The A–Z Guide to Vivienne Westwood
Punk’s not dead; Westwood’s iconoclastic vision will outlive us all.
The doyenne of subversion. The patron saint of punk. Has any designer’s vision transcended time like Vivienne Westwood’s?
From the King’s Road beginnings where she and Malcolm McLaren made a name appropriating fetish gear and rockabilly togs to the demi-couture heights her brand would reach in the early ’90s in collections like “Anglomania,” Westwood’s career is a master class in navigating the industry on one’s own terms.The daughter of a cobbler and a mill worker, the future Dame Westwood was born in April 1941 in the East Midlands village of Glossop. Moving with her family to London as a teenager, a young Vivienne set the stage for her earliest artistic ambitions with a jewelry-making course at the University of Westminster (then the Harrow Art School). She trained and worked as a schoolteacher, soon wedding factory worker Derek Westwood in a dress of her own design, and giving birth to a son. By 1965, though, the stars aligned when she met young art student McLaren. Westwood divorced her husband and moved in with the future Sex Pistols Svengali. Two born provocateurs, Westwood and McLaren would soon cement their first creative bond with a fledgling boutique.Opened in 1971, their shop at 430 King’s Road in London’s Chelsea neighborhood—variously incarnated as Let It Rock; Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die; SEX; Seditionaries; and Worlds End over the years—would become a nexus of shifting counterculture in the city. The duo would soon shepherd punk’s hard edges into the flamboyant new romantic era and channel “Buffalo” style’s bold eclecticism.Westwood was a magpie of centuries and continents, as staunch in her radicalism as she was passionate about the historic; to deep-dive into her collections is a crash course in the heritage of the United Kingdom. She was zealous in her affections and uncompromising in her beliefs—a consummate shit-stirrer whose designs continue to enthrall a new generation today. Ahead of Christie’s upcoming auction of Westwood’s personal archive, a look back at some of the moments and figures who helped to define her singular career.
Austrian-born Kronthaler first met his future wife and collaborator in 1988 when Westwood was 48 years old and teaching at the Vienna School of Applied Art. They were kindred spirits from the jump, as he recalls: “When I met Vivienne, she was somebody who taught you to examine history. In those days, it was unusual, but I could relate to it.” This precocious student wowed the designer and before long relocated to London to work for her label, first sleeping in the studio before their relationship became romantic.The power duo debuted their first collaborative effort at Pitti Uomo for Spring/Summer 1991 with the tattered and frayed denim of “Cut, Slash & Pull” inspired by the Tudor modishness of slashing fine fabrics to reveal the equally opulent textiles beneath. Despite a 25-year age gap, they went on to wed quietly in 1993 and remained creative collaborators throughout their famously unconventional marriage of three decades, until Westwood’s death in 2022. Kronthaler was a silent partner in the label for most of that time, eschewing the limelight as much as his wife seemed to court it. “She never cared if I got pissed or went out,” he once reminisced. “She wouldn’t even ask; she was never interested in these things, control. It was total freedom.”
The Buffalo style, a culturally kaleidoscopic vision led by stylist Ray Petri and photographer Jamie Morgan, borrowed its name from Malcolm McLaren’s own 1983 track “Buffalo Gals” and would become a cornerstone of Westwood’s early work.Melding streetwear and a multicultural sensibility, this “urban guerilla” look was by Westwood and then-partner McLaren’s Fall/Winter 1982 collection “Nostalgia of Mud.” With its densely layered, earth-hued fits, woodblock prints, and silhouettes echoing the long skirts () worn by the women of the Andes, the collection was dynamic in marrying folk roots with a forward-thinking eye and an appreciation of non-European traditional fashions. (Famously, Pharrell achieved virality at the 2014 Grammys wearing one of the seminal collection’s oversized felt Mountain Hat, previously donned by hip-hop pioneers like The World’s Famous Supreme Team.)The barnstorming show dovetailed with the opening of a boutique at St. Christopher’s Place (also dubbed “Nostalgia of Mud”), designed to look like an archaeological dig, full of scaffolding and tarps, with an intimidating facade that featured an earthy-looking map of the world. While the shop wouldn’t last long, shuttering around the time of Westwood and McLaren’s split in late 1983, the ideas it unpacked would remain hallmarks of Westwood’s work throughout her career.
