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

What are the clothing items, events, fashion shows or fashion press campaigns that have perfectly reflected, and supported, the major social changes?

Vivienne Westwood he is undoubtedly one of the iconic figures in the fashion industry who, more than any other, has been able to convey strong messages to question the status quo. His critical spirit towards the world and society starts from his own personal path, destined for a bourgeois life and consciously diverted towards a future from creative, free and, above all, independent woman.

A revolutionary approach that was naturally expressed also in his fashion collections, in which he often wanted to represent the woman in her entirety, clearing social taboos through irreverent and often considered scandalous shows: one above all Café Society, for the Spring / Summer 1994 collection.

The parade has entered by right in the hypothetical list of most memorable in the history of fashion, during the golden years of Vivienne Westwood on the catwalk. The stylist, just a few years earlier, had received the OBE from Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace, where in fact he had already expressed his carelessness, towards the stereotypes about female sexuality, as well as the will to exorcise them. As? Presenting himself on this official and decidedly formal occasion, without wearing underwear.

In the collection Café Society, the iconic designer wanted to represent this liberation by collecting a myriad of references to different eras, to draw from and then reinterpret them with audacity. In fact, the show, held in the sumptuous nineteenth-century setting of the InterContinental Hotel in Paris, is to be considered as a real symphony of erotic stereotypes brought to caricature, thanks to the deconstruction of historical details.

A sort of “perversion”, as many critics called it at the time, with which Vivienne Westwood played reassemble the sartorial elements as you please, further spiced up by contemporary and risque narrative devices: the image of Kate Moss on the catwalk is unforgettable, topless but perfectly powdered while eating an ice cream. The silhouettes were a riot of Elizabethan couture with Victorian details, remixed French Rococo jackets covered in colored tulle, but also deep and provocative necklines. An ironic and equally daring note, the Krakow shoes – long and pointed, dating back to 1400 – reinterpreted and adorned with vibrators, to symbolize the importance of female pleasure and, above all, the desire to be able to speak freely.

In all its pomp, the collection Café Society has done nothing but represent the enormous contrast between the restrictions and the encumbrance of women’s clothing – however refined – in the past centuries, and the willingness of women to undress, in every sense, both of the constraints in which they have always found themselves caged, and of the conservatism and puritanism forcibly sewn on them.

Rocking the hips with flounces, staggering on vertiginous heels and interacting with each other in a subtly erotic way, the models perfectly embodied the message intended by Vivienne Westwood, without fear of the criticisms that would arrive on time. A strong choice of subversion, more than a simple provocative show, thanks to which the designer has overturned oppressive conventions, exploiting them in a way of liberation. And, above all, giving life to an emancipated legacy to be delivered both to women and their way of dressing, as well as to those who would create fashion: the new generations of designers.

Other stories of Vanity Fair that may interest you:

– When fashion changes society: the story of April Ashley, the first trans model

– When fashion changes society: Alexander McQueen, Voss and mental health

– When fashion changes society: Chanel and women’s emancipation