Vivienne Westwood (Q3654)
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Fashion Brand
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Vivienne Westwood |
Fashion Brand |
Statements
managing director
World's End Shop Operator
intern
2007
intern
1985
assistant
hat designer
2019
designer for Witches collection
The Vivienne Westwood collection hasn’t been on the runway since 2019. For its return to the catwalk, the London-based team took off to China to officially close the Shanghai Fashion Week schedule last night (officially being used loosely, there’s still lots to come from Shanghai).The show got underway with a men’s look, a pinstripe suit worn with a pair of silver leather peep toe heels. Two other masc-looking models followed in black frocks, one of them carrying a basketball to match their dress. “Black, the best color for summer,” read the collection press release. These looks and their gender-bending styling—a house signature but less of a familiar sight in Shanghai—were a reminder of the kind of titillating play that made Dame Westwood a countercultural icon.What ensued was an amalgamation of some commercial ready-to-wear (tees, denim mini skirts and jackets, knit separates); a range of athleisure in the form of biker shorts, tights, a funky singlet, and some wide-legged sweats; and swimwear. It was at times a confusing melange of product, particularly the inclusion of a singular Mao suit jacket. Not every visiting label at Shanghai Fashion Week needs to take on the challenge of reappraising Chinese garb. At the very least, the goal should be to do so with more commitment—considering particularly that the week has an array of talented local designers doing this sort of thing already. One can’t help but wonder what a combination of the unique Westwood tailoring vernacular might look like when combined with something as sharp as a Mao suit or a cheongsam.The real hits here were the fan-favorite Westwood-isms. From tailored jackets and a deliciously signature Dame Vivienne skirt suit to a run of corsets and the designer’s signature plaid, it was these crowd pleasers the label should’ve focused on. On the menswear side, a black blouse with a ruched collar and a cropped denim jacket worn under a tiny black harness were highlightsA couple of tiny sparkly dresses and draped frocks are sure to charm the celebrity corps stateside. With Americans including Taylor Swift and Malia Obama wearing the label, New York should be the next destination in the Westwood travel itinerary.
19 October 2024
Considering the extensive archive of the late Vivienne Westwood, it’s not surprising that the in-house team now helming her eponymous label continually reference her past work, deconstructing and reinterpreting as they go along. The fall collection found inspiration in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s seminal 1774 novelThe Sorrows of Young Werther. Westwood herself is quoted in the brand’s press release, having once said, “Andreas bought me Goethe’s book. It was the first tragic novel, and it caused a sensation – and was one of the factors which led to the Romantic movement. Napoleon took ‘Werther’ on his Egyptian campaign in 1798 – and when he met Goethe in 1808, he told him that he had read the book seven times – he decorated him.”Unveiled at the brand’s London HQ in Mayfair, the latest collection merged a tapestry of textures and concepts inspired by the early 19th-century ‘Empire style’ movement, the Napoleonic era’s aesthetic, and the lavish grandeur of Imperial Rome. Looking to classical antiquity and military regalia, the lineup featured intricate interior prints and Jacquards expertly tailored into an array of louche blouses, structured jackets, and playful skirts. A halter-neck top, evoking the sophistication of a gentleman’s three-piece suit vest, underwent a transformation into a hybrid corset with a structured boned interior. This same ingenuity was echoed in a striking red knit cardigan, cleverly integrated with a built-in corset.In contrast, the collection also featured rugged, animalistic elements evoking the wild landscapes of Scotland, with earthy tones and pony-hair accessories—a standout being the fuzzy platform boot. Referencing Ancient Rome, toga-esque dresses crafted from copper viscose fabrics created an illusion of liquid leather, hanging effortlessly from racks. Suiting took center stage, showcasing impeccably tailored variegated striped wool two-piece suits alongside a denim twist on the classic frock coat, paired with matching breeches—a masterful fusion of tradition and contemporary flair.While gauzy knits made recurring appearances in relaxed, patchwork separates, outerwear crafted from red and gray Harris Tweed added a distinctly British touch to charming double-breasted coats and structured jackets. Despite the array of intriguing concepts, the collection occasionally felt overwhelmed by the multitude of ideas presented. Streamlining the focus on singular references could’ve enhanced cohesion and clarity.
28 March 2024
The designers of Vivienne Westwood’s label are always drawing inspiration from the vast archives left by its legendary founder. For spring, the team paid tribute to Shakespearean England, a time when gender boundaries were fluid and self-expression was celebrated—values deeply ingrained in the Westwood ethos. The lookbook was shot at Shakespeare’s Globe, the historic Elizabethan theater constructed in 1599, where William Shakespeare penned his famous plays. In true Westwood fashion, the collection featured compelling silhouettes, tactile fabrics, and unexpected idea mash-ups.At the brand’s Conduit Street HQ, the collection was divided into distinct sections, each representing a different mood. To begin, there was a romantic and disheveled tribute to Westwood’s spring 1998 collection Tied to the Mast. Jacquard separates in an overdyed ecru shade embodied the opulence of Marie Antoinette’s Versailles, while maintaining a punk sensibility with frayed edges. Off-the-shoulder dresses and cropped cardigans were crafted from vibrant, multi-colored stretch knit fabrics, offering a youthful interpretation of modest shapes.Distorting the confines of gender binaries, the brand transformed its Evolution of Man print into ultra-feminine silhouettes, featuring flowing shirt dresses and scalloped jackets. There were nods to Westwood's ’80s heyday through oversized cotton poplin button-ups and structured outerwear with pronounced shoulders. The corsetry, a Westwood signature since her 1987 Harris Tweed collection, was ingeniously crafted from knit fabric, maintaining its three-dimensional shape without traditional boning.Pablo Picasso's zig-zag designs from the 1920 balletLe Tricornewere blown-up and decorated ’90s-inspired silhouettes. Elsewhere, a range of vibrant-hued pants with integrated boxer shorts and chaps looked like real conversation starters. Overall, it’s evident that Westwood’s design team thoroughly enjoys delving into her remarkable archive.
20 October 2023
Where the late Vivienne Westwood’s husband Andreas Kronthaler honored her life and career with his show in Paris, the focus for her London-based eponymous label—the company’s more commercial offering—was to carry on as usual. This was a deliberate move on the part of the internal team, who opted to present after Paris to ensure that Kronthaler’s outing served as a tribute to the designer founder.For fall, the Westwood design team focused on the brand’s extensive archive. Inspired by the concept of a nomad who’s collecting myriad eras through textures and silhouettes, the garments combined new ideas with references to seasons past.A spring 2014 checkered fabric, for instance, was transformed into a newly developed style—a rounded shoulder suit. Elsewhere, there was a distressed taupe jumper with a monkey motif from spring 1993 printed on it, as well as tailored separates for both men and women that featured the iconic off-kilter drunken tailor shape. The corset, an enduring Westwood hallmark that was introduced in the fall 1990 Portrait collection, was updated as the ‘Sunday corset’ by Kronthaler, which was made with a bodice on its underside and a soft, draped exterior. Leopard print could be found on button-up shirts, thigh-skimming dresses, and a plush teddy coat constructed out of woven wool (emulating the softness of shearling)—a throwback to fall 1991’s Dressing Up collection.It goes without saying that Westwood’s legacy lives on—in the industry, as well as within her design studios. Devotees of the brand may feel at ease knowing that their favorite styles will continue to be explored, modernized, and re-produced here.
14 March 2023
Strictly she’s a Dame (a title bestowed on her by the British state), but Vivienne Westwood is often described as a queen, whether of Punk or British fashion. Before this collection, originally due to drop yesterday, then deferred for obvious, British reasons, Westwood tipped her tiara to the real just-passed HRH. She said last Friday: “The Queen performs a national service. Every morning she has her breakfast, most days her outfit is already decided for her royal appointment; shake hands, gives speeches. Every institution in our country wants her acknowledgement and attribution. Her life is prescribed. The Royal Family, as an institution, is social cement. The Queen holds the country together. She’s a figurehead of international diplomacy. I think it’s so important that our Royal Family is hereditary, the family members learn diplomacy by osmosis and develop a sense of duty to our country and to the world. We all owe her our gratitude.”Westwood is closely associated with the spirit of ’70s sedition soundracked by the Sex Pistols. Yet she twice collected honors from Buckingham Palace (even if unencumbered by underwear). And her patriotic alignment did not end with Elizabeth; for fall 2015 she put out a t-shirt printed with an image to the-then Prince Charles as a shout-out to his long standing environmental campaigning.This collection was entitled Born To Rewild (a phrase incorporated into the pinstripe pieces) and represented a fresh chapter in that ongoing Westwood concern. As ever, all of the pieces were presented with an impeccable sustainability provenance and a dizzying frame of reference, both to Westwood’s own past collections and creative culture more broadly.The neon-spiked tartan, for instance, was a version of the MacAndy pattern first used in her fall 1993 Anglomania collection. Slashed denim was developed from the Cut and Slash collection of 1991. And there was also a great corset skirt developed from a design originally modeled by Kate Moss, sucking a lollipop, in 1992. Naturally, there was also plenty of Sex—a pair of shorts named the Rough Bum featured a Savile Row style pant-tightener above the salient area, while jeans came without a top button, but an “emergency button” halfway down the fly. One suspects that Westwood’s design team has a whale of a time mining, refining, and reviving her wonderful archive: recycling in the best possible sense.
