Vivienne Westwood
(1941 - )
Vivienne Westwood was born Vivienne Swire in Glossop, Derbyshire, England in 1941. She studied art for a very short time at the Harrow School of Art. She graduated as a teacher and taught at a North London primary school. In 1971, Westwood stopped teaching and began to design clothes for a store which she and Malcolm McLaren had opened. The store's name was “Let It Rock.” She was responsible for copying and outfitting the social movements characterized by the growing segments of the British population known as the Teddy Boys, Rockers, and, finally, the Punks. During the early to mid-1970s she and McLaren merged tough biker leather jackets with pornographic imagery and traditional tartans to produce the DIY (do-it-yourself) aesthetic that expressed the anti-establishment spirit of punk “Based in London’s King’s Road.
Westwood and McLaren constantly changed the name of their shop to enhance the current collection’s ideals from Let it Rock (1971) to Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die (1973), and Sex Pistols, a punk rock band that McLaren managed. Punk enabled Westwood to experiment with fashion’s power to shock and challenge.In 1981, she began showing in Paris. Her "Pirate" and "New Romanticism" looks of the 1980s brought her to the attention of the fashion world, although the huge swirling petticoats, buckles, ruffles, pirate hats and baggy boots set fashions that were a decade ahead of their time.
Westwood has been instrumental in the fashion for underwear worn as outerwear, with bras worn over dresses, in the mid-1980s Westwood showed corsets and crinolines, and claimed them to be not restrictive but sexy. Her shoes are extreme in height and decoration. Her designs, in the 1990s, focused on traditional garments which she reinvented and exploited, creating in the bystander an unease in the new details she presents between garments, styles and cuts.
Vivian Westwood’s talent has been recognized by the British Designer of the Year Award, 1990, and 1991; by the Order of the British Empire (OBE), 1992; the British Designer of the Year Award (twice) from the British Fashion Council, and in 2004-2005, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the National Gallery, Australia, held a major retrospective of her work. In 2006, Westwood was named dame of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.
Westwood expanded her business with a first store outside the United Kingdom, in Tokyo in 1996. She then launched a new denim collection, Anglomania, in 1997. Her own fragrances followed, with Boudoir in 1998 and Libertine in 2000. Today, her empire consists of men’s and women’s clothing and shoes, bags, jewelry, and her fragrance, Boudoir.
