FASHION QUOTE BY
VIVIENNE WESTWOOD
2023 APRIL ISSUE
Written by Andrew Sia
Illustrated by Elita Lam
From the Desk of the Publisher
“Shoes must have very high heels and platforms to put women’s beauty on a pedestal”
- Vivienne Westwood
Vivienne Westwood was an English designer and an entrepreneur, largely responsible for bringing modern punk and new wave fashions into the mainstream. This piece of writeup can be read in two angles, the first approach as the obituary, and the second approach as an introduction of this fashion designer and her quotes.
She was the more recent ones and some of us would have remembered her for her provocateur, or you may say avant-garde, but definitely cutting-edge design. But it is never meant for everyone’s taste.
It has been a long while that I have picked the quote from Vivienne Westwood, in fact, several of them, but for some reasons I haven’t been featuring her. Perhaps it is the fate, that I have to wait until now, and I intend to feature her as both the fashion designer with her famous quote, and also this can act now as her obituary. May Dame Vivienne Westwood Rest In Peace.
Vivienne was born in Tintwistle, U.K., on April 8. 1941and passed away on December 29, 2022 in London. She was born to the Swire’s family and was the child of Dora and Gordon Swire. She was known for a chaotic but colorful life, and sometimes she could be very accommodating to people. She died at the age of 81 and we can say that she had a full life.
In her childhood everything was short of supply and her education ended in 1958 from a grammar school. The family moved to London and her parents saved enough to buy a little post office business there. She went to an art school but soon to find out that there was no sewing class and she quitted.
You may say that she was London’s first teen generation that went through experiences that were related to music, and later we can see that her life was affected by it. Her unique style in those days was beehive hair, pencil skirt, stiletto heels.
She became a primary school teacher and married Derek Westwood in 1962. The next year their son Ben was born but soon the couple separated. She went back to her parents and soon was sharing an apartment with her brother, Gordon, and there was another art student, Malcolm McLaren. Very quickly she became Malcolm’s first girlfriend. Their son was born in 1967.
They began collaborating in rock music and produced their own records. Vivienne sell bike jackets and sell them together with her T-shirts which she printed with lewd, gay and straight. Their first shop became known as SEX.
In 1974, Vivienne and Malcolm visited New York to try to promote their business, and Malcolm was hooked on the music scene there and among the people they met, Andy Warhol made the most impression.
Back in London, Malcolm worked himself up to become one of the pivotal, and most divisive influences on styles and sounds of late 20th century pop culture. He recruited his own punk band, the Sex Pistols, the punk-rock band that took the UK scene in 1977. And Vivienne created the fashion to go around it. It was correct to say that Malcolm and Vivienne popularized looks from punk to fetish which still dominate the fashion world. But the two were split with the ownership of ideas and experimenting with shop drained their cash and left Vivienne short of finance.
Vivienne started to travel to Italy and engaged with a fashion PR, Carlo D’Amario, and look for financial backing for her label. Soon her collection was showing in Paris and Tokyo, but with the image of a maverick and a renegade. With the economic turmoil of the 1970s, international couture turned towards ostentation and ready-to-wear and conservatism, Vivienne was a rare survivor.
McLaren and Westwood’s first fashion collection to be shown to the media and potential international buyers was Pirate. A series of collections were shown as the following:
Salvages in late 1981;
Buffalo/Nostalgia Of Mud shown in spring 1982;
Punkaturn in late 1983;
Worlds End 1984, renamed Hypnos, in late 1983.
Vivienne also named the eras of her career as:
Period of “New Romantic” from 1981-1985;
Period of “The Pagan Years” from 1988 to 1991.
With many attempts and ventures, Vivienne’s finance was still unsound and she earned wherever she could. She even taught fashion at the Academy of Applied Art in Vienna from 1989 to 1991, and Hochshule der Künste in Berlin from 1993 where she fell in love with her best student, Andreas Kronthaler and he moved into her London flat and they married in 1993.
Vivienne’s show in 1990 in Paris attracted backers from Italy, and at that time she had already followers in Japan and building another new market in China. And over time she grew her business into a global business. She was famous for the punk gear which was not without reason. Her political stance and her advocacy were anti-establishment although she was often found contradiction, and yet she matured into a national institution.
In the later part of her career, she opened shops and made the strong presence in the many parts of the world, we can refer to the following:
In 2015 opened a shop in mid-town Manhattan in New York City;
In 2016 office and showroom in Rue Saint-Honoré, Paris;
In 2015 opened 12 shops in the UK;
63 shops worldwide, nine in China, nine in Hong Kong, eighteen in South Korea, six in Taiwan, two in Thailand, two in the US.
With her political involvement we came to know that she was promoting Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, climate change and took part with civil rights groups.
In 1992 she was honored for OBE, and she went to the Buckingham Palace in a finely tailored suit but without underwear underneath it.
In 2010, she was made a dame.
Vivienne Westwood was survived by her son, Joe, and Kronthaler. Her son Joseph, used his father’s maternal grandmother’s surname, Corré, founded Agent Provocateur, inspired by his mother’s outrageous bra and corset designs. The company has stores in 13 countries.
We can remember Vivienne for her several quotes:
The best fashion accessories is a book;
If you’re too big to fit into fashion, then you just have to do your own fashion;
It is not possible for a man to be elegant with a touch of femininity;
Shoes must have very high heels and platforms to put women’s beauty on a pedestal.
As you know I picked the quote to be used in this writeup for a reason. There was a story that Westwood loved platforms and later she elevated them so high that the model Naomi Campbell fell off the 9 inches soles on her catwalk.