THE first time most of us became aware of Vivienne Westwood was when Sex Pistol Steve Jones wore one of her naked breasts T-shirts on Bill Grundy’s Thames TV show at the end of 1976.
Punk rock had arrived, designed by Vivienne. And it was like a big fat punch in the face.
Music would never be the same again, and neither would fashion.
Not if Vivienne — who died aged 81 on Thursday night — had anything to do with it.
Immediately the Pistols became public enemy No1, while punk fashion was imprinted on the public psyche.
Bondage trousers, safety pins, short and dyed spiky hair, stencilled T-shirts and black lipstick — not since the days of leather jackets, quiffs and jeans back in the 1950s had street fashion been so incendiary.
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The media was appalled, punk became a rebellious orthodoxy and the Sex Pistols — guided by their manager Malcolm McLaren, who was also Vivienne’s boyfriend — became a cause celebre.
McLaren would always say that the exploits and the image of the Sex Pistols were designed simply to sell records.
Vivienne meanwhile was genuinely trying to reinvent fashion.
Which she did, in some style. Overnight she became not just the most revolutionary fashion designer this country has ever produced, but the most influential too.
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She was shouting at a customer
Not only was everything she designed considered to be a rebel classic, but her designs influenced two generations of young designers, from John Galliano to Stella McCartney, from Alexander McQueen to Victoria Beckham.
Her clothes were completely contemporary yet they were steeped in the past. She loved kilts and corsets and always had a historical backstory to her collections.
And her clothes were worn by everyone from Tracey Emin and Theresa May to Pharrell Williams and Princess Eugenie.
The way she designed meant that her clothes could be worn by both men and women, and she could be said to have spearheaded the idea of gender-fluid clothing (without consciously doing so).
I first met her in 1977 when I visited her Seditionaries shop in the Chelsea’s King’s Road.
At that time, I had never seen a person, let alone a woman, look so extraordinary. With her dyed hair, her bondage strides, standing next to the equally arresting shop assistant Jordan, she looked like an assassin from outer space.
She was actually shouting at a customer, telling him she didn’t think he could carry his outfit off.
She was probably right. I was just glad she hadn’t picked on me, and hadn’t decided to laugh at my plastic leather jacket, green fluorescent trousers and baseball boots.
Naturally, I was terrified. But as I started to bump into her at punk gigs in London at the Roxy, the 100 Club and the Marquee, she turned out to be quite benign. She wasn’t so much aggressive as eccentric.
It was her outfits that were aggressive, which was the whole point. “My job was always to confront the establishment,” she said. “Punk was about rebellion but it was also about celebration. A celebration of freedom. It was your fault if you didn’t understand it.”
Born in 1941 in the village of Tintwistle, Derbys, Vivienne was raised by factory worker dad Gordon Swire and cotton weaver mum Dora.
The family moved to Harrow, North London, when Vivienne was 17 and she took a jewellery-making course only to drop out after a term.
She then worked as a primary school teacher for five years. In 1962, Vivienne married toolmaker Derek Westwood and they had son, Ben, a year later.
They split in 1965 after Vivienne met then-art student Malcolm McLaren. In 1967, she gave birth to Malcolm’s son Joe.
Having taught herself how to cut, drape and sew, Vivienne and McClaren started selling designs on the King’s Road in a shop called Let It Rock in 1971.
Three years later, it became SEX, where her punk designs and the Sex Pistols inspired a generation — before being renamed World’s End.
She would split from McLaren in the early 1980s, when he wandered off to be a pop star. It was then that she started to become renowned as a genuine force in British fashion, designing dozens of collections that pushed the genre to the outer limits of acceptability. And she was brilliant.
In the early 90s, while teaching fashion at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna, she fell in love with student Andreas Kronthaler — who she wed in 1993. They were still together when she died.
I would interview her throughout the 1980s and she became an enthusiastic firebrand for creativity, especially British creativity.
Above all else, Vivienne cared
She was a cracking interviewee as all you had to do was ask her a question and she would talk for hours and hours without pausing for breath.
“Culture is necessary for human beings to develop and evolve into better people, better creatures,” she liked to say, knowing that what she was doing was changing the way people lived their lives.
“Fashion can help you look at yourself and make you question why you are doing the things you do.” Unlike many designers, she always had a manifesto in mind when she produced a collection.
These manifestos were not always as cohesive as they perhaps could have been, but above all else, Vivienne cared.
She cared about the effect her clothes could have on people. I went to interview her once wearing one of her infamous pirate tops and she squealed, “You look lovely. I might have to borrow that and copy it. Maybe I should design it again!”
