Vivienne Westwood, farewell to the queen of British fashion

«Vivienne Westwood she died today, peacefully and surrounded by her family, in Clapham, in south London»: thus begins the post entrusted to Instagram that no true fashion lover, but not even any curious observer of contemporary society, would ever want to read, and which announces the disappearance of the brilliant and beloved British designer.

And he continues: «Vivienne continued to do the things she loved, until the last moment, drawing, working on her art, writing her book and changing the world for the better. She has led an extraordinary life. Her innovation and impact over the past 60 years has been immense and will continue into the future. Vivienne considered herself a Taoist. She wrote: “The spiritual system of the Tao. Today there has never been more need for the Tao. The Tao gives you a sense of belonging to the cosmos and gives purpose to your life; it gives you such a sense of identity and strength to know that you are living the life you can live and therefore should live: make full use of your character and full use of your life on earth. The world needs people like Vivienne to change for the better.”

And we couldn’t agree more.

An intense and very rich lifethat of the creative born Tintwistle, on April 8, 1941: full of intuitions, enthusiasm, gimmicks, provocations (also), inventions and mischief, but above all passion, lavished in everything she did, from fashion to the recent – but already long-standing, because she was an authentic visionary in this too – commitment to sustainability and ecology, undertaken well before it became a fashion.

After the childhood spent in a small village of Derbyshire with his father Gordon Swire and mother Dora, he moved with his family to London in 1958, where he studied jewelery and fashion, although his first jobs were as a school teacher. She marries Derek Westwood in 1962, but it is the meeting with Malcolm McLaren, who would later become the manager of the legendary Sex Pistols, to change her life. In 1971 the two opened their first, revolutionary shop, Let it Rock, at the iconic 430 King’s Road. Over the years the store has changed its name several times – Too fast to live too young to die, Sex, Seditionaries and so World’s End – but never its mission as a melting pot of new trends, captured on the streets, among the youthful subcultures in their birth.

Westwood adopts the tradition, even bourgeois, of British society, to distort it from within, crippling its founding canons and almost mocking them, but always with irony and with no background whatsoever for his country and its traditions.

As, for example, with movement punk and with the style that he contributed to create, define and in a certain sense to codify, creating with his clothes a real uniform, apparently aggressive and provocative, made up of safety pins, studs, leather nails, chains, bleached jeans and ripped shirts. But her greatness was also that of breaking into the fashion system and its industry, unhinging certainties from within with strokes of creativity, coherently continuing her personal artistic research, with the collection Pirate, a real milestone in the history of 20th century fashion, which marks the bursting of his great interest and his boundless knowledge for the history of fashion and costume in all its eras, in its collections. Not by chance the corsetthe one that came straight from the seventeenth century, has been for decades, and continues to be, one of its most recognizable, distinctive and let’s say iconic garments.

In the 80s she explored the territories and suggestions of the tribal and post-atomic style, therefore she was among the first to break any barrier between the masculine and the feminine, to invent gender fluid even before the expression existed, sending men in skirts on the catwalk, inspired by the Scottish kilt. Her accessories are also unforgettable, from jewels with phallic shapes to boots Pirate bootup to the highest wedges who managed to bring down the catwalk even a model ready for anything like Naomi Campbell.

In recent years, his has become ever more profound and all-encompassing social and political commitmentcarried forward by the designer essentially from her collections, which have become programmatic manifestos in favor of civil rights, but also of an authentic ecological awareness: Propaganda, Active Resistance, Active Resistance to Propaganda are some of his strongest positions taken against the Bush and Blair administrations, in support of Assange, against war and all forms of exploitation.

In 1992, she married one of her fashion students, Andreas Kronthaler, who has been lovingly supporting her for years. Today Kronthaler declared: «I will continue with Vivienne in my heart. We worked our way through to the end and she gave me a lot of stuff to move forward with. Thanks, honey”.

It is now learned that the designer had been ill for some time, but did not want to make her struggle public. Despite having fought it to the end. With strength and courage, as she has done in everything she has faced in her life.

Read also:

– When fashion changes society: Vivienne Westwood, Café Society and the liberation of female sexuality

– The small, big fashion stories: the time Vivienne Westwood caused a scandal by Queen Elizabeth

– Naomi’s fall on the runway and 14 other moments to remember

– Naomi Campbell strips down for Vivienne Westwood

– Vivienne Westwood, that doc who doesn’t represent her

– Vivienne Westwood, 80 years of a punk, environmentalist, rebel icon

– Forty years of Vivienne Westwood in a book

– Vivienne Westwood: 5 curiosities about the punk designer revealed in a documentary

– Vivienne Westwood, 25 years of wedding dresses come to life in the new collections