Written by Nick Glass, CNN
British fashion designer and style icon Vivienne Westwood has died at the age of 81. According to an official statement from her company of the same name, she passed away peacefully with her family at her home in London on Thursday.
For the media, she was “the high priestess of punk” and the “Queen of Extreme”. She was a beloved figure to the fashion world, energizing and pushing the boundaries of the industry until her death.
After receiving the Order of the British Empire from the Queen in 1992, she shot sansculottes for photographers. In April 1989, she did the cover of Tatler magazine dressed in an aquascutum suit that she said was intended for Margaret Thatcher.
Westwood honestly didn’t care. As the eldest of the Ingenues, with intermittently orange hair and an alabaster complexion, she rose ignominiously to revered status as a British national treasure.
“I have a built-in perversity,” Westwood is said to have said, according to Jon Savage’s seminal England’s Dreaming: The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock, “a kind of built-in clock that always goes against everything orthodox.”
She was born Vivienne Isabel Swire on April 8, 1941 in Derbyshire, England. Her mother worked as a weaver in local cotton mills; Her father came from a shoemaking family. As a teenager, she began making clothes for herself.
After a semester at Harrow Art School, she worked as a primary school teacher and in 1962 married a factory worker, Derek Westwood.
But everything changed when she left her husband and met Malcolm McLaren in 1965.
“I felt like there were so many doors to open and he had the key to all of them,” she told Newsweek in 2004.
1970s Britain is unimaginable without their creative partnership. McLaren ran the Sex Pistols, and from a shop on London’s King’s Road, Westwood helped develop a visual grammar for the punk movement.
Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren with Vivienne Westwood outside Bow Street Magistrates Court in London. Credit: Bill Kennedy/Mirrorpix/Getty Images
The store changed its name – Let It Rock; Too fast to live, too young to die; Sex; A rioter – but you couldn’t escape his impact on the streets.
“It changed the way people looked,” Westwood told Time magazine in 2012.
Her attire ranged from fetishistic bondage gear to massive platform shoes and slogan t-shirts. Insurgents famously sold a T-shirt showing the Queen with a safety pin through the royal lip.
Westwood eventually moved on. In 1981, at the age of 40, Westwood launched her first catwalk collection with McLaren. The gender-neutral clothing was reminiscent of the golden age of piracy, muggers, dandies and privateers. Westwood studied and subverted ancient tailoring techniques, an approach later emulated by other British designers such as John Galliano and Alexander McQueen.
Over the decade, Westwood has drawn eclectic inspiration from Keith Haring, Blade Runner and the French Foreign Legion.
She introduced the mini-crini (a combination of tutu and Victorian crinoline), nude tights with modest fig leaves and distinctive corsetry worn as outerwear; she designed dresses for women with busts and hips (ask Nigella Lawson or Marion Cotillard, both of whom wore Westwood to dramatic effect); She would experiment with Harris tweed and tartan.
Vivianne Westwood takes a bow at the end of her Spring Summer 2003 runway show in Paris. Credit: Bassignac/Benainous/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images
John Fairchild, then the all-powerful editor of Women’s Wear Daily, gave her his blessing in 1989. In his opinion, she was one of the six most influential designers of the 20th century, along with Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, Giorgio Armani, Christian Lacroix and Emanuel Ungaro. Westwood was the only woman, the only Brit and the only designer on his list who wasn’t already a multi-million dollar brand. (In 1989 she was still living in a former council flat in South London and was “virtually bankrupt”, according to Jane Mulvagh’s 1998 biography, Vivienne Westwood: An Unfashionable Life.)
Style writer Peter York summed it up in a 1990 documentary: “All the things that drive her and all the obsessions that she builds her work around are quintessentially British: the whole class and sex thing, the particular obsession with the Queen. You couldn’t develop anywhere else.”
Vivienne Westwood and her husband and fellow designer Andreas Kronthaler at Paris Fashion Week 2013. Credit: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images
In 1992 Westwood married Andreas Kronthaler, an Austrian design student who was 25 years his junior. They worked as co-designers before he took over their ready-to-wear line in 2016. In a statement released announcing her death, Kronthaler said: “I will carry on with Vivienne in my heart at the end and she has given me many things to move on with.” Thank you darling.
Westwood was an outspoken champion of the planet, often emphasizing quality over quantity when consuming fashion. For her Autumn Winter 2019/20 show at London Fashion Week, Westwood sent models, actors and activists down the catwalk with political signs – one of which read, “What’s good for the planet is good for the economy.”
The Vivienne Foundation, a nonprofit founded by Westwood, her sons and granddaughter in late 2022, will officially open next year. According to its spokespersons, it will “honour, protect and continue the legacy of Vivienne’s life, design and activism”.