“The world needs people like Vivienne to change for the better,” concludes the statement via Instagram her team used to announce the death of the designer, who died in Clapham, London, at the age of 81, “in peace and surrounded of her family” died. And the truth is, Vivienne is one of the few people who can be said to have actually changed the world. She wasn’t content to be the godmother of punk to the general public. In the fifty years that followed, Westwood was a pioneer in creating feminist fashion based on historical revisionism and, most importantly, one of the first to look sustainability in the face and publicly denounce the devastating impact this industry is creating on the planet.
Born into a working-class family, she began studying jewelry design at the age of sixteen, but had to drop out because she couldn’t afford it. When she married Derek Westwood at 21, she was working as an elementary school teacher but was designing her own wedding dress. In the late 1960s it was not common for a woman to run a fashion business, let alone a woman born into a family of limited resources. But Westwood was in the right place at the right time: London between the turn of the decade, from the 1960s to the 1970s, a city that was then almost a laboratory of ideas, of ideas that came from the streets. When she met Malcolm Mclaren, a young man associated with politics, music and the local intelligentsia, she left her husband and embarked on an adventure that is now fashion history.
Together they started Let it rock in 1971, a small shop on King’s Road where McLaren repaired records and Westwood used second-hand clothes. Gradually, the ideas of the Situationist movement, of which both were adherents, were incorporated into their provocative designs. It was then that Victorian clothing, bondage aesthetics or nihilistic slogans began to creep into their designs, which were almost always created on clothing that had already been worn. By the time they rebranded Let it rock as Sex, the shop where the punk aesthetic originated, the couple had already served bands like the New York Dolls and Chrissie Hynde, later the singer of The Pretenders (which always caused controversy led). the public since the switch.
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