“For me, the focus of a woman is the waist,” Westwood mused in her eponymous memoir. “This corset we made, it was really, really sexy. People just loved it. Three sizes were all we ever needed.” Reappropriating the silhouette of a cinched waist to playful effect, the corset became a staple of Westwood’s design vocabulary—perhaps never more famously than in 1990’s “Portrait” collection.Corsets plastered with frothy rococo artworks of cherubs and bucolic scenes like François Boucher’s “Daphnis and Chloe” were juxtaposed with hoisted cleavage and mini-crini skirts galore. Models Denise Lewis and Susie Cave smooched on the runway, echoing the kiss of Daphnis and Chloe in Boucher’s painting. Transforming a historically restrictive tool of the male gaze into a plaything for unapologetic female sexuality, the “Portrait” corsets have enjoyed a viral revival with A-listers like Bella Hadid and FKA twigs in recent years.
At the far end of the spectrum from Westwood’s structured corsets and famously artful draping was the punky rawness with which she and McLaren defined the look of punk in its earliest days. Think: The silkscreened tattered muslin shirts of Seditionaries sported by the likes of Johnny Rotten, or tank tops bearing words spelled out in chicken bones scrounged from a nearby Italian restaurant.“I was messianic about punk, seeing if one could put a spoke in the system in some way,” she told . “I realized there was no subversion without ideas. It’s not enough to want to destroy everything.” While an atelier finesse came to define Westwood’s collections over the decades that followed, they were never without the DIY touches and ethos that were her signature.
Westwood’s lifelong historical bent took particular delight in the Elizabethan era and its namesake “Virgin Queen” Elizabeth I, whose reign solidified a newly unified British identity. Most notably in Fall/Winter 1997’s “Five Centuries Ago,” Westwood celebrated the Tudors, turning out Elizabethan ruff collars and pannier gowns juxtaposed with garter belts and gimp masks. Supers including Helena Christensen, Alek Wek, and Eva Herzigová stalked the runway in white face powder and rouged lips—alongside a shirtless bagpiper—serving Elizabethan elegance with a side of S&M glamour.
No designer has embodied staunch activism so much as Westwood did. What began as a general anti-establishment bent with the punk mores of SEX and Seditionaries found form by the mid-1980s through her anti-nuclear sentiments, present in the brightly hued dystopia of collections like 1984’s “Clint Eastwood.” By 1989, the designer was covering posh magazine in her best Margaret Thatcher getup, alongside the cover line “This Woman Used to Be a Punk”—yet her most overtly political days were still to come.Throughout the aughts, Westwood promoted conscious consumption of fashion in the face of climate change, proclaiming to : “I don’t feel comfortable defending my clothes. But if you’ve got the money to afford them, then buy something from me. Just don’t buy too much.” By 2012 she had launched her Climate Revolution campaign with a guerilla-style protest at the London Paralympics, highlighting the need for action. She would even partner with PETA to promote vegetarianism in a bid to reduce farming-related carbon emissions. In December 2014 alongside son Joseph Corré, Westwood turned up at 10 Downing Street in a Santa suit, attempting to deliver the “gift” of asbestos to David Cameron as an anti-fracking demonstration. “I guess I’m a punk because I’m a fighter,” she once mused. “You’re born with the character you’ve got, and I will always fight. I can’t help it.”
Gold Label is the home of all things Westwood demi-couture and made-to-measure, first introduced with Fall/Winter 1993’s “Anglomania” collection. In 2016 it would be redubbed “Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood,” and is rounded out by Vivienne Westwood MAN, and diffusion lines Red Label and Anglomania. “I definitely wanted Andreas Kronthaler to be acknowledged by everybody for the genius that he is,” she said of the rebrand. “I absolutely wanted his name to be as well-known as mine. Because it should be. I wanted the public to know that.”
As infamous runway falls go, Westwood muse Naomi Campbell’s is as iconic as any. Walking in Fall/Winter 1993’s “Anglomania” wearing a feather boa and 12-inch-high Ghillie heels in embossed purple croc, Campbell turned an ankle but followed up the tumble with a megawatt smile that became a press sensation. Westwood once remarked, “Shoes must have very high heels and platforms to put women’s beauty on a pedestal.” Today, the brave can still cop a pair of Ghillies at a comparably sensible six-inch height.
