Westwood Bound
Vivienne Westwood’s inspired and inspiring fashion introduced new forms of beauty and ripped-up British identity
Obscene to the crude, sophisticated to the refined, Dame Vivienne Westwood is remembered as one of the boldest proponents of the Punk aesthetic. Her political T-shirts — featuring provocative slogans, crucifixes collaged with swastikas, gay cowboys, satanic union flags, ripped up royalty, and the like — were sure to amuse your friends and antagonize your enemies. As a bonus, you could get yourself arrested just for strutting down the street in one. Westwood, aka ‘The Queen of Punk’, was among a handful of young Brit designers who clobbered politics with art and made fashion dangerous during the 1970s.
Vivienne Westwood took everyday items of clothing, such as the simple T-shirt, in a more Dada direction. After all, the Punk scene was a direct descendant of Dadaist ideology and aesthetics which she fully embraced with her then partner, Malcolm McLaren when they opened their fashion outlet, Let It Rock, in the King’s Road, London. That was in 1971 and, in 1974, the boutique would be re-branded as SEX.
A year after that, McLaren launched The Sex Pistols, a piece of performative hype-art taking the form of a band that came to epitomize the Brit Punk scene. They also served as a touring…
