Vivienne Westwood x Malcolm McLaren
Vivienne Isabel Swire born in Glossopdale, Derbyshire, on 8 April 1941, always enjoyed cutting a dash. As a teenager in the 1950s, she customised her school uniform to emulate the fashionable pencil skirt and made many of her own clothes, including a long, fitted ‘New Look’ dress made of sleeveless shifts, with a single seam and darts, from exactly one yard of fabric. Ecology and independence remain central to Westwood’s character. She has lived in south London for many years, cycles everywhere.
Using culture as a way of making trouble
Vivienne Westwood met Malcolm McLaren in 1965, and their son Joseph Ferdinand Corré (who went on to open Agent Provocateur ) was born in 1966. Their working relationship, which lasted from 1970 until 1983, launched Punk. Vivienne recalled : I felt there were so many doors to open, and he had the key to all of them. Plus, he had a political attitude and I needed to align myself.
McLaren was infact obsessed with fashion and music and saw them as inseparable parts of a Rock ‘n’ Roll outlaw spirit. Rejecting the dominant hippie look, in 1971, McLaren opened a shop called Let It Rock, and shifted to another fashion minority.
McLaren renamed it Sex and he scrawled above the door ‘Craft must have clothes but Truth loves to go naked’. The interior was sprayed with pornographic graffiti, hung with rubber curtains and stocked with sex and fetish wear.
Sex was intimidating and it attracted an extraordinary clientele, with voyeurs and prostitutes mixing with proto-Punk King’s Road shoppers. Jordan, the shop assistant, wore rubber clothes, a beehive hairstyle and theatrical make-up.
The Punkature Era
Soon Westwood’s horizons opened and expanded. As McLaren put it: We want to get out of this island mentality, and relate ourselves to those taboos and magical things we believe we have lost.They designed new collections based on ethnic and primitive looks culled from National Geographic magazine while their second collection Savage (S/S 1982) combined Native American patterns with leather frock coats. Third cameNostalgia of Mud (A/W 1982), with its huge tattered skirts and sheepskin jackets in muddy colours. In March 1982, McLaren and Westwood opened a second shop. It was called Nostalgia of Mud . The interior was styled like an archaeological dig. McLaren and Westwood began to conjure up darker spirits and found a magical, esoteric sign language in the work of the New York graffiti artist Keith Haring
Punkature (S/S 1983) still had a raw feeling and an emphasis on pre-washed and over-printed natural fabrics. It played on the words ‘punk’ and ‘couture’, and carried images from Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner.
The Witches collection was the final collaboration between McLaren and Westwood
By 1984 Westwood had moved to Italy with her new business partner, Carlo d’Amario. The Hypnos collection featured sleek garments made out of synthetic sports fabric in fluorescent pinks and greens. They were fastened with rubber phallus buttons. This was followed by Clint Eastwood, a collection that hankered after the wide open spaces seen in Western films: It included garments smothered in Italian company logos and Day-Glo patches inspired by Tokyo’s neon signs.
The Harris Tweed collection celebrated Westwood’s love affair with traditional English clothing and also her growing obsession with royalty. It was named after the woollen fabric hand-woven in the Western Isles of Scotland. The word clann in Gaelic means children of the family. A Clan Tartan is the regular sett (pattern) of the clan or family. The identification of clans with tartan patterns became a dogma of great success: all the recognised clans had their tartans, be they Highland or Lowland. Using a mix of different tartans, Westwood ensembles exploits the rich depth, colour and diversity of the traditional checked pattern. Let’s camouflage.
Many of the garments – the twinsets made by the long-established firm of Smedley, the ‘Stature of Liberty’ corsets, the tailored ‘Savile’ jackets – became Westwood classics and her most recognisable trademarks. Romantic and historically accurate, the corsets are also surprisingly practical. Stretch fabrics allow ease of movement, and removable sleeves convert a daytime garment to evening wear. Once a symbol of constraint, corsets are now an expression of female sexuality and empowerment.
With Britain Must Go Pagan, Westwood combined traditional British themes with classical and pagan elements. Classical drapery was paired with tweed, Smedley underwear was overprinted with pornographic images from ancient Greece. This strange mix reflected the inherent camouflage in her work, its respect for tradition and culture alongside a love of parody and sexual liberty. With the Mini-Crini collection she has devised a ‘mini-crini’ that combined the tutu with an abbreviated form of the Victorian crinoline. References to literature and high art pervaded Westwood’s work. She spent many hours in the Wallace Collection in London studying the 18th-century French art collected by Lord Hertford. In shows she began to use statuesque models dressed in sumptuous costumes and poised on 10-inch platform shoes, as if on a pedestal. The idea was that they had just stepped out of a portrait. Fashion is Camouflaging Environment.
Harlequin from Vivienne Westwood’s “Voyage to Cythera Autumn / Winter 1989-90″ collection “Vivienne Westwood”, Victoria and Albert Museum
VIVIENNE WESTWOOD – V&A Retrospective, Palazzo Reale, Milan.
Launched in the 2004 at the London Victoria & Albert Museum, the exhibition is the largest display the museum ever dedicated to a British designer. The Retrospective features designs selected from both the V&A’s collections and Vivienne Westwood’s personal archive.
