Dame Vivienne Isabel Westwood – or Queen Viv, as the late, great designer was often fondly called – had a reach that extended far beyond the world of fashion. Maverick, seamstress, activist and provocateur, she was first and foremost a very British artist, who inhabited her own world and was generous enough to throw it open to the rest of us.
Westwood-world has existed for as long as someone of my generation can remember. Coming of age with punk in the late seventies, we might have attributed the movement’s iconic and subversive bondage aesthetic first to the Sex Pistols and then to Malcolm McLaren – but Vivienne Westwood owned top billing on that podium.
Westwood-world has existed for as long as someone of my generation can remember
A seamstress from a working-class family in Tintwhistle in Derbyshire, it was Westwood’s £100 that in 1971 secured the premises in the King’s Road that began as Let It Rock, and her ragged band t-shirts, pimped up with everything from safety pins to chicken bones, that drew the crowds. The shop changed name with bewildering speed, from Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die, to Seditionaries, and then to Sex, but from the outset it was a magnet for gorgeous rebels, from Chrissie Hynde to the legendary poseuse (and star of Derek Jarman’s Jubilee) Jordan Mooney, not to mention the Pistols before they were the Pistols and every young punk within a 300-mile radius. I couldn’t afford to shop there, but having borrowed a Seditionaries black and red striped shirt with Jailhouse Rock overtones from a friend, I went to considerable lengths not to return it.
The clothes didn’t get any cheaper, but we didn’t have to own any Westwood – and I didn’t, for a long time – to feel those pieces were for us, they represented us. Her Boucher corsets and gartered stockings, her tartans and platforms, her white-painted faces and pompadours and sashes were the people’s theatre, a display on a par with any pageantry the palace could put on – music hall and dance hall, revolution and history and rock ‘n’ roll shaken up as only Westwood could do it.
Queen Viv tapped into a rich vein of anarchic exhibitionism that has run through the national character since Boadicea, from Lady Godiva to the “spend, spend, spend” pools winner Viv Nicholson, allied to the passion for fashion that every girl with a Saturday job and a Saturday night in view could understand.
The truth is, her clothes were also beautiful. The famous picture of Westwood twirling for the cameras after receiving her OBE reveals more than just her knicker-less bottom. We are being shown the exquisite craftsmanship of the wool suit she made for the ceremony: a circle skirt lined in pearl-grey silk, a nipped-in jacket, a matching hat. And what is most significantly being demonstrated is her fearlessness, her complete disregard for what is expected of a middle-aged woman and her body. Thus, by the time I could afford a Westwood piece I was 40, but for my 50th birthday I was wearing a gold-sequinned corset dress of hers, without fear or body-shame, and at 60 a skin-tight velvet column. The devotion she inspired among women, from customers to collaborators, from Susie Bick to Sara Stockbridge to Pam Hogg to Kate Moss, is testimony to the generosity of that fearlessly woman-friendly vision.
That’s not to say Westwood clothes haven’t always been demanding – they present a challenge and require a shift in mindset away from comfort, sometimes as far in the other direction as bondage. They are tight at the waist and hobbled at the knees, or hoicked at the hem as if they’ve got caught in your knickers; they require elaborate threading and strapping to stay on and their shirt buttonings pull tight across the breasts.
The undisguised sexiness of the clothes is indubitably part of the appeal, but the fact that that sexiness teeters both towards the cartoonish and the subversive makes it easier for the wearer to own it; walking around in Westwood feels like the possession of secrets (a corset is invisible, after all) and is done for private pleasure, for actual fun and self-expression in display, rather than entirely for another’s gaze.
Because Vivienne Westwood could no more have been a people-pleaser than a Norland Nanny (although I suspect she’d have enjoyed the uniform). Often, her no doubt considerable advertising budget felt more like gleeful sabotage than the hard sell: it was spent on rebel photographers like Juergen Teller, who created images such as the designer herself reclining snow-white and naked with Titian hair, or squatting over a heap of sawdust after some unmentionable incident.
Her models wore t-shirts defending the causes and people she felt passionately about, from climate change and anti-consumerism to Chelsea Manning or Julian Assange. When interviewed she never used the opportunity to flog her product, but always to argue – and rarely to listen to the question.
Vivienne Westwood’s insistence on her right to be who she wanted, to use her body and her business as she wanted, to rejoice in it as her artistic canvas, however little it might conform to norms or expectations, was paramount – and an invaluable example. We shall not see her like again, and we shall miss her.
Christobel Kent is a Gold Dagger-nominated author. Her latest novel “In Deep Water” is out now
