Vivienne Westwood by Vivienne Westwood & Ian Kelly

Author:Vivienne Westwood & Ian Kelly [Kelly, Ian, Westwood, Vivienne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447254133
Publisher: Picador

Architect’s drawing for the Worlds End clock.

Pirates was a first for Vivienne in a number of ways. It was the first time Vivienne was accorded, and accorded herself, the status of a designer. It was the first time she went onto a catwalk, at Olympia, at the end of a proper collection. ‘I had on an old grey school sweater and no make-up, I nearly missed the show, and Malcolm made me go on stage, saying, “They want to see you as you are, they want to see that you have been working.” It was the first time Malcolm had been able to synchronize properly his fashion and music crossover, getting sponsorship from cutting-edge musical technologists Sony Walkman(!) and showcasing his latest band, Bow Wow Wow, in Vivienne’s pirate clothes. And the V&A promptly bought one of the outfits. As John Galliano was moved to say, ‘It’s impossible to think of the bands, the music and the spirit of both Punk and New Romanticism without Vivienne’s work.’ It was to be her next claim on fashion posterity. Boy George was at the show, Adam Ant had already followed in the wake of the Healey / McLaren / Westwood pirate look, ‘and Steve Strange [the club promoter] named his “Club For Heroes” just as we had called the Seditionaries clothes “Clothes for Heroes” – it was jolly good for business.’ Club owners and habitués like Steve Strange and Leigh Bowery enthusiastically bought and wore her clothes. So too did club promoters Michael and Gerlinde Costiff, who attended that first Olympia show. Michael described it as ‘the most extraordinary thing you have ever seen – absolutely magical. It was so luxurious, all the glitter of gold, that whole swashbuckling, heroic feeling, it was stunning . . . Vivienne up until then had been very black; to see all that colour, that gold!’ They were indeed clothes for heroes, as the shop legend had it, and the heroism was, in Vivienne’s mind, part of the ongoing punk crusade with clothes: ‘I don’t believe in closing in. You don’t make people want to change things by making them realize how poor and humiliated they are . . . you have to make people feel great before you get change.’

‘I’m very literary,’ Vivienne repeats to me one morning, ‘and I’ve got literary ideas. The pirate trousers, for instance, are like something from a story. But more than that, even worn denim gives the idea of experience. If you wear old clothes, then you can look like you have the experience, the story that the clothes carry. So it was a big, big design moment when I did those pirate trousers – it was the start of a whole new look. I was searching for something and I found it in historical costume, so it’s the beginning too of me looking backwards as well as forwards. And it’s important, in a small way also, to acknowledge the issue of “distressed”, and “vintage”, as it has become. Because that became part of how to tell a story in fashion, and give an idea of experience.

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