To hell with staid navy or charcoal; when Westwood debuted her Virgin Atlantic uniforms in 2014, the airline’s female employees were sporting fiery crimson. Jackets bore the brand’s signature nipped waist, complemented by crisp ruffled white shirts and matching pencil skirts, while men’s three-piece suiting hearkened back to Savile Row tradition.It wasn’t the first time Westwood would share headlines with Virgin Group impresario Richard Branson; back in 1977, the two took an eventful boat trip together for the occasion of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. Branson and McLaren organized a jaunt down the Thames featuring the Sex Pistols (the latest signees to his then-fledgling Virgin Records) performing “God Save the Queen.” While a reportedly tame affair, the stunt didn’t end well; the boat was met by police on its docking, ending with a furious McLaren getting beaten up and both Westwood and Branson among those arrested. “The band had done nothing wrong, nobody had done anything wrong,” Branson would remember, “but the very act of raiding the boat and then about 12 policemen physically beating up Malcolm McLaren with truncheons obviously propelled the Sex Pistols onto the front pages of all the papers.”
Westwood was an outspoken supporter of the WikiLeaks founder and his efforts for the transparency of classified documents, visiting him during his asylum. In the summer of 2020, petitioning Assange’s extradition to the US, she donned bright yellow and locked herself in a giant birdcage outside of Old Bailey, declaring through a megaphone, “I am the canary in the coal mine! If I die down the coal mine from poisonous gas, then that’s the signal.”A year later she and Kronthaler would create a custom gown for Stella Moris’s wedding to Assange in Belmarsh prison, as well as a tartan kilt for the journalist himself. When Westwood died in 2022, Assange requested a temporary release to attend the funeral. It was denied.
A powder-faced Moss, topless in a bicorne hat and micro-mini, licking a Magnum bar and stalking the leopard-print carpet. Say no more! One of the most provocative outings from a famed provocateur, Spring/Summer 1994’s “Cafe Society” marked the first time Westwood cast her soon-to-be muse and friend Ms. Moss. The stuff baddie-bestie dreams are made of, their relationship would last until Westwood’s death. “Every time she speaks to me I feel like we’re in a conspiracy,” Westwood once said of Moss. “It’s so intimate that you just want to know what you’re going to be doing together.”
Westwood and McLaren’s famed shop at 430 King’s Road would go by a host of names over the years, but when it opened its doors in November 1971, it was as Let It Rock. Taking cues from the era’s teddy boy rockabilly revival, the couple peddled brothel creepers, drape coats, and deadstock tees studded, slashed, and pinned to look straight out of a Karlheinz Weinberger snap. The space was kitted out in the style of a ’50s suburban UK living room and quickly became a clubhouse for the teddy boys and girls of Chelsea to hang out and listen to rock ’n’ roll records. In 1973 with the movement waning, Let It Rock rebranded in biker form as Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die (an ode to James Dean), before cementing its infamy in early 1974: SEX, the shop and future punk mecca, was born.
Not yet the Situationist impresario he would become, young art student McLaren first met Westwood, then a single mother and schoolteacher, in the late ’60s. By 1971 the pair were hawking their rockabilly wares out of the shop on Kings Road, but already on their way to changing the course of fashion history. At various times serving as manager for the Sex Pistols, the New York Dolls, Adam and the Ants, and Bow Wow Wow, McLaren was an opportunist with a knack for PR antics and a taste for reinventing his artists to mixed success. See: rebranding the trash-glamour of the Dolls, dressing them up in “communist” inspired red leather, or poaching Adam’s Ants to backup a teenaged Annabella Lwin in what would become Bow Wow Wow. The band was conceived partly as a promotional move, serving as de facto models for Westwood’s 1981 “Pirate” collection.While McLaren’s managerial efforts were hit or miss, both his aesthetics and marketing prowess were formative for Westwood: “He influenced the way I dressed and thought about clothes too,” she wrote in her memoirs. “He began to spend most of his student grant on clothes for me. He cared passionately for clothes and transformed me from a Dolly Bird into a chic, confident dresser.” The marriage was a volatile one, though; while both their romantic and creative partnership would falter by the tail end of 1983, the symbiosis of Westwood and McLaren is a sort fashion has rarely seen again.
Synonymous with legendary London clubs like Covent Garden’s short-lived Blitz, the new romantic movement was a playful response to punk-rock anti-fashion. Androgynous and colorful, it took cues in equal measure from Native Americans and pirates, lifting touches from harlequins and fin de siècle fops along the way.Hotspots like Blitz and Billy’s played host nightly to Adam and the Ants, Boy George, Steve Strange, and more—and Westwood and McLaren’s early designs would become synonymous with the aesthetic, particularly with the duo’s groundbreaking 1981 collection “Pirate.”
