Between a remarkable mastery of the cut, a provocative look, an irreverent and joyful femininity, the stylist had not stopped questioning the established order. It died on December 29 at the age of 81 years.
by Caroline Rousseau
In the press release of the brand that bears his name, announcing his death Thursday, December 29, it is written: “Lady Vivienne Westwood, creator and activist”. In 2022, fashion has few famous stylists associated directly or indirectly with the very idea of activism. His was pegged to the body. Stainless, breathtaking, sometimes disturbing, it was its trademark, its raison d’être in the world.
First a teacher in a primary school, Vivienne Isabel Swire will marry and divorce in the 1960s of Derek Westwood, leader of a nightclub. But it was his meeting, as early as 1965 with Malcolm McLaren, future manager of the New York Dolls and Sex Pistols, and especially their installation in 1971 at 430 Kings Road in London, which will base legend. Lance of punk known in particular under the Sex brand, the small shop is then unlike any other. Friend for half a century with the British designer, Couturier Jean-Charles de Castelbajac remembers this day in 1972 when he passed in front of the window and crossed the door: “I then crossed a large period of solitude because I was making clothes Based on a mop and moving blankets … and I come across this King’s Road store where everything was transgression, diversion and recovery, up to these T-shirts made with chicken bones! “
Passionate about history, Vivienne Westwood develops a taste for the 18th century e century French, the Revolution, the Incredible and the Wonderful, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Rose Bertin or François Boucher. Not in a literal approach, but situationist: she takes up her account historical elements – the corset, the tailor technique, the false asses or even the tartan -, she deconstructs and rebuilds everything so that everyone has a new look at things . In perfect self -taught (she will have received in all and for everything that three months of fashion training at the Harrow School Art), she dismantles the clothes she buys to understand their structure. “I have been criticized for being anachronistic. But my way of cutting clothes, which adapts Madeleine Vionnet’s techniques or Charles Frederick Worth to mass production, has influenced the way people dress,” said -It to M the magazine of the World in 2014, during the promotion of its autobiography.
Mode more disturbing than Glamor
With determination and Constance, the Westwood warrior makes her locker room a fight, a permanent, alive slogan. Its fashion, more disturbing than glamorous, challenges. Between a remarkable mastery of the cut, a provocative look, an irreverent and joyful femininity, it questions the established order. “She could have made more conventional choices, but she stayed all her life faithful to her commitments, analyzes Castelbajac. She felt that putting herself in danger was the only way to be immortal during her lifetime.” Like this day in 1992 where she receives from the hands of the queen the medal of the order of the British Empire: she presents herself in gray -mouse tailor of a formidable classicism and, leaving Buckingham, turns her skirt leaving photographers to discover that she does not wear panties.
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