20 September 2022
Vivienne Westwood’s greatest source of reference is none other than Vivienne Westwood herself. This season the doughty designer and her team remixed elements of her back catalog afresh, while inserting a sprinkling of newly conceived elements in order to service the seasonal consumption provoking manufacture of the “new.” Naturally, however, all the fabrics and materials created for that consumption were sourced from suppliers the designer’s lengthy notes worked to demonstrate were impeccably sustainable.Because this is the Year of the Tiger and the market responds to such references, the Westwood team looked back to the fall 2001 show Wild Beauty, which featured whiskered tiger headpieces and a tiger stripe that was reproduced here on some appropriately fierce tailoring and overdyed on deadstock cotton velvet and certified-not-harmful viscose dresses pants and shirting for both genders. There was also a new take on tiger in a pixelated and otherwise distorted print, plus an equal opportunities feline shout-out to leopards, featured on underwear and base layers in more friendly viscose via digital print. More obscurely, the dress in Look 48 was apparently gathered together from a bolt of fabric cut in the silhouette of a black panther skin outline, an enjoyably ditsy way in which to generate Westwood’s trademark woozily asymmetric ruching.Cat-unrelated highlights included wide-shouldered, low-skirted, and double-breasted all-viscose satin tuxedos, plus pieces made in a repeat end-of-year school tea towel print (a British cultural quirk the Westwood team said they needed to explain to editors from the U.S.) and others in a Westwood drafted, Matisse inspired eye print. A corset reproduced the chicken-bone font of Westwood’s classic “Sex” T-shirt while more subtle visual congress was provoked through samples of painted works by Jean-Baptiste Oudry and Breughel. Elsewhere, “wrecked” overcoats were unconventionally cut to generate the same vagabond iconoclast charisma that Westwood herself has for so long personified. Without in any way being a criticism of Westwood—been there, done that—it was tricky to square her “buy less, by better” mantra set against a collection that was so bristling with highly want-able buyables.
22 February 2022
Over the past few seasons, Vivienne Westwood’s main line has served as a forum to revive (and, naturally, reimagine) some of her most memorable collections from decades past, most notably with the use of the Boucher prints from her famous “Portrait” collection for fall. And why wouldn’t she look into her archive? In recent years, cult Westwood pieces from the 1990s have found a new and unexpected audience in some of today’s most obsessed-over fashion plates, with Bella Hadid making Westwood’s Rococo corsets one of the hottest vintage finds going and her corseted dresses remaining a perennial favorite in Kim Kardashian West’s closet. When the clothes feel more relevant than ever—and others are cashing in on them—it seems only right that Westwood should remind us where it all started.This season, she continued the trend with a look back to one of her personal favorites, spring 1998’s “Tied to the Mast” collection, a swashbuckling pirate-and-sailor fantasia inspired by the 19th-century British couturier Redfern. Still, this season’s cheeky, more light-hearted lookbook, featuring the likes of Georgia May Jagger and Lily McMenamy cavorting around maritime detritus—and in one shot, a shirtless, oiled-up model holding a sailboat above his head, bodybuilder-style—feels firmly rooted in the present.In part that’s thanks to Westwood’s ongoing commitment to sustainability, an area where—whatever you make of her mandate to buy less while still producing multiple collections each season—she undoubtedly walks the walk. As is now custom, the show notes were accompanied by a 28-page dossier outlining the collection’s environmentally-friendly credentials: 98% of the materials are low-impact and cruelty-free, and for the first time, there are no virgin synthetic fabrics. Even the wools now come from “regenerative agriculture” farms, in which as much attention is paid to the health of the soil as to the welfare of the sheep.But it’s also Westwood’s ability to find fresh riffs on these historical designs that ensures they never feel antique. In place of the bonnets, sashes, and dramatic crinolines of the collection’s theatrical first outing, here, things were dialed back to suit a 2021 customer. The sailor’s knot motif from 1998 could be found laser-printed onto denim and woven through adjustable tops constructed via zero-waste pattern cutting and crisp sweater vests.
Nautical stripes came chunky and on the diagonal, printed over sweatshirts and cotton tracksuit pants in the asymmetric, “drunken” style usually reserved for Westwood’s tailoring. And as for those corsets? Here, they came embedded into slinky, figure-hugging dresses with perfectly placed cut-outs at the bust for a final racy touch. It’s not hard to see the commercial appeal of the clothes, but thankfully, they have a newfound youthful charm, too.
17 September 2021
Vivienne Westwood’s Storm in a Teacup collection was presented on March 17, 1996, in Paris.
8 April 2021
Vivienne Westwood’s On Liberty collection was presented on March 6, 1994, in Paris.
8 April 2021
Vivienne Westwood’s Anglomania collection was presented on March 16, 1993, in Paris.
8 April 2021
Vivienne Westwood’s Vive la Cocotte collection was presented on March 18, 1995, at the Louvre Carrousel in Paris.
8 April 2021
Vivienne Westwood’s Café Society collection was presented on October 13, 1993, in Paris.
8 April 2021
According to the accompanying release 90% of the Vivienne Westwood in this look book was made “from materials that have a reduced impact on our environment,” including a newly-sourced recycled denim. Much of its design exemplified these ingredients in repurposing many of the Westwood ideas that have over the years had such a positive impact on the environment of fashion. From the mini-crini and beyond, Westwood has long upcycled deadstock modes of dressing to renew them through her urgent and maverick eye.This collection’s refreshed melange starred a print ofDaphnis and Chloe, a 1743 painting by François Boucher from the wonderful Wallace Collection that sumptuously pictures a sleeping shepherdess being ogled by a ripped shepherd. This starred across prints on shirting, T-shirts, denim, bodysuits, dresses and a frock-coatish parka, competing with clashing ginghams, stripes, herringbones, and checks. Not unlike Boucher, Westwood is a master at subverting apparent propriety to invoke the truthful and unruly; her signature brushstrokes of drunken tailoring and subversive drape were in full effect here.
19 February 2021
Even in a season such as this, all is never entirely quiet on the Westwood front. A two minute collection video put out by the indefatigable dame to accompany this collection was partly shot outside the Old Bailey—England’s highest court—during demonstrations in support of legal efforts to thwart the extradition of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to the United States. Westwood didn’t reference this in her notes but instead stuck to the clothes, observing: “Dress for the time of day, or don’t dress for the time of day—wear your evening clothes to the office if you go back to work, mix seasons— our aim is to show only one collection a year.”One collection a year would absolutely suffice for a line dedicated to delivering tweaked updates of the wardrobe Westwood invented and refined. Plus it would be consistent with her long-established concerns with sustainability; Westwood was way ahead of the curve on that front.This collection played men in slinky jersey viscose dresses against women in clown-bright and ringmaster-loud “drunken” tailoring, two of the gender nonspecific pillars of Westwood’s big top. New for the season/year were attractively busy prints based on paintings by Chrissie Hynde: very cool, and according to Westwood an idea her husband, Andreas Kronthaler, came up with. In exchange for the art the fashion house made a donation to Hynde’s charity. Another outside contribution was provided by artist Anthony Newton whose work was adapted to create a lace trompe l’oeil.Alongside the film and look book the house now provides a pack of sustainability notes in which the organic provenance of cotton slattern blouses or checked paneled linen bombers is catalogued with justifiable pride. Westwood’s evolution of her still-revolutionary wardrobe for style-conscious seditionaries continues.
18 September 2020
Set up in the Serpentine Gallery, this Vivienne Westwood event was half fashion presentation, half demonstration on behalf of Julian Assange, who is currently imprisoned in Belmarsh awaiting a trial that will likely see him extradited to the United States to face further prosecution for his role as the mastermind behind WikiLeaks. Assange is a man who did some incredibly useful work—exposing war crimes, a deadly military attack on journalists, and various other examples of corruption and murder—but whose behavior has often been less than heroic: His is a story of light and shade.It was Westwood who placed this story alongside a presentation of her clothes, so although it’s a clunky and clumsy transition, we need to follow it. This too was a collection that was neither all good nor all bad. I felt really sorry for the model of look 11 who was required to adopt the same pose for the hour of this presentation, while holding one of Westwood’s “playing cards” in front of her crotch. I enjoyed another playing card that read “media abuse ignorance”—thank you very much. A dossier leaked to us reviewers by Westwood’s PR team laid bare in exhaustive detail the environmental blamelessness of all the fabrics here, and they were used with typical aplomb in her alcoholic tailoring and tracksuits incorporating Harris Tweed. A sort of faded palm tree jacquard, overdyed between a green and a blue, on a pinstripe fabric was very lovely on an oversized pant. And nobody does a sexily tumbled, louchely ruched dress as well as this designer.Should Julian Assange be extradited? Absolutely not, especially given the Anne Sacoolas impasse. Should this collection be investigated? Without a doubt.
