In the press release from the brand that bears her name, announcing her death on Thursday, December 29, it is written: “Dame Vivienne Westwood, creator and activist”. In 2022, fashion has few famous designers associated directly or indirectly with the very idea of activism. His was pegged to the body. Stainless, hair-raising, sometimes disturbing, it was his trademark, his raison d’être in the world.
First a teacher in a primary school, Vivienne Isabel Swire will marry and divorce in the 1960s from Derek Westwood, manager of a nightclub. But it is his meeting, in 1965 with Malcolm McLaren, future manager of the New York Dolls and the Sex Pistols, and especially their installation in 1971 at 430 Kings Road in London, which will found the legend. Lair of punk known in particular under the sign SEX, the small shop does not look like any other. Friend for half a century with the British designer, couturier Jean-Charles de Castelbajac remembers that day in 1972 when he walked past the window and walked through the door: “I was then going through a great period of loneliness because I was making clothes from mops and moving blankets… And I came across this store in King’s Road where everything was transgression, diversion and recovery, down to these made-up T-shirts with chicken bones! »
Passionate about history, Vivienne Westwood develops a taste for the XVIIIe French century, the Revolution, the Incredibles and the Marvelous, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Rose Bertin or François Boucher. Not in a literal approach, but situationist: she takes up historical elements – the corset, the tailoring technique, false bottoms or even the tartan –, she deconstructs and reconstructs everything so that everyone takes a fresh look at things. . Completely self-taught (she only received three months of fashion training at the Harrow School Art), she dismantles the second-hand clothes she buys to understand their structure. “I have been criticized for being anachronistic. But my way of cutting clothes, which adapts the techniques of Madeleine Vionnet or Charles Frederick Worth to mass production, has greatly influenced the way people dress.”she said to M the magazine of the world in 2014, while promoting his autobiography.
Fashion more disturbing than glamorous
With determination and consistency, the Westwood warrior makes her locker room a battle, a permanent, living slogan. Her fashion, more disturbing than glamorous, calls out. Between a remarkable mastery of the cut, a provocative look, an irreverent and joyful femininity, she questions the established order. “She could have made more conventional choices, but she remained faithful to her commitments all her lifeanalyzes Castelbajac. She felt that putting herself in danger was the only way to be immortal in her lifetime. Like the day in 1992 when she received the medal of the Order of the British Empire from the hands of the Queen: she presented herself in a mouse-grey suit of formidable classicism and, on leaving Buckingham, twirled her skirt leaving to the photographers the task of discovering that she is not wearing panties.
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