From her designs donned by Kate & William to her becoming a Climate activist, she’s remembered as staying true to her values
London: The pioneering British Fashion designer, honored as the Dame Vivienne Westwood played a key role in the punk movement. She was widely admired for how she stayed true to her own values throughout her life. The British Fashion Queen died peacefully surrounded by her family in Clapham, south London. She was 81.
Westwood received the auspicious designation of Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2006. Earlier she was adorned with an order of the British Empire medal in 1992.
Early life
She was born in a Derbyshire village of Tintwistle in 1941. Westwood’s family moved to London in 1957. Her close circle of people remember her as doing the things she loved up until the last moment. Her interests include designing, working on her book and making art.
There she attended art school for one term. Westwood worked as a primary school teacher. Later she set up clothing shop ‘Let It Rock’ on King’s Road in Chelsea. Her then partner McLaren began managing a punk rock band the Sex Pistols made up of shop regulars. They shot to fame in 1976 wearing Westwood and McLaren’s designs.
A self-taught designer with no formal fashion training, Westwood learned how to make clothes as a teenager. She followed patterns and by taking apart secondhand clothes she found at markets to understand the cut and construction.
Her husband and creative partner, Andreas Kronthaler, said: “I will continue with Vivienne in my heart. We have been working until the end and she has given me plenty of things to get on with. Thank you darling.”
The Fashionista
The punk style British fashionista rewrote the rule book in the 1970s. Westwood held her first proper fashion show the Pirate Collection in 1981. She continued to use British and French history to inspire her.
She married Kronthaler, a former student of hers, 25 years her junior, in 1992. He became creative director of her company and increasingly was responsible for design work in later years.
By the 2000s, Westwood was designing wedding dresses for the likes of model Dita Von Teese, who dressed in her purple gown to marry singer Marilyn Manson, and Princess Eugenie who wore three Westwood designs for the wedding of Prince William and Catherine.
Her provocative and sometimes controversial designs came to define the punk aesthetic, and Westwood would become one of Britain’s most celebrated fashion designers, blending historical references, classic tailoring and romantic flourishes with harder edged and sometimes overtly political messages.
Since her earliest punk days, Westwood remixed and inverted imagery drawn from the British monarchy. Outside Buckingham Palace, she gave a twirl to waiting photographers, revealing to all the world that she had worn no knickers.
Activism
In the mid 2000s, Westwood turned her political focus towards the climate crisis. In 2007, she published a manifesto titled Active Resistance to Propaganda, in which she wrote: “We have a choice: to become more cultivated, and therefore more human – or by not choosing, to be the destructive and self-destroying animal, the victim of our own cleverness (To be or not to be).”
As an anti-consumerist, Westwood gleefully undermined her own business interests. In 2010, she said “I just tell people, stop buying clothes. Why not protect this gift of life while we have it? I don’t take the attitude that destruction is inevitable. Some of us would like to stop that and help people survive.”
n 2015, she drove a tank to then PM David Cameron’s home in Oxfordshire, in a protest against fracking. As a vegetarian, Westwood lobbied the British government to ban the retail sale of fur alongside other top designers including Stella McCartney.
She was also an outspoken supporter of Julian Assange. In 2020, she suspended herself in a birdcage to protest against the WikiLeaks founder’s extradition from the UK. In 2022 she designed the suit and dress worn by Assange and his wife, Stella Moris, at their wedding
Westwood up until the end regularly wrote on the issues of climate and social justice on her website No Man’s Land. Last month she made a statement of support for the climate protesters who threw soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, writing: “Young people are desperate. They’re wearing a T-shirt that says: Just Stop Oil. They’re doing something.”
Tributes
Paying tribute to Westwood’s life, Supermodel Claudia Schiffer wrote that Westwood’s “unique voice will be irreplaceable and will be missed”,
The fashion designer and Spice Girl Victoria Beckham said: “I’m so sad to learn of the passing of legendary designer and activist Dame Vivienne Westwood.”
Singer Billy Idol – who found fame on the London punk music scene – tweeted: “RIP it will take me a bit to take this in…”.
Culture Secretary Michelle Donelan tweeted, “A sad day, Vivienne Westwood was and will remain a towering figure in British fashion.”
Singer Boy George, who first met Westwood in the early 1980s, called her “great and inspiring” and “without question she is the undisputed Queen of British fashion”.