Debuted in 1986, Westwood’s instantly iconic logo nods to the British Crown Jewels and the jewel-encrusted orb bestowed to the British monarch, or “Defender of the Faith,” during the coronation ceremony. Topped off with a galactic Saturn ring, this futuristic spin on historic British icons represents stewarding tradition in a progressive way. The symbol also echoes the Harris Tweed Authority logo, the heritage textile manufacturer that Westwood’s label has collaborated with for decades.
Swashbuckling and dynamic, the first runway collaboration between Westwood and McLaren would set the tenor of the brand from the jump. Spurred by the rebrand Adam Ant commissioned from McLaren for £1,000, Fall/Winter 1981’s “Pirate” collection embodied the look of new romantic fashion and the Worlds End iteration of the Kings Road boutique. “Clothes for heroes,” the gender-fluid collection was full of drapey fits, ruffled shirts, waistcoats, rosette-studded bicorne hats, and the now-iconic slouchy Pirate Boot. The undulating squiggle print, today a house signature, also made its first appearance on this cast of Walkman-wearing buccaneers for a new generation.
Westwood made a name for herself through the subversive reappropriation of old-world institutions, so it’s only fitting that she’s well represented in London’s lofty National Portrait Gallery. While not all are currently on display, 20 images of Westwood are contained in the museum’s collection, ranging from Juergen Teller’s iconic 2009 nude to Gian Paolo Barbieri’s shot of Westwood in full royal splendor as Queen Elizabeth I.
The list of Westwood’s collaborators and cohorts reads like a who’s-who of late twentieth-century iconoclasts. Pretenders singer Chrissie Hynde was famously a SEX shop assistant alongside the likes of Siouxsie Sioux, Glen Matlock, and Sid Vicious, at various points. Pamela Anderson, Jerry Hall, and Rose McGowan have all made runway cameos over the years, while Boy George, Duran Duran, Adam Ant, and Bow Wow Wow famously sported the brand’s earliest designs.Among other notable creatives in the Westwood fold, artist Keith Haring’s collaboration for Fall/Winter 1983’s “Witches” stands out. Spurred by a trip to New York, McLaren and Westwood’s final collection together was inspired by the burgeoning hip-hop scene and Haring’s glyph-like iconography. “His work was like a magical, esoteric sign language,” she recalled. The artist’s signature dogs and dancing figures were brought to life in prints and intarsia knit across tops, skirts, shearling jackets, and more, all sent down the runway under flashing strobe lights to a hip-hop soundtrack. Madonna would even sport a “Witches” skirt briefly in her “Borderline” music video of the same year.
While not the biggest household name of the Westwood cohorts, model Sara Stockbridge’s cheeky brand of sex appeal would come to embody the brand from Spring/Summer 1985 until her runway retirement in 1991. With a headful of bottle-blonde roller curls and legs for days, Stockbridge’s punky spirit made for the definitive Westwood coquette. Maybe most iconically, she covered ’s August 1987 issue in a shot by Nick Knight, wearing a crown hat from that year’s “Harris Tweed” collection alongside the headline “Vivienne Westwood Crowns Her Princess.”Though she may have traded in her modeling chops to become a mother, actress, and novelist, Stockbridge could still be counted on to make the odd cameo for her old pal over the years—as in spring 2007, when she flounced down the runway dragging on a cigarette.
As classic Westwood codes go, tartan tops the list. “It’s a heroic image, the kilt flying,” she once said. “The idea of climbing mountains in this garb with the wind blowing behind you. They have all got stories, these fabrics.” Forever inspired by the mores of traditional dress, Westwood’s fascination with tartan has rebellious roots that date back to the Dress Act of 1746, when Britain banned wearing the fabric for 35 years following the Jacobite revolts of the Scottish Highlands.The plaid bondage gear that would become synonymous with first-wave punk style was a staple of McLaren and Westwood’s Seditionaries-era lineup in the late ’70s. Westwood’s signature tartan, woven by Lochcarron of Scotland, was dubbed “MacAndreas” (after Andreas Kronthaler, natch) and debuted in Fall/Winter 1993’s “Anglomania” outing. The vibrant blue and red plaid most memorably turned up as a showstopping wedding gown and veil worn by Moss and was officially recognized by the Scottish Register of Tartans in the same year. Other tartans dear to the Dame’s heart included punchy pink and green Bruce of Kinnaird, which dates back to the mid-eighteenth century, and any of the plaids and checks turned out by Harris Tweed, a longtime partner of the brand.Woven by artisans in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland to exacting specifications (and without the use of electricity) for over a century, Harris Tweed is synonymous with craftsmanship and heritage. Through Westwood’s lens, the fabrics found a new life beginning with Fall/Winter 1987’s namesake “Harris Tweed” collection as she reimagined what had once been perceived as fusty and elevated it to high-fashion heights, showing Harris Tweed skirt sets and wool crowns alongside flirty mini-crini skirts and faux ermine capelets fit for a queen. “My whole idea for this collection was stolen from a little girl I saw on the tube one day,” Westwood would recall. “She couldn’t have been more than 14. She had a little plaited bun, a Harris Tweed jacket, and a bag with a pair of ballet shoes in it. She looked so cool and composed standing there.”