I have to say I thought she was marvellous, a true maverick.
She was the real queen of fashion.
After a while she started to become focused on surprise rather than shock, understanding the ingenuity of the clothes she designed that led to the punk revolution were appreciated because they were different rather than simply shocking.
In later life, she became more and more interested in social issues, particularly climate change. She was obsessively opposed to fracking, and developed a rather odd interest in activist Julian Assange.
Even though McLaren went on to have a string of famous girlfriends — including the American actress Lauren Hutton — he always kept something of a torch for Vivienne.
In one of my many interviews with him — which took place in the sushi bar in the Kensington Hilton in the summer of 1987 — he talked for over three hours about how much he had loved her.
We were drinking so much beer that, at one point, I had to cross the lobby to use the loo. When I returned, ten minutes later Malcolm was crying into my tape recorder.
When I transcribed the tape later, I discovered he hadn’t stopped talking while I was gone. That’s how much he loved his maverick muse.
I loved her too. She made my wife Sarah’s wedding dress, and once, when she was styling Vivienne for Vogue (where she worked) and complimented Viv on the dress she was wearing, she immediately took it off and gave it to her.
“It will look so much better on you than me,” she said, completely unembarrassed about the fact she was now naked. Anyway, to her it was all something of a game.
A copper-bottomed British eccentric
“I never look at fashion magazines,” she once said. “I find them incredibly boring.”
To Vivienne, reading a fashion magazine would have been like joining the establishment.
Vivienne was a genuinely brilliant person. Someone who considered what she did to be of real quality.
She understood how good she was, and the huge effect she had on others. But she didn’t care what anyone thought of her. She gave the impression of being a dotty aunt, but in reality she was a copper-bottomed British eccentric.
Fashion for her was important, but she knew it wasn’t rocket science. “Buy less, choose well and do it yourself!” she said. “I’m not terribly interested in beauty. To me, a status symbol is a book.”
I went to most of her fashion shows, and towards the end of her life, the gossip at these shows tended to revolve around her own attire as much as the attire of the models she sent down the runway.
Whenever we saw one of her fashion shows in Milan, the topic of conversation on the front row was whether she was wearing underwear (she usually wasn’t). Which was one of the reasons we all loved her.
By the time of her death, she was appreciated by so many people for stretching the boundaries of what it meant to be a designer.
Yes, she was adored by the style fraternity and by every fashion fan from Chelsea to Tokyo.
But she was also adored by journalists, photographers and chat show hosts, because we all knew when you had an audience with Vivienne it was going to be explosive.
When I posted photos of Vivienne on Instagram after her death — including a picture of the two of us taken during London Fashion Week — I got an immediate response from Jonathan Ross. “There will never be another,” he said.
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And he was right. She was the queen of all she surveyed. And now that she’s gone, everything she created has disappeared with her.
Goodbye, Vivienne. And God save the queen.
Her passion inspired a generation
Tracey Lea Sayer
WHEN I was a young art student in the late 1980s, Dame Vivienne Westwood was my total inspiration to work in the fashion business.
With her pivotal role in the punk movement and her outspoken approach towards politics and the establishment, she gave a generation of fashion students the voice they wanted to hear.
Viv was cool, cutting-edge and stood up for what she believed in.
I also loved that she was from a working-class background, like me, but had made it into the world of high fashion.
She gave me hope.
On a trip to London as a teenager, I visited her shop – then called World’s End, on the King’s Road. I was in seventh heaven.
Bondage pants, Baroque corsets and chokers adorned the walls, all of which shocked my mum who I was with at the time.
Although she started out as a school teacher, Viv became more of a life tutor. Her passion and ability to challenge, inspired a generation of British club kids.
We wore her clothes out until they fell apart. After all, we could put them back together with safety pins, right?
Vivienne used her catwalk as a platform long before social media existed to campaign for a better world. She spoke until her death about climate change. She was so much more than just fashion.
Her “buy less, choose well, make it last” ethos has always meant a lot to me. In an industry of excess, she never sold out and I love her for that.
In 1992, I landed a job as the receptionist at her design studio in Battersea. This was the biggest “pinch me” moment of my life.
Vivienne would wander into reception wearing “rocking horse” shoes made out of wooden blocks and a zig-zag print dress and ask me, “What’s that funny old thing you are wearing, Tracey?”, before asking me to take off my second-hand jacket so she could look at the cut.
That is what everyone loved about Vivienne.
She didn’t have a filter. Her refreshing and positive approach to change made her an inspiring role model.
I love her quote, “And if you can change you, you can perhaps change the world”.
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