative power of culture and education, as she once said in an interview with the NZZ. Much more than fashion, she talked about art, literature and philosophy, raved about Antoine Watteau or recommended reading Bertrand Russell and Aldous Huxley, “the two greatest English authors of the 20th century”.

“All I knew was that I always wanted to read. If you don’t read, you don’t understand the world,” Westwood said at the time, and found that people were becoming more and more stupid because they were consuming more and less and less to think.

Pirates on the catwalk

In 1981, while still working with Malcolm McLaren, Westwood designed her first own collection for the catwalk. Theme: «Pirates». The show marked a move away from the harsh style of safety pins and zippers towards a softer, more romantic line. What remained of the spirit of punk rebellion to the end, however, was Westwood’s defiance of established norms.

Courage and the complete absence of understatement were part of their concept from the start. “I think the connecting factor between everything I’ve ever done is the heroic,” she said, whose pithy sentences could be quoted forever. Standing out, making a statement – that’s what it was all about.

In doing so, she set a few trends in motion, the effects of which can still be felt today. With her “Witches” show (1983) she was the first to bring hand-made sneakers onto the catwalk. She was also among the first to use underwear as outerwear. Initially criticized by the fashion industry as “difficult to sell”, her ideas kept catching up with the mainstream. Her Mini Crini collection (1985) marked a new turn in style.

Westwood had turned to art and costume history as a source of ideas and away from streetwear. She designed crinoline-style mini skirts and paired them with corsets, powder wigs and platform shoes. With this, she began to develop the influential figure-hugging style that has characterized her to this day.

When a broad-shouldered masculine style shaped women’s fashion in the 1980s, ultra-feminine fashion made it socially acceptable again.

British through and through

She also regularly returned to classic British patterns and fabrics such as tweed and plaid – at first glance a paradoxical choice by a fashion designer with pronounced anti-establishment reflexes. Just like her royal logo, which resembles an orb with a cross and a ring of planets, and her devotion to the Queen, which she thought was “absolutely magnificent”.

However, like all interesting people, Vivienne Westwood was a person of contradictions. For the self-confessed Eurocentric, tartan and Union Jack had nothing to do with nationalism. The iconoclast believed strongly in the value of culture and tradition and, with TS Eliot, believed that the true test of an original work is whether or not it fits into tradition.

At least since the turn of the millennium, Westwood has been one of the best-known international fashion brands. She has been honored with retrospectives and elevated to the status of “Lady” of the British Empire by the Queen. During a guest professorship in Vienna in the 1980s, she met her student and future husband Andreas Kronthaler, who played a key role in the creation of her designs in the years that followed and whose name later appeared in the title of the collections.

Westwood’s amazing career didn’t just give impetus to fashion. She showed the world that there is always another way. Now the lady, the rebel who made her mark on the fashion world, has fallen asleep “peaceful and surrounded” by her family in Clapham, south London.