15 February 2020
This season Vivienne Westwood opted not to show this second line with all the accompanying brouhaha a Westwood show entails, but to instead let the clothes do the talking. This was a good call, because during a speed date in her Conduit Street showroom, they proved themselves extremely articulate.True, it was Westwood’s highly capable (and just as highly heeled) rep, Laura McCuaig, who let us know that between Fall 2017’s collection and this one, the amount of styles in this coed collection have been reduced by 50 percent in womenswear and 32 percent in men’s. This was to emphasize that when Westwood tells us tobuyless, she is also being sure to make less (although McCuaig did not have a sense of whether the overall amount of pieces produced has been similarly slashed).The collection was an artful mishmash. Westwood’s main inspiration was apparently the stand-up theater of Italy’s commedia dell’arte as well as the also Italian, but more recent, character of Pinocchio, Carlo Collodi’s lying puppet. Had Westwood been in the room, I would have expected a lengthy reference to Boris Johnson at this point. However, as mentioned, this evening it was all clothes and no soapbox.Pinocchio somehow led to the irregular circles that reappeared here and there throughout the collection, sometimes colored in on a hand-scrawled Sharpie print on deconstructed shirt-shifts, sometimes overlaid on digitally printed Dutch Delft china and fruit still-life digital prints.Some really interesting dresses in shirting cotton were made in fractured shards of paneling that recalled broken glass. A construction system termed “cocoon” saw more panels of shirting fabric, this time organically circular and shirred at the seam, interconnected to make suggestively oversize collage garments that added cup size and bolstered hip and fairly winked a come-hither hello at you from the mannequin. Also entertaining was the so-called drunken tartan pieces for both genders that took that venerable Scottish pattern but gave it the woozy skew-whiff aspect of a one Scotch too many. Another wantable were the updated “alien” pants with a drooping waistline saved by an internal corseted cinch at the navel.I could give you theblah blah blahon the various sustainable attributes of the rayon, cotton, linen, and more in this collection, all of which was outlined—as usual recently—in the excellently thorough accompanying document.
Just suffice it to say that while Westwood’s rhetoric can be jumbled to the extent that it pollutes the message she is so dedicated to spreading, there is no question that when it comes to production, she practices what she preaches.
14 September 2019
Even seditionaries get married. Who would’ve thought that Vivienne Westwood’s made-to-order, semi-couture bridal business was brisk and growing? But hey! Fashion is about being constantly surprised, and Westwood isn’t afraid to confound expectations. A further example: Her iconoclastic spirit doesn’t really apply to the design of her bridal gowns, which actually looked rather traditionally bridal. No pyrotechnics here. Gowns were beautifully cut, corseted comme il faut to enhance the décolletage; their hourglass-y, slightly provocative (but just a bit) silhouettes were inspired by 18th-century cocottes, and made from swaths of decadently draped white satin, mikado, or ethereal fil coupé. They’d make even the most circumspect bride-to-be look like a Grecian goddess.But Vivienne Westwood’s clients aren’t created equal to other labels’ customers. They mostly come with a conscience, either ethical, social, or environmental; beneath their English-flora-printed, sinuously cut wedding dresses in glimmering briné satin, they are true, combative seditionaries. Hence they’ll have their gowns made in sustainably sourced viscose as a vegan alternative to silk, or in organically produced, eco-friendly and cruelty-free Peace silk, which allows the silk butterfly to live beyond the cocoon. So kudos to the indomitable Dame Viv: If all brides were eco-fighting seditionaries, responsibly choosing their beautiful wedding dresses, the world would be a better place.
3 July 2019
On the tube this morning I read Emily Farra’s excellent Vogue Runway interview with Stella McCartney before reading the press release from last night’s Positive Fashion cocktail party. Then I looked at the work of the 15 young designers—most of them deeply concerned by ecological considerations—who participated in the Brave New Worlds initiative at Somerset House. And then, back on the tube again en route to Vivienne Westwood, I bumped into a group of hundreds of demonstrators. One explained they were from Extinction Rebellion, a nonviolent direct action protest group that was blocking traffic by the Thames to draw attention to the fact that, they claimed, in the last 15 years global consumption of clothing has doubled as its utilization has decreased by 36 percent.The sustainability conversation is certainly happening. Proselytizing—almost competitively—is a thing. But I don’t need Rose McGowan to tell me, as at this show, that the world is about to end while a patronizing guy called called George who says he’s from a group called Intellectuals Unite lectures me about the value of reading books.A year ago I pinched a document that laid bare Westwood’s supply chain, and it was impressive in its vertically integrated integrity. But it doesn’t make sense to lecture your audience about the nefarious impact of new trousers and try to sell it new trousers at the same time. To be truly sustainable we should never buy any garments again—and actually, we probably don’t need to. Vivienne Westwood is an amazing and wonderful spirit mother who I have enormous respect for, but to preach hard-core sustainability in the midst of selling “crap”—her words—stinks of hypocrisy. She is right about so many things, but this is absolutely the wrong platform.Great pants, though.
17 February 2019
Like any true Cassandra, Vivienne Westwood’s prophecies are heaped with skepticism before they come true. Along with Katharine Hamnett, Westwood has been banging the drum about the importance of sustainable production for years. Now the rest of the world is listening, at last—the company is currently involved in sustainably minded collaborations with the British Fashion Council and the newly fur-free Burberry, among others—and the witch (her words, not ours) seems well ahead of fashion’s oil-tanker lurch toward responsible manufacturing.This collection, presented via a video and lookbook rather than a show, was a case in point. The organic cotton and linen drunkenly tailored jackets and drop-crotch pants featuring watercolors of Chinese peonies and calligraphies reading “Dame Vivienne” and “Green Economy” were 100 percent sustainable. The 90 percent acetate mix in floral jacquards on off-the-shoulder dresses were made from wood pulp extracted from plantations regulated by reforestation programs designed to positively impact the environment. And so it went for the rest of the collection: The underwear-ish wool ribbed knits; the hemp-and-bamboo mix, rough-hemmed, and piping-edged shirt; and the 100 percent recycled striped double-breasted jackets and hoodies inspired by army uniforms were all produced to adhere to the Oeko-Tex sustainability standard. Even the width of broad handkerchief skirts was determined by the span of the bolt of cloth from which they were cut, to ensure minimal waste in production.Westwood’s militantly responsible substance was reflected in the typically anarchic style of the pieces: Shirts featuring long lace-edged collars and silk linen jacquard britches were meant to mobilize thoughts of raffish musketeers fighting under a green banner.“Consumption is the enemy of culture,” asserts Westwood in the video that accompanies this collection. You could argue that consumption is culture in 2018 and that Westwood is at the vanguard of those transforming our perception of it. Yet taking a position counter to hers is a dangerous game—because, in the long run, she’s often proven correct.
18 September 2018
Instead of holding a show, this season, Vivienne Westwood shot a video. The 2-minute, 46-second film is to be released today across every digital platform the company can muster. On YouTube, it’shere.Watch it and you’ll see lots of studiedly disarrayed street-cast models gamboling around a studio and the London neighborhood of Parsons Green, discussing the empowering nature of clothes, muttering about being recruits to the Westwood “army,” and flirting. Dame Vivienne explains that the collection “has got a theme of war running through it” and mentions a set of prayer flag playing cards she has designed and printed “to save the whole world.” The hashtag #Don’tGetKilled seems like reasonable advice. Unlike Andreas Kronthaler’s collection for Westwood, which shows in Paris and aims to be experimental, this line reiterates many of Westwood’s magnificent core motifs in a seasonally specific tone. This season, the tone was military.In the Westwood showroom on Conduit Street, the real stars of Westwood’s film lined the room. Painted woodland camo print, blown up, was used on shirts, and jackets were overprinted with broken up letters from the adage “sow the whirlwind, reap the whirlwind.” A green-on-beige check based on a garment worn by a childhood soft toy of Westwood’s was recruited as a broadly interpreted camouflage in full-shouldered, slant-pocketed coats. Suits featured the dark brown and green stripes worn by Moroccan colonial Goumier regiments, and sweats came in a dusky Mountbatten pink devised to camouflage warships on the sun-touched horizon. There were Westwood-y riffs on baggy demob suits and an eye-popping woven dogstooth and Prince of Wales mix coat. The tailoring jostled with raffishly regimental details: frogging, braiding, some golden oak leaves at a lapel.Across the showroom, much of the womenswear echoed the fabrication of the men’s. Exceptions included full-leg pants teamed with asymmetrical jackets and corsets in an orange-touched, purportedly military red and a rich green. These came in a satin viscose blended with nettle and were evening cousins to their Mountbatten pink day equivalents in hemp. Although it’s sad no physical manifestation of Westwood will grace London this season, this movie-led maneuver seems well worth a sortie.