Plundering the codes of the aristocratic and landed gentry was all in a day’s work for Westwood. “Englishness is vital to what I do. It’s about cut, it’s about irony and it’s about risk-taking,” she remarked in her 2014 memoir.Quintessentially British in every way, 1988’s “Time Machine” collection paid particular attention to the men’s Norfolk suit, a popular style dating back to the 1860s and usually worn for bucolic hunting trips at country manors and the like. Westwood merged the silhouette with a different kind of suit—a knight’s armor—and placed tweed “plates” at the elbows and shoulders.In Fall/Winter 1989’s “Voyage to Cythera,” Westwood would show a pair of flesh-colored velour tights accented by one strategically placed acrylic fig leaf. This epitomized what she referred to as the “Britain Must Go Pagan” years from the late ’80s to the early ’90s, a gleeful interrogation of quintessentially British costume, from traditional tweed to Regency-era dandyism. When it comes to dress as a tool of social commentary and an exploration of power, few have ever done it as artfully as Westwood.
Guitarist of groundbreaking female punk group The Slits, Viv Albertine was an admirer of Westwood from her earliest days on Kings Road. “Vivienne Westwood was my first role model,” she has said. “She was an extremely rigorous thinker and it mattered to us what she thought. I don’t think she is given enough credit for this, but she very much set the tone for what became known as punk.”In her memoir , Albertine writes: “Vivienne’s scary, for the reason any truthful, plain-talking person is scary—she exposes you. If you haven’t been honest with yourself, this makes you feel extremely uncomfortable, and if you are a con merchant the game is up[. . .] Sid [Vicious] told me, ‘Vivienne says you’re talented but lazy.’ I’ve worked at everything twice as hard since he said that.”
Swashbuckling and swaggering on its 1980 debut, the fantastical Worlds End incarnation of Westwood and McLaren’s Kings Road shop turned out to be its final form, operating under that name to this day. So-called for its once-remote Chelsea location, its interior was decorated to mimic that of a galleon ship to coincide with the 1981 “Pirate” collection, with sloping floors and a clock that ticked backward. The shop shuttered in 1984 on the heels of Westwood and McLaren’s split (the former decamped to Italy for a time) and remained closed until 1986, when it rose from the ashes. Today you can stop in to peruse archival reissues and directional Gold Label styles.
If it’s shocking that the monarchy would choose to formally recognize Westwood’s accomplishments, it’s no surprise at all that she would accept the honor of OBE in typical Westwood form—knickerless. Summoned to Buckingham Palace to receive Britain’s highest honors in 1992, Westwood wore a polished gray circle-skirt suit from her latest Spring/Summer collection, “Grand Hotel.” When she took the look for a spin for the assembled paparazzi, the result was an NSFW spectacle. “I wished to show off my outfit by twirling the skirt,” she recalled breezily. “It did not occur to me that, as the photographers were practically on their knees, the result would be more glamorous than I expected.”
From the teddy boys to the punks and the Blitz kids, youth culture was a cornerstone of Westwood’s ethos. Never one to rest on her laurels, the designer continued to support emerging talents in her later years, sitting front row for the likes of Matty Bovan (she dubbed him a “true punk”) and inspiring countless spiritual heirs from Richard Malone to Chopova Lowena.
It’s tough to imagine what Westwood would make of TikTok microtrends, though it might involve a couple of choice four-letter words. Still, her brand has enjoyed a recent revival with a generation not yet conceived when iconic “Anglomania” hit the runway in 1993. Spurred in part by a Westwood-wearing character in the cult anime , Gen-Z seized on the brand’s orb pearl necklaces in 2021, so much so that it reinstated production of its Mini Bas Relief Choker. A little bit , a little bit dark academia, it’s since been spotted on the likes of Rihanna, Bella Hadid, and others, and propelled other Westwood staples like mini kilts, logo wallets, and the Granny Bag to new Gen-Z heights.
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