The Bite Magazine - issue 16

renamed ‘SEX’, a shop ‘unlike anything else going on in England at the time’ with the slogan ‘rubberwear for the office’. After the Sex Pistol’s ‘God Save the Queen’ went to number one and was refused air time by the BBC, the shop was reopened as ‘Seditionaries’’ and transformed the straps and zips of obscure sexual fetishism into fashion and inspiring D.I.Y aesthetics, which the media called ‘Punk Rock’. In 1980, two years after the Sex Pistols had split, the shop was refitted and renamed ‘Worlds End’ and remains so until this day. From her very first collection shown in spring 1981 to her current offering ‘Intellec- tuals Unite’,VivienneWestwood’s influences in the fashion world knows no limits. The AW81 collection ‘Pirate’ debuted the designer’s and McLaren’s very first catwalk show and kick-started the new romantic look as well as dominated the ‘80s sub-cul- tures. It was shown at Olympia to a blast of cannon fire and rap music by McLaren, with the clothes evoking the golden age of piracy, an age of highwaymen, dandies and buccaneer. Her next two collections ‘Savage’ and ‘Nostalgia of Mud’ opened up Westwood’s horizons and was influenced by ethnic and primitive looks taken from the National Geographic magazine. McLaren described the idea behind the collection as, “We want to get out of this island mentality and relate ourselves to those taboos and magical things we believe we have lost.” The SS82 collection combined Native Ameri- can patterns with leather frock coats and featured Foreign Legion hats worn back- to-front, ‘petti-drawers’ and shorts, while the AW82 featured huge tattered skirts and sheepskin jackets in muddy colours. The SS83 ‘Punkature’ collection which carried images from Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner still carried a raw feeling and emphasised on pre-washed and over- printed natural fabrics, with a play on the words ‘punk’ and ‘couture’. Moving over to the dark side, Westwood’s and McLaren’s AW83 ‘Witches’ collection discovered ‘a magical, esoteric sign language’ in the work of New York graffiti artist Keith Haring, which they printed in fluorescent colours on backgrounds that resembled firework paper. The collection featured oversized jackets and coats, double-breasted jackets and huge cream cotton mackintoshes that were worn with knitted jacquard bodies, tube skirts and pointed hats. The clothing was accompanied with customised train- ers that had three tongues which emulated the freeze-frame effect of strobe lighting and the jerky sound of rap music. “Like sequences of things, where people are dis- located somehow at the same time that they’re moving.” This was the final collec- tion that McLaren and Westwood worked on together. Life after McLaren increased Westwood’s creativity and it wasn’t long before the designer found a new business partner, Carlo d’Amarion who remains the man- aging director of her company today. The designer’s SS84 ‘Hypnos’ collection featured sleek garments made out of syn- thetic sports fabric in fluorescent pinks and greens and were fastened with rubber phallus buttons.Westwood rubbed shoul- ders with the likes of Calvin Klein, Claude Montana and Gianfranco Ferre in Tokyo when her collection was shown at Hanae Mori’s ‘Best of Five’ global fashion awards. Following this, her AW84 ‘Clint Eastwood’ collection hankered after the wide open spaces seen in Western films. She said, “Sometimes you need to transport your idea to a world that doesn’t exist and then populate it with fantastic looking people.” The collection included garments smoth- ered in Italian company logos and Day-Glo patches inspired by Tokyo’s neon signs. The designer’s creative ideas went from strength to strength with an emphasis on the Harris Tweed which celebrated her love affair with traditional English cloth- ing and also surprisingly her growing obsession with royalty, a far cry from her earlier rebellion ideals. She returned to deriving eclectic pieces in her ‘Britain Must Go Pagan’ collections, combining tra- ditional British themes with classical and pagan elements including classical drapery paired with tweed, Smedley underwear overprinted with pornographic images from ancient Greece, ‘Miss Marple’ suits in Harris Tweed and articulated jackets inspired by medieval armour and printed Sèvres patterns on classical ‘togas’ creating a collection that ‘telescoped time’. More collections followed that helped shape the face of fashion and set VivienneWestwood as one of the pioneers that we will remem- ber and cherish for a long time to come. With the support of husband Andreas Kronthaler’s creative direction behind her, there are no signs of Vivienne Westwood slowing down any time soon. Hers is a story of influence, provocative ideas and pressing issues that has shaped her career in the most respectable way, albeit a few controversies along the way. After all, if it hadn’t been for Westwood and McLaren, we probably wouldn’t have had the punk movement. www.viviennewestwood.com bite designer profile