8 January 2018
Instead of holding a show, this season, Vivienne Westwood shot a video. The 2-minute, 46-second film is to be released today across every digital platform the company can muster. On YouTube, it’shere.Watch it and you’ll see lots of studiedly disarrayed street-cast models gamboling around a studio and the London neighborhood of Parsons Green, discussing the empowering nature of clothes, muttering about being recruits to the Westwood “army,” and flirting. Dame Vivienne explains that the collection “has got a theme of war running through it” and mentions a set of prayer flag playing cards she has designed and printed “to save the whole world.” The hashtag #Don’tGetKilled seems like reasonable advice. Unlike Andreas Kronthaler’s collection for Westwood, which shows in Paris and aims to be experimental, this line reiterates many of Westwood’s magnificent core motifs in a seasonally specific tone. This season, the tone was military.In the Westwood showroom on Conduit Street, the real stars of Westwood’s film lined the room. Painted woodland camo print, blown up, was used on shirts, and jackets were overprinted with broken up letters from the adage “sow the whirlwind, reap the whirlwind.” A green-on-beige check based on a garment worn by a childhood soft toy of Westwood’s was recruited as a broadly interpreted camouflage in full-shouldered, slant-pocketed coats. Suits featured the dark brown and green stripes worn by Moroccan colonial Goumier regiments, and sweats came in a dusky Mountbatten pink devised to camouflage warships on the sun-touched horizon. There were Westwood-y riffs on baggy demob suits and an eye-popping woven dogstooth and Prince of Wales mix coat. The tailoring jostled with raffishly regimental details: frogging, braiding, some golden oak leaves at a lapel.Across the showroom, much of the womenswear echoed the fabrication of the men’s. Exceptions included full-leg pants teamed with asymmetrical jackets and corsets in an orange-touched, purportedly military red and a rich green. These came in a satin viscose blended with nettle and were evening cousins to their Mountbatten pink day equivalents in hemp. Although it’s sad no physical manifestation of Westwood will grace London this season, this movie-led maneuver seems well worth a sortie.
8 January 2018
Who hasn’t seenNaomi Campbell’s famous runway fall?That was on Vivienne Westwood’s runway in Paris back in 1993. Today in London it happened again, albeit to a very different model. One of the acrobats that Westwood and Andreas Kronthaler recruited for this highly entertaining show had just finished a mighty Cossack squat when his 8-inch-ish platform slipped out from under him. He crashed to the floor, crushed the full-hemmed skirt of his off-the-shoulder black taffeta gown . . . but sprung back up onto his platforms undaunted. We applauded in relief.And that was only the second most heart-in-mouth moment of this show. The tensest was at the finale, when Westwood came out held aloft above a mightily muscled man. It did not look entirely rehearsed. He was strong, but was she stable? One slip, and calamity. There was a millisecond where it looked like she might take out the editor of BritishGQin a moment of double fashion tragedy. Happily, they made the course, and her giddily motley cast rushed out behind as we applauded once again.There were many takeaways from a show that is well worth watching in full. It was driven by Westwood’s continuing activism to highlight and decry climate change. As her husband said backstage: “She is on a mission. It is all her philosophy. She is unstoppable, a tyrant! A righteous tyrant.” Thus many of the opening looks were emblazoned with Westwood’s implorings. The fishnet stockings worn by both men and women were stuffed with an ephemera of trash: cans, packets, and a few crushed plastic balls pinched from the children’s adventure playground at the end of the runway. Some of the models were shod in crushed Evian bottles strapped roughly to their feet. Prints included one taken from Bruegel and another taken from Westwood’s own illustrations for a new deck of playing cards in which the club was distorted to resemble a phallus. Some fine suiting cut in hemp was similarly accessorized by a diamond-studded chain. Dresses and pants were patched with off cuts of fabric and sequin.In an excellent makeup hack, lipstick was replaced with rose petal. In the background, the music was provided by Levant and Taylor with Mic Righteous, one of whose rhymes went: “I hear the fire talking / the young people are wonderful / and the future is with Corbyn.” The problem so many young designers who owe so much to Westwood face is that nobody does what she does better than her. And that includes runway tumbles.
12 June 2017
Who hasn’t seenNaomi Campbell’s famous runway fall?That was on Vivienne Westwood’s runway in Paris back in 1993. Today in London it happened again, albeit to a very different model. One of the acrobats that Westwood and Andreas Kronthaler recruited for this highly entertaining show had just finished a mighty Cossack squat when his 8-inch-ish platform slipped out from under him. He crashed to the floor, crushed the full-hemmed skirt of his off-the-shoulder black taffeta gown . . . but sprung back up onto his platforms undaunted. We applauded in relief.And that was only the second most heart-in-mouth moment of this show. The tensest was at the finale, when Westwood came out held aloft above a mightily muscled man. It did not look entirely rehearsed. He was strong, but was she stable? One slip, and calamity. There was a millisecond where it looked like she might take out the editor of BritishGQin a moment of double fashion tragedy. Happily, they made the course, and her giddily motley cast rushed out behind as we applauded once again.There were many takeaways from a show that is well worth watching in full. It was driven by Westwood’s continuing activism to highlight and decry climate change. As her husband said backstage: “She is on a mission. It is all her philosophy. She is unstoppable, a tyrant! A righteous tyrant.” Thus many of the opening looks were emblazoned with Westwood’s implorings. The fishnet stockings worn by both men and women were stuffed with an ephemera of trash: cans, packets, and a few crushed plastic balls pinched from the children’s adventure playground at the end of the runway. Some of the models were shod in crushed Evian bottles strapped roughly to their feet. Prints included one taken from Bruegel and another taken from Westwood’s own illustrations for a new deck of playing cards in which the club was distorted to resemble a phallus. Some fine suiting cut in hemp was similarly accessorized by a diamond-studded chain. Dresses and pants were patched with off cuts of fabric and sequin.In an excellent makeup hack, lipstick was replaced with rose petal. In the background, the music was provided by Levant and Taylor with Mic Righteous, one of whose rhymes went: “I hear the fire talking / the young people are wonderful / and the future is with Corbyn.” The problem so many young designers who owe so much to Westwood face is that nobody does what she does better than her. And that includes runway tumbles.
12 June 2017
This was Vivienne Westwood’s first-ever show on the London menswear schedule, and a co-ed show to boot. But as she observed, it was far from the first time she’s put both genders on the same runway. She said: “My very first shows were all mixed. Really, they were. Pirates, Buffalo Girls. . . . men and women together. Although, in this show some of the men are wearing dresses, which isn’t something they did much of before.”The guys-in-gowns moments included a long-haired model who wore his black one-shouldered tulle-twist dress above black ankle boots and check socks pulled taut above them. One wore a rib-knit sweater as a miniskirt below his powerfully shouldered jacket, another wore a workwear-indigo pinstriped shirt and skirt, and a third wore a full-length cream knit dress with a distressed hem and colored panels at the shoulder. “It helps you explore yourself, doesn’t it?” said Westwood.Less transgressively, both men and women wore more of that broad-shouldered double-breasted tailoring with gender conventional attire below the belt. This silhouette, particularly when teamed with wide, not-quite-full-length pants and the zigzag pixie–meets–cowboy boots that shod many looks, provided a powerful reminder that while other hotly au courant designers have been working a similar seam recently, Westwood did this (like so many things) way before anyone. This tailoring sometimes came accessorized with phallic totems: jeweled or metallic balls (and the rest) on chains.A print used throughout showed a crowd of faces: Marionette faces, creepy pagan totem faces, and Westwood’s own—she peeked maniacally forth, too, from between the lapels of a beige check gridded with the finest lines of green and red. Westwood was placing herself among the cast of a show imagined as theater. That hooded scarlet woman, the mordant frock-coated retainer, the courtly chorister in a golden dress with a drooping sash of lurid green were others—but the narrator was the look before that woman in red, a distressed jester overwritten with Westwood exhortation to use ecologically unimpactful electricity providers.Whatever her critics contend, Westwood is committed to recycling: Suiting for both sexes plus one lovely ice-velvet waistcoat were decorated with disjunctive patterns Westwood had culled from the Ballets Russes, and as often many looks here were tweaked updates from her existing canon, down to the wonderful darted enhancements at bosom and bottom in her closing few dresses.
Even the hand-applied nail art, including tiny finger puppets, was made from the leftover wrapping paper that she and her husband, Andreas, and their family had got through during Christmas. Westwood is a wild and benevolent force, still vital after all these years—we should relish her.
