Westwood, though, has not just hogged the spotlight with ruthless sensationalism. At the centre of her work and herself lies an integrity and genuine creative curiosity that has sustained a remarkable career, so that her own success has extended beyond that of those people she has taken inspiration from and worked with. In relation to her notoriety, she says: 'It wasn't that I purposely wanted to rebel, I wanted to find out why it had to be done one way and not another.'1
Whether her scandalous flair was intentional or not, though, she made a lasting impression on the fashion world, and on British people and culture. It has been said that her designs: '… encapsulate a particular Britishness, a fearless unconformity combined with a sense of tradition.'2
Her work has confronted and explored the notion of Britishness in some depth; Westwood has drawn inspiration from all aspects of our national identity, from the Queen and Margaret Thatcher, to the Sex Pistols, to Harris Tweed, to boarding school. It is true, though, that her loyalty lay with rock 'n' roll rather than the establishment: 'The safety pin in the lip of the Queen was saying, "You too can be a punk"',3 explained Westwood on another scandal.
Her involvement in the music scene in London was important, and Westwood's shop, 'Let It Rock', became a haven - perhaps the home they had never known - for the Sex Pistols, their various groupies and a range of other punks. As Paul Cook, one of the Sex Pistols, remembers:
It was an intense time and there was a lot of violence directed at punks, particularly from football fans who used to be around Chelsea on Saturdays. Vivienne and Malcolm McLaren's shop was one of the few places you could hang around without feeling uncomfortable. The band was formed there from people who used to come in or work there at the weekends. We were never told what to wear, but we had free rein in the shop, particularly when it was re-named Seditionaries and we could wear the bondage trousers and the clothes with straps and zips.4
It seems, then, that Vivienne really was the mother of punk, dressing her surrogate children for their various performances and scandals: she designed the clothes, the look, that epitomised the movement, and the Sex Pistols performed the soundtrack.
The punk style in Westwood's clothes was an important development of the designer's own identity, because it gave her a means by which she could be as assertive as her male counterparts where previously she had been comparatively constrained. And beyond the scandal, there lay an impressive degree of thought, as observed by Christopher Breward:
Their pulling together of sadomasochistic bondage paraphernalia, Nazi military decorations and clothing associated with the nursery or asylum, produced a surreal commentary on the anarchic tendencies of sartorial display. In imbuing these combinations with a fierce talismanic power, Westwood paid subconscious homage to the process of bricolage described by the anthropologist Levi-Strauss in his examinations of the fetishistic uses made of artefacts by primitive societies.5
Thus, Westwood's designs had more substance than generally thought, even in the very beginning of her career as a designer, during the punk movement. She agreed that there was more to her work than sensationalism and overt sexuality: 'The safety pins definitely had an analogy in Third World culture, like putting feathers in your hair … or people in Africa who made necklaces out of old car hub caps'.6
The punk movement certainly elevated Westwood to a degree of infamy and formidability, but when punk died, Vivienne Westwood and her iconoclasm did not. Although she became rather more distanced from her previous creative and business partner, Malcolm McLaren, she became no less influential. On the contrary, Westwood's career took off. As McLaren involved himself increasingly with the music scene, Westwood focused her energy on being a recognised fashion designer. She became disinterested in punk, as the movement lost its principles and energy and effect - it all became so regular and accepted that one woman's magazine ran an article telling mothers how to make 'punk-style' clothes for their daughters. Vivienne Westwood said of this period:
I got tired of looking at clothes from this point of view of rebellion - I found it exhausting, and after a while I wasn't sure if it was right. I'm sure that there is such a thing as the 'anti-establishment' - it feeds the establishment.7
And so, Vivienne Westwood realised that the battle against the establishment could not be won through the blatant wearing of ripped clothes and subversive slogans; she became a sort of femme fatale, a honey trap, charming the fashion world and subtly destroying its loyalty to the establishment. In Vivienne Westwood, punk did not die - it just grew up.