9 January 2017
This was Vivienne Westwood’s first-ever show on the London menswear schedule, and a co-ed show to boot. But as she observed, it was far from the first time she’s put both genders on the same runway. She said: “My very first shows were all mixed. Really, they were. Pirates, Buffalo Girls. . . . men and women together. Although, in this show some of the men are wearing dresses, which isn’t something they did much of before.”The guys-in-gowns moments included a long-haired model who wore his black one-shouldered tulle-twist dress above black ankle boots and check socks pulled taut above them. One wore a rib-knit sweater as a miniskirt below his powerfully shouldered jacket, another wore a workwear-indigo pinstriped shirt and skirt, and a third wore a full-length cream knit dress with a distressed hem and colored panels at the shoulder. “It helps you explore yourself, doesn’t it?” said Westwood.Less transgressively, both men and women wore more of that broad-shouldered double-breasted tailoring with gender conventional attire below the belt. This silhouette, particularly when teamed with wide, not-quite-full-length pants and the zigzag pixie–meets–cowboy boots that shod many looks, provided a powerful reminder that while other hotly au courant designers have been working a similar seam recently, Westwood did this (like so many things) way before anyone. This tailoring sometimes came accessorized with phallic totems: jeweled or metallic balls (and the rest) on chains.A print used throughout showed a crowd of faces: Marionette faces, creepy pagan totem faces, and Westwood’s own—she peeked maniacally forth, too, from between the lapels of a beige check gridded with the finest lines of green and red. Westwood was placing herself among the cast of a show imagined as theater. That hooded scarlet woman, the mordant frock-coated retainer, the courtly chorister in a golden dress with a drooping sash of lurid green were others—but the narrator was the look before that woman in red, a distressed jester overwritten with Westwood exhortation to use ecologically unimpactful electricity providers.Whatever her critics contend, Westwood is committed to recycling: Suiting for both sexes plus one lovely ice-velvet waistcoat were decorated with disjunctive patterns Westwood had culled from the Ballets Russes, and as often many looks here were tweaked updates from her existing canon, down to the wonderful darted enhancements at bosom and bottom in her closing few dresses.
Even the hand-applied nail art, including tiny finger puppets, was made from the leftover wrapping paper that she and her husband, Andreas, and their family had got through during Christmas. Westwood is a wild and benevolent force, still vital after all these years—we should relish her.
9 January 2017
It seemed spookily quiet inVivienne Westwood’sLondon showroom this morning—especially when compared to the raucous cacophony of her past shows.Yet these still lines of clothes belie behind-the-scenes action. The no-show this week is a preamble to next January’s merging of this woman’s second line (formerly known as Red) and the men's line under a label simply called Vivienne Westwood that will show atLondon Fashion WeekMen's. In Paris—in two weeks—the label formerly known as Gold will become Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood, a longer but more accurate summation of the collection Westwood’s husband has masterminded for some time now.Vivienne herself, however, will continue to boss this one—in between the imminent release of her diaries, titledGet A Life,the foundation of a club night for intellectuals and students, and new store openings in Paris and New York. Age does not wither her.This collection bore the Dame’s hand via prints of painted squiggle on pantsuits, panels, jersey jackets, and micro-ponchos. A red check print was based on a pillowcase she pinched from her son Joe’s house, then overlaid with splatter and floral. There was a crini-liss mini meant to partner with her high-waisted, slightly off-kilter "Prince" jacket that ran through this collection. A cloaklet in layers of roughly tousled metallic fringing, harlequin patch boots, and ruffled confusions of fabric on skew-necked smocks transmitted the Italian-touched 16th-century theatricalism she said in her release she was aiming for.It was hard to see the fuchsia Westwood said was overdyed on her sexily-bedraggled navy chalk stripe skirts, pants, and jackets—and impossible not to see the hypercolor ka-pow of irregularly gridded blue and red taffeta dresses and harlot crop tops. Although released in a rare fallow moment, this was a collection fertile with options for Westwood lovers.
20 September 2016
Boundaries mean little to DameVivienne Westwood. Perhaps because she transgressed so many in the ’70s. This is, after all, a woman who habitually wore a see-through rubber body suit—dubbed the “Rubber Johnny,” after a British prophylactic colloquialism and due to its translucent pink material—and who sold T-shirts scrawled with obscenities, erect penises, and the like. So while today’s show was subtitled “Man”, the show itself was unisex, with men and women modeling, often wearing clothes that could more readily belong to the opposite sex. Female models were dressed in wide, purposefully sloppy tailoring; male models as often as not wore skirts or dresses. Gender gap? What gender gap? The male models, oddly, looked oddly appealing in the skinny knit dresses. Nevertheless, you knew which side of the closet these pieces would probably wind up on, for all but the most die-hard Westwood fans.The only boundary Westwood seems keen to reinforce, strangely, is a certain distance from the designs. Her Gold Label womenswear was last season rechristened “Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood,” an outward acknowledgement of an interior dynamic that sees Kronthaler leading the design team, while Westwood focuses on political causes close to her heart. And while those political causes used to influence the clothes, and continue to be broadcast loudly during the publicity of her fashion shows, these days the two sides of that Westwood dynamic seem disparate, disconnected.More’s the pity. Because although Westwood’s politics could often overpower the fashion she designed—both for the last 25 or so years in partnership with Kronthaler, and even way back when it was just Westwood herself at the design table—they often empowered them. Eleven years ago, she splashed the word “Propaganda” across her clothes in the hopes, she once told me, of politicizing youth. Those pieces have now rolled into the cannon of a Westwood classic, and even if their original intention—resisting the propaganda of the contemporary age through art and culture—is occasionally lost, they’re recognized as a counter-culture statement. They’re worn by people young and old.Westwood today made an impassioned video plea for the release of Julian Assange, who, she asserts, has done no wrong.
Her point deserves to be heard—but is a fashion show the right place and, more importantly, does it have the right audience if one wishes to affect real and lasting sociopolitical changes? Westwood’s messages in the past had validity in that unusual arena because they informed every facet of the clothes she and Kronthaler created together. In dressing the world in her sartorial palimpsests, Westwood campaigned through clothing. It was a unique stance—one not really seen since Katharine Hamnett in the ’80s. It was sometimes heavy-handed, but it was always impassioned, heart-felt, and singular. The chewed-up and bog-washed clothes Kronthaler createdlookedvery Westwood, in their muddy colors and arresting disproportion. But you wouldn’t have minded that message being more insistently stitched into every seam. That’s a Westwood trademark as important and instantly identifiable as pirate boots or bondage trousers.
19 June 2016
Can missing a show you’re due to review ever be relaxing—perhaps even fun? Answer: never. Or at least never before this afternoon’sRed Labelouting.Here’s the get-out clause—the reason that your designated reviewer’s seat was left vacant as the models pounded the parquet runway today was a virtuous one: Preshow, backstage,Dame Viviennehad spent so long talking that the models were already heading around the backboard into the pit when we were alerted to the fact that the game was afoot, and she rushed off to watch the video alongside Andreas Kronthaler. Left in backstage limbo, I got to watch the models get into their A-game as they lined up to stride into the glare of scrutiny: They danced, they smiled, they shook it off. Very notably, they also enjoyed being in this typically eclectic and borderline-heretical collection of clothing.Watching them, this reviewer was basking in the afterglow of a great chat with the Dame. Usually she wants to bang the drum for whichever cause she has leaped upon most recently—climate change, corrupt politicians, Leonard Peltier, take your pick—but today, refreshingly, she spoke of the clothes; specifically the three days before a show when the collection is back from the factories and she’s trying to turn it into a runway persuader. Here’s some of what she said: “The collection is produced in Italy, and I don’t have much of a chance to see it [before it arrives in London]. So what happens is on day one you get there and go: ‘Oh my god we wanted this in a different color,’ and all kinds of things. You think ‘there is nothing there, what am I going to do?’ You know?”Sounds bad. But, “by the second day you realize that there is a lot going on in this collection and you can really do a lot with it . . . but to do a fashion show you have to really style it well and get all the different combinations working together to get the power of the collection across. . . . And then it’s just a question of getting there and working with the casting and models to get everything right: the right socks with the right shoes, the right girl, it’s just got to look great. And you keep editing it and editing it, getting it down to something really essential.” And day three? “It’s a question of graft: You have to just keep on doing it until you are exhausted.”
21 February 2016
Sometimes, you drift into a show with your head on autopilot. This reviewer must have been borderline catatonic beforeVivienne Westwood’s collection this afternoon. How so? Well, first a conversation with Andreas Kronthaler was cut short because he had to help a strapping model named Fabio into a silver lamé dress. Passing the time by staring at the accessories table, the necklace made of soda can pull tabs stood out—but the silver and bronze penis pendants failed to register. And then there was the name of the collection: Be Specific. Whatever could it have been about?Doh!The runway lights threw it all into relief. A fishtail fine-knit top was open at the back for a flash of spine. A printed rich green chaotically ruched dress, low enough for an “oops, pardon me” of nipple, was worn beneath a violet cardie embroidered with what looked like rutting stags. All this above some fine 4-inch platform creepers. The overall effect was slatternly, in a good way. Plus there was Fabio, a one-shouldered black silk gown—with a train—over check trousers, and a big-shouldered silver scene-stealer teamed with a miniskirt and one of those fetching phallic accessories. There was a robe in pinstripe. How much clearer could Westwood make it?Yet there was boy as well as girl in this menswear show. Suiting was exaggerated at the shoulder and suppressed at the leg and wrist: cropped and chopped and changed—reassigned. One regatta striped suit with high-shine 12-hole red work boots was glorious society punk. On the way out, one retail buyer said: “They do all this, and then you get to the showroom and it’s full of great commercial stuff.” Clever, huh? Seditious on the runway and solicitous off it. Very clever, indeed.
17 January 2016
Can you reasonably rage against the machine when you are a highly profitable cog in it? This is an obvious paradox inherent inDame Vivienne Westwood’s policy of using her shows as a podium from which to preach about the iniquities of mass consumerism and fossil fuel dependence. Her valiant pitch at squaring that circle is the exhortation “to buy less things that are better made and last longer,” a sentiment that, while impossible to disagree with, doesn’t quite carry when delivered in the backstage hubbub immediately before a show of seasonal fashion. Nonetheless, this evening’sVivienne Westwood Red Labelcarnival was a corker.Held in a basement space grippingly advertised outside as an “Alien Sex Club,” the runway was overlooked by a balcony on which gathered a band of paper-crowned model/protestors holding banners hostile to politicians and shale gas extraction. The soundtrack was, quite frankly, hellish—a cacophony of sirens and garble through which occasionally stirring dialogue could be heard, including the weary line: “Fashion is ridiculous, a pathetic parody of what it used to be.” After the last look walked, the protesters descended behind Westwood. Everyone in the room dutifully took pictures, then realized they had no signal. The most piquant contradiction in this show was how incompatible the collection seemed with the rhetoric around it. Because while the styling was absolutely maverick—all smeared robber-mask eyes and sleep-in-a-tree hair—there is no other way to describe the clothes than with the C-word: conservative.Prettily ruched frocks—frocks!—in lace came layered with sweet scarlet florals. Knee-length tea dresses were delicately cut and spattered with Marimekko-touched patterns. Layered embroideries in manor-house interior reliefs were layered around their wearers like professionally piped icing. Yes, there was the odd proselytizing button or T-shirt emblazoned with a meaningful carbon footprint, but subtract these—and perhaps alter some of the more laissez-bare necklines—and you could imagine theDuchess of Cambridgeor Samantha Cameron appropriately shaking hands with the CEO of Shell in a great many of these looks. It was as if the Sex Pistols were covering Maroon 5—and it was good.
20 September 2015
"Salva Venezia" (Save Venice) read the plea on theMagic Mike-esque, extremely briefs that were the faintest of underline south of a crop top and turban in the first look. By framing this collection around Venice, Dame Vivienne Westwood and Andreas Kronthaler hit upon a rare accord between clothes presented and campaign agitated for. "It is to do with climate change, of course," Kronthaler explained backstage: "Venice is one of the greatest things we have as an urban space." And that city is, of course, at risk from irresponsibility-induced high tide. Photo-printed palazzo separates, a five-layer pentimento-painted romper costume, and a series of loose-knit medieval hovel tunics cast a true-ish, if sometimes unflattering, light on this theme.You could stretch the point and say that the typically wicked tailored looks that followed were an update, a look at the tailored 10 percenters who stalk the Arsenale during the biennale. But they were just great Westwood suits (ah, the irony of a designer who so detests the system but is one of the best exponents of its uniform). "This was quite a sexy collection too," Kronthaler said. There were certainly signifiers of sex, which came repackaged and subverted, notably the tit-tote chest bag. And if you like pants that fall to your ankles if you don't hold on to them, there were plenty of those too. It wasn't the most desirable Westwood men's collection, for sure, yet some boats will be floated.
21 June 2015
Dame Vivienne Westwood puts the drama into costume so reliably that her histrionic styling and agitprop proselytizing—this time for the Green Party—should come as a given. Also to be expected are agenda-led accessories ("Get a life," it said on the straps of wrist-slung bags) and ironically saccharine touches (aw, a BuzzFeed-cute kitty-cat tote). There will always be a wink of overt come-hither (a shoulder strap unpeeled like a half-started banana) and an angry jangle of punky hardness (cuffed necks and unkempt hair nooses tied by skull-chain earrings).What'sreallystimulating about Dame Vivienne, though, is the conservative (don't worry: small C) stuff, because she understands the interaction of drape and ruche with the feminine body more intimately than any other working designer (although Galliano runs her quite close). Look 39, seemingly quiet-ish after all the fireworks before it, was this Red Label collection's apotheosis: no fury, just shape and suggestive ripple. The top half of look 5—best to ignore the oversize diapers that cursed a few looks—cast this spell almost as powerfully. Even though Westwood's husband and creative partner, Andreas Kronthaler, wasn't around for the bow, another highlight was the riff on his menswear collection of mismatched tailoring, expressed here in partisan tartans and magnified chalk stripes.
22 February 2015
The reference promised reverence but proved trickier than a straightforward tribute. Dame Vivienne Westwood sang the praises of the Prince of Wales in her show notes with a paean to his spirituality, his organic farming, and his other Westwood-friendly preoccupations. She had, she pronounced, adopted him as the "patron" of the collection.The first model duly emerged wearing an ensemble broadly appropriate as an homage to one of Savile Row's most celebrated customers: windowpane-check gray trousers and a borderline tartan peaked jacket. Westwood's banana skin was the pair of blue suede high heels.Westwood and her husband, Andreas Kronthaler, have turned such acts of runway radicalism into a well-practiced routine, but even when you expect it, these shows have impact. Look-twice touches this time included British sterling banknote-print clothing (and great sneakers), an interesting spasm of one-shoulder Fred Flintstone stretch knitwear, a look featuring floral-lapelled eveningwear and a balaclava, and a cluster of butch men with clutch bags. And the guy who came out with his pants half-down.All this slapstick was a laugh, as ever, but a distraction too: It obscured the richness of a collection that pulsed with poppy tailoring twists, radical casualwear, and fine footwear—even those heels, if that's your bag. And sure, some of the shtick was a lighter way of enunciating the "relationship between men and women" theme that has been so current on both sides of the fashion-show calendar's gender divide. The dame emerged wearing the prince on her chest, alongside her king.
18 January 2015
In case you hadn't heard, next week the citizens of Scotland will be voting on a referendum to secede from the United Kingdom, and declare—for the first time since 1707—its own sovereign state. For Americans reading this, Scottish independence is pretty much tantamount to Texas quitting the union and galloping off into the sunset with its vast oil reserves in tow. The Queen, to put it mildly, is not psyched. But if you thought that age or Queen-anointed dame-ness had dulled Vivienne Westwood's lust for anarchy in the U.K., well, you don't know Viv. At her Red Label show today, Westwood's lobbying for a yes vote in Scotland—as in, Yes, let's get the hell out of here—was front and center. Malcolm McLaren, meanwhile, must be giggling in his grave.There were other statements on the Red Label runway, too—fashion ones, to be exact. These included big shoulders on jackets, for example, and sweater dressing and vaguely tribal jacquard. The show didn't break much new ground—if you've seen one Westwood lass who looks a bit like a stowaway on an 18th-century pirate ship, you've pretty much seen them all—but it did serve up a few fresh looks. The tiered tops and dresses suspended like curtains evidenced that Dame Viv still has a cool idea or two up her sleeve. And as a fluid, floaty, tangerine-toned evening frock proved, the grande dame of punk really can drape like a god. A resounding "yes!" to that.
14 September 2014
They don't make 'em like Vivienne Westwood anymore. Now a 70-something Dame and still hobbling around in her own umpteen-inch platforms, she staged her Spring men's collection today and hijacked the occasion to express (more of) her political leanings. Well, not so much leanings as impassioned, full-throated beliefs.The show was called Moral Outrage, making it clear from the start that Westwood was itching to talk about something big, something other than fashion. That something was Leonard Peltier, the Native American activist who was incarcerated in 1977 for the murder of two FBI agents. If you didn't know, the designer is convinced the notorious case is bogus, that Peltier is innocent. "He's been in prison for forty years, but it's a total fraud," she said backstage before the presentation, her words taking on new poignancy as they tumbled through purple lipstick. "Hedidn'tdo it."Wait, was that the cause Westwood wanted to champion? Because slapped across the backdrop was an image of a pig. A pig! And several of the models wore plastic pig snouts. Right, she wanted to highlightPig Business,an undercover documentary that exposes the cruelty of pig farming in the U.K. Her team had just dispatched an e-mail about it, so that must have been it.No, no. That wasn't it either. Handwritten atop the invitation was "climaterevolution.co.uk," a website where the designer shares her urgent views on the impact of materialism and the deleterious effect it's having on the environment, a subject she has been very vocal about for a number of years. Some may scoff, but Westwood is highly informed on the matter, and that's to be commended. When sustainability and eco-awareness finally take root in the fashion industry, she will have once again been a pioneer.Obviously, she wanted to raise all of these issues, and probably has many more at the ready. As long as she has the spotlight, why not bundle her crusades? Who's going to stop her? As for the clothes, they were classic Westwood, loaded with her trademark tatters, swashbuckling shapes, exaggerated collars and cuffs, and upturned pockets. That's as potent a political statement as any, although Westwood's final words to this reviewer, delivered with a mischievous grin, are what will resonate the most: "I'm the most unpatriotic person…but I like the Queen."