Still subversive, but bored with safety pins, Westwood looked to other sources for inspiration. She recalls a dialogue with McLaren - still an important mentor in her life:
We wanted to get out of the underground tunnel feeling of England, that dark feeling. After Seditionaries I didn't know what to do, and Malcolm just looked at what was happening on the streets and he saw people wearing fancy dress and old clothes, just like they did in Paris in 1972. He said, 'Do something romantic, look at history.' And I realised that I'd only looked at my own lifetime's culture and all the rebelliousness.8
This was a turning point in Westwood's career, and her originality as a designer flourished as she drew inspiration increasingly from art history, and from such wide-ranging areas as Ancient Greece, piracy, historical menswear (for example, the plain tailoring of 18th-century English gentlemen). She met a man named Ness, and he subsequently introduced her to European painting, especially Titian and Vermeer, the writing of Bertrand Russell and Aldous Huxley, and the music of Chopin and Ravel.
She rejected the anarchist approach to dress-making of the punk era, and she adopted the pattern cutting and tailoring so absent previously in the making of her clothes. Ironically, by conforming to the traditional practices of tailoring, she rid herself of the restraints posed on her by the anarchist approach; she found that as a designer she was free to pursue other lines of interest, without losing her iconoclasm and fiery originality.
[The punks] had to start to step out and look rich. In the same way they got the punk clothes on their backs, they now have to go one step further and start looking golden and rich and in control, or potentially in control. I don't believe in closing in. You don't make people want to change things by making them realise how poor and humiliated they are … you have to make people feel great before you get change.9
Parallels in Westwood's move from brash rebellion to a celebration of elegant sensuality can be made with Madonna's development as a style icon. She gave up obvious sensationalism and brashness in favour of Marie Antoinette costumes and a new interest in the old French Royal court and old world decadence. In this manner, Vivienne Westwood diversified as a designer in the eighties and nineties.
Punk is definitely part of my history. I'll never get rid of that, but let me tell you what I think street clothes are. They presume that there is an establishment, and that they are therefore 'anti-establishment … I used to believe that there was a door to kick down, but now I know it's not there at all. There are just jumps along the way.10
Westwood went on to gently mock the British idea of establishment, rather than wage war against it:
She brought in a gentle parody of establishment styles - the clothes of boarding schools, royalty and country wear - giving them a new lease of life … Westwood's heroes had changed from punks and ragamuffins to cheeky Tatler girls wearing clothes that parodied the upper-class English.11
Vivienne Westwood, throughout her spectacular career, has spanned every aspect of British culture: she has been immersed in the punk movement and she was awarded the Queen's Award for Export Achievement in 1998. Some may muse that Westwood has sold out, or lost her principles - that she has become what she hated so much as a young designer. Rather than be a hypocrite, though, Vivienne Westwood has not betrayed anybody, and she has not betrayed herself. She has not let other people and ideas restrain her creativity; ultimately, her design is more important than the political climate in which she designs it, and so she has risen above the context, in search of higher creative fulfilment. It is not about the establishment versus the anti-establishment anymore; it is about making clothes that are universal in their inspiration and not limited to a particular fleeting movement or niche. Vivienne Westwood, in detaching herself from immediate conflicts and concerns, has become a more successful and inspiring designer, whose work exists beyond the immediate present. 'Her clothes are an intervention in fashion, not simply a development of it - which is why they are always so distinctive, and often so distanced from what's going on elsewhere in the industry.'12
Christiana Spens
References
1. Wilcox C. Vivienne Westwood. London: V&A Publications, 2003: 9.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Cook C. They Wear Her Well. interviewed by Dee O'Conell in Life, The Observer Magazine, 8 April 2001: 16.
5. Breward C. Fashion. Oxford, 2003: 196-197.
6. McDermott. Vivienne Westwood: ten years on. I-D February 1986: 12.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ash J. Sex is Fashion Fashion is Sex. 2G 1986.
10. Webb. Interview for Blitz magazine, May 1986.
11. Wilcox C. Vivienne Westwood. London: V&A Publications, 2004: 21.
12. Healey M. The Genius. Pop October 2002: 305.