21 June 2014
The key look at today's Vivienne Westwood Red Label show was a short red suit with lapels that closed to form a heart. It wasn't the key because it was the best look, or even the one that captured the collection's essence. But it stood out because, well, Dame Viv is probably the only designer who can pull off a red heart suit. On any other runway the gesture would be total camp or sentimental silliness. But Vivienne Westwood pulls that kind of thing off. Barely. Who will take her place?The question of legacy seems an appropriate one to raise today. This was a relatively restrained show, and it seemed to be fueled by quite a bit of nostalgia; the initial passage of broad-shouldered coats and suits, in particular, had the flavor of postwar looks Westwood probably recalls from her childhood. Elsewhere, the hits of leather and signature Westwood styles like the sculpted cocktail dress had a retrospective quality as well. Westwood isn't advancing her aesthetic at this point, she's codifying it. And in the meantime, the show included an appearance on the catwalk by the Dame's granddaughter, and concluded with the two of them taking the final bow together.
15 February 2014
Vivienne Westwood's cause du jour is fracking. Her always-polemical show notes read (in full): "Attention: Fracking is the Big Fight. In England we must all challenge the irresponsible behavior of our governments who are trying to force fracking upon us with no consideration of alternatives. The public must be informed. One thing is sure: At this point in time we must think before we rush into further action to fracture our earth."Tracing a connection between cause and collection is a touchy business. Fracking tends to pit the environmentalists against the oil barons, so it probably wasn't too far a stretch to see a reference to petroleum in the models' black-spackled hair—and maybe not even to go one step further and suggest that the darker palette, with more black than usual, picked up the theme, too. Ironic or not, all that black made this collection look more wearable than some of Westwood's acid-toned outings. But take it too far at your peril. There were the usual wild three-button suits and tailored coats, but the collection was positively thick with duvet coats, big sweaters, sweats, and tracksuits. Many were more provocative than your average trackies (in gold lamé or see-through mesh, for example), but they nonetheless telegraphed a kind of kick-around comfort and ease. Which would have made the show's message something along the lines of: Relax. But Westwood doesn't do that, and, God bless her, she likely never will.
11 January 2014
Vivienne Westwood often uses her Red Label show as a springboard to talk about climate change, and today's catwalk presentation was no exception. At the beginning, a figure hunkered down in the center of the square stage underneath a red spotlight, with wild hair and a full-length dress vaguely classical in feeling, draped and dusted all over with white powder. She began to dance. The figure turned out to be Lily Cole, who interpreted a passage from Hans Christian Andersen's "The Red Shoes": Once the girl in the story has been seduced and taken over by the red shoes, they dance her to death. After that the show began.The models all emerged in similar white makeup, a look later described by Westwood as "like an animal trapped in the headlights, trying to flee and trapped." "The Red Shoes" had been a metaphor for climate change refugees, both people and animals, trying to flee but with no place to go. Westwood's clothing for Red Label was somewhat more conventional in feeling. There was a vague nature motif—a great, intense recurring floral photoprint that looked particularly good on a slouchy silk jumpsuit tied at the knees with scarves—but the point of Red Label is that it is about practical, timeless Westwood pieces rather than overly disposable fashion. As always, there were many standout items: the photoprint floral dresses; a gunmetal chain-mail trench and trousers; high-waisted, knee-length shorts with a halter fastening like braces; the always-excellent striped cotton shirting and shirtdress; a characteristic Westwood skirtsuit with that nipped waist and tumbledown front.The message of Red Label abides by Westwood's personal maxim that she reiterated after her show: "Buy less, choose well, make it last. Quality rather than quantity: That is true sustainability. If people only bought beautiful things rather than rubbish, we wouldn't have climate change!" Of course, the metaphor of "The Red Shoes" also applies to the rampant consumerism engendered by fast fashion. And if there is one thing Westwood wanted people to take away, it wasn't to do with consuming material things at all; it was to read "The Red Shoes," and to read in general: "There are certain writers who give true meaning to the imagination," she said. "There's that line in 'The Red Shoes' when she says to the executioner, 'Come out, come out! I cannot come in, for I must dance.'"
14 September 2013
Vivienne Westwood could be spending 2013 exulting in a victory lap. Inspired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the eyes of the world turned back to punk, and so, inevitably, to her. Given that, punk's grande dame—and now its titled Dame—would surely be forgiven a retrospective. But Westwood hasn't wallowed; the former seditionary has remained seditious. She arrived at the Costume Institute Gala with a laminated photo of WikiLeaker Bradley Manning pinned to her dress, and she trotted out his image again for her menswear show, which she uses as much as a platform for her political agitating and consciousness raising as she does for fashion. Showrooms are for clothes. In a lengthy note on every seat, Westwood described starting the collection with India, springboard enough to consider the plight of the Indian poor, the environmental impact of those who are displacing them, and the governments who are profiting off the spoils. (Hers are the rare press releases that venture into Chomskyan polemics.)The Indian theme was a bit literal in parts, but on the whole, there were winners among the beautifully ombré pieces, as well as some of the lightweight checked linen. The profusion of tunics and swingy drawstring trousers—many accessorized with Manning's military beret—actually put Westwood in step with what some of her fellow designers are showing, albeit in more exaggerated (and drop-crotched) form. That might have made her blood boil—if she didn't have more pressing geopolitical matters to worry about.
22 June 2013
Vivienne Westwood's Red Label show today took place at the Saatchi Gallery, adjacent to the King's Road and not that far from the designer's legendary store at number 430. The store has, of course, gone through many transformations over the years, just like Westwood's output itself. And yet perhaps it will forever be remembered as one of the crucibles of punk in the shape of its Sex and Seditionaries incarnations. Particularly Sex, the place where John Lydon was auditioned for the band eventually known as the Sex Pistols—partially in promotion of the boutique—by singing along to the jukebox, while Glen Matlock worked as a Saturday boy.There is much of this punk spirit—or rather, punk aesthetic; there isn't that much anarchy going around—in the air this season, mainly because of the imminent Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition. But how would the godmother of the movement,thefashion originator, respond to it herself in her collection?On the surface—aesthetically, that is—Westwood seemed to be comprehensively ignoring it. Instead she concentrated on the codified later period clothing, an aesthetic she has pushed so hard it has become familiar looking; it almost appeared today like a workingwoman's wardrobe, especially when the final model emerged in a pantsuit clasping a clipboard. And in many ways Red Labelhasbecome a workingwoman's wardrobe. Granted, that woman probably works in the arts or the media, but it is part of Westwood's triumph that her extraordinary clothing vocabulary has become part of the fabric of the every day. All those typical Westwood dresses with their slouchy ease, her casually nipped-waist jackets and typical love of stripes—the burgundy and blue striped coat that opened the show accompanied by stripey kneesocks was one outstanding example—well, it just all looked so effortless. And isn't that more subversive than parading the typical codes of punk with a capital P for all to see?As Westwood emerged at the end, it was up to her to provide the anarchic element. She was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of herself in man-drag with the words "I am Julian Assange" written on it. The thing about Westwood is that she doesn't have todopunk, she justispunk.Speaking after her show about the movement she helped create and seemingly left behind, Westwood said: "At one point I was quite contemptuous of punks left over from the movement. I thought punk folded because of a lack of ideas, and I wanted to carry on learning.
It wasn't enough to go jumping around and spitting. And then, earlier this year, I was talking to some of the young male models at the men's show, and they had that punk mentality: Don't trust governments ever. I think that is punk. And they were interested in what they wore; it really means something. It's nice to know that mentality still exists in a new generation. I am now really proud of it."
16 February 2013
Is there an internal logic to a Vivienne Westwood men's show? To see or not to see—that is the question. The opening of this one was as close as Westwood gets to stiff-lipped sartorial: full suits and fur-trimmed greatcoats, multi-vented trenches and cap-toe brogues—even neckties, for god's sake. It then spun to grunts in sweats and riot gear, blanket coats and scrawled-slogan tees. As usual, the only key Dame Viv offered to the code was a primer on Climate Revolution: a ten-point plan to establish the Arctic Commons, save the rainforest, and curb "corporocracy."That set the mind a-wanderin'. Those necktied ones—could they be the evil corporocrats in the flesh? Then there was the riot squad, in puffer jackets and matching athletic shorts. But they wore face masks, too, and on top of that, all and sundry were bruised and bloodied. Had the Climate Revolution come? Its seditionaries were wearing its branded T-shirts.Westwood never disengages with her mission—which is now as much about effecting change as design, it seems—but for whatever reason, this outing had a renewed (dare one say renewable?) energy. There were bits of the usual silliness, to be sure, but there were standouts among the macro-check suits and some of the street-friendly outerwear.It left you wondering whether Westwood had dived back in to stage the revolution in pantomime and beseech the crowd to take it to the streets. And then—screech!—it ended with a surprisingly straight take on white-tux evening. Which set the mind a-wanderin'…
12 January 2013
When there was much talk a few seasons ago of "the female fashion designer," with a cod-feminist veneer applied by many magazines, Marc Jacobs pointed out to this reviewer, "There is nobody more influential than Vivienne Westwood or Miuccia Prada, and they don't get talked about in that way." They're viewed as designers, not (merely) female designers.In the Vivienne Westwood Red Label show today, it was perhaps up to the designer herself to make a not-so-veiled comment that went beyond the silliness of this discussion. Known to be not such a fan of Feminism with a capital F, Westwood proceeded to present a ladylike collection that harked back to the austerity period of her youth. These painted 1950s ladies—literally so at times, with full faces of green, blue, yellow, and pink makeup—sauntered along the catwalk in clothing that was among Westwood's more demure offerings: fine wool twinsets, pink silk jacquard skirtsuits, cocktail dresses with giant pearls. These codified clothes have been seen many times before in Westwood's output as the ultimate punk reactionary, but they were particularly purposeful and pretty today. They also pointed to a period when consumerism wasn't rampant, and fashion was not so disposable—something that Westwood is known to appreciate about her upbringing.All of this was accompanied by a live performance by Rooster, with Sara Stockbridge—perhaps the ultimate Westwood muse, and most closely associated with the designer's mini-crini, corset, and crown phase—providing jarring lead vocals.As the designer emerged at the end, heavily cloaked and helmeted, by Stephen Jones, naturally, and with thick black makeup applied to her mouth and eye, she was the literal grim-faced antithesis of what had just gone before. Dropping her cloak to reveal the most unflattering pair of large knickers and a T-shirt that stated, "Climate Revolution," she further unfurled and held aloft a banner with the aid of two helmeted model helpers that said the same.Vivienne Westwood has almost attained the status of a British national treasure. But don't be slapping the National Trust sign on her just yet: She will never really ever be "kept"—she's far too unpredictable for that.
15 September 2012
Vivienne Westwood's invite re-createdLe Déjeuner sur l'Herbe. It isn't hard to imagine her in sympathy with the defiant, inexplicably naked lay on the lawn. That's a very Westwood stance, and in fact, she's taken it before. She's picnicked for Spring in the past, but as she admits in the show notes, "Why not? We can recycle the grass stain and wine stain prints and insects from previous summer collections." Accordingly, the lot felt a bit remaindered. But among the odds and ends were some pieces sure to engage her fans, from blue and white striped tailoring to the peachy jeans she makes in collaboration with Lee.
23 June 2012
In past seasons, the tribal makeup, wild hair, and fiery attitude at Vivienne Westwood Red Label shows have gone a long way toward disguising the fact that the clothes on the runway are generally pretty tame. This season, however, there was a new sense of circumspection at Red Label. Maybe that feeling had something to do with the fact that Westwood had chosen to show in a more intimate venue than usual; certainly it related to the atypically quiet styling, and the relatively taut edit of the collection itself. Stripped—to a degree—of theatrics, today's show actually made a rather compelling case for the Red Label clothes.Englishness, in its present polyglot incarnation, was the theme du jour. That isn't a new concern of Westwood's, but her take on it felt realistic and freshly relevant, no little thanks to the fact that menswear-inspired suiting, sculptural construction, and check are all rising trends for Fall. Westwood is a practiced hand at all that, and she didn't need to stretch herself to turn out strong looks. A fitted asymmetric suit in gray tweed and cropped, wide-leg trouser cut shown in plaid were especially good; so too the short pencil skirt with a kick of pleats along the hemline. Elsewhere she showed attractive, if familiar, draped silk jersey dresses and some winning tonal intarsia knits with a vaguely tribal motif. Nothing shocking here, in other words, just an uncharacteristically cogent expression of the Red Label signatures.
18 February 2012
We now interrupt your fashion week for a message from Mother Earth: I'm melting! This transmission came courtesy of fashion's most committed climate watcher, Vivienne Westwood. Dame Viv often uses her runways to broadcast calls to arms, and this one was no exception. The polar ice caps are disappearing at an alarming rate, a point driven home by David Attenborough's recent seriesFrozen Planet, Dame Viv's stated inspiration. It got her thinking about the polar explorers of the early twentieth century, gentlemen adventurers who didn't always come insulated against the elements. "When they went to the North Pole, some of them wore tweeds!" Westwood exclaimed pre-show. "They didn't have the right clothes."It's been cold in Milan this week, so you could sympathize with the tweed-clad models whose lips were painted frostbite blue and whose beards dangled icicles. But despite the backward-looking start, this wasn't a historical collection. It was a sales-driven one, heavy on a wide variety of VW staples, from suits to jeans to knits. "It's a lot of choice, always," Westwood said. She was poetic on the subject of her fits: "They've got a terrific rapport with the body."Her own rapport may well be with her buyers. This was Westwood at her most restrained.
14 January 2012
Today's Vivienne Westwood Red Label show was a relatively subdued affair. Emphasis on relatively: Per usual, the collection featured feral hair and makeup, and a grab bag of looks. It also closed with ZZ Top's "Gimme All Your Lovin'" and the charming sight of model Eliza Cummings, in a strapless red ball gown, picking up the tiny Charlotte Free and carrying her down the catwalk, as Free was struggling in her shoes. Too often it goes without saying that Westwood wants everyone—models included—to have fun at her shows, and in her clothes. Well, good on her for that.And good on Westwood, too, for exerting some real design discipline this season. There was a clear proposition threading its way through the show, which was to take suiting pieces—jacket, blouse, trousers—and highlight one element by giving it a sculptural dimension, or magnifying its proportion. The idea fared better in some garments than others: A wrapped suit jacket with a draped lapel was very good, whereas a pair of cropped trousers with a seriously low-hanging crotch was a little silly. In general, though, these pieces worked, as did the simplest of Westwood's draped dresses, Grecian-looking silk jersey numbers in black and white, and diaphanous, bias-cut frocks in a rust-tone print. There were other nice looks along the way, as well, and several kooky ones, inevitably. You could argue that Westwood should edit those pieces out, but that would be tantamount to suggesting she have less fun.
16 September 2011
Where Thom Browne had fun with fencing at Moncler and Miuccia was gaga for golf at Prada, Vivienne Westwood went the whole hog and chose the Olympics as her inspiration for Spring 2012. Of the three, the onetime goddess of punk's take on sports was by far the least disciplined.There were items as literal as Olympics-themed logo tees and the laurel wreaths that crowned one or two models' heads. But the designer's intention was also to show "what one could wear to attend the formal ceremonies," hence the gray pinstripe three-piece suit that invoked a different kind of master of the universe. Alongside came gigolo types in unbuttoned shirts, their foreheads dripping with huge globs of sweat courtesy of some makeup department voodoo. At the end, Westwood took a haphazard victory lap with her husband, Andreas Kronthaler, whom she was keen to credit as her co-creator. ("The greatest talent I've ever met," she called him backstage.)Everything about this show was off-kilter, including the shorts with their off-center button-front flys. If nothing else, that gave new urgency to the old tailor's question as to whether sir dresses to the left or right.
18 June 2011
Vivienne Westwood staged her Red Label show tonight at London's Royal Courts of Justice, a venue that at first blush seemed an ill fit. What on earth was England's grand dame of helter-skelter fashion doing in George Street's august Victorian Gothic gallery, which operates by day as the lobby for actual courts of law? Then, as the models began strutting down the catwalk clad in this season's grab bag of Red Label looks, the location started to make a kind of wacky sense. The Royal Courts are where civil suits are heard, and if you want to observe the crazy variety of human life in London, which was the overarching theme of Westwood's collection, the courts where people go to sue their neighbors and get divorced is probably as good a place as any.Anyway, the clothes. This was a more disciplined collection than the one Westwood showed last season, which isn't saying all that much. The theme of Britishness—in particular the eclectic Britishness to be observed around Portobello Market on an average Saturday—gave Westwood an easy through-line for her ideas. Lots of plaid and pinstripe, a fair amount of riding-habit velvet, some chunky marled knits, plus garments inspired by bankers' shirting and prep-school uniforms: presto, the human comedy, West London style. Sprinkle with confetti bursts of neon feathers to taste.There were, as usual, too many of Westwood's overworked garments here, like a weirdly bunched button-down minidress in broadcloth blue, with ungainly pleating at the shoulder. Westwood's big eccentricities, like those confetti feathers, are winning; her little ones often feel like contrivances. That said, there were a number of clever, wearable garments: Westwood came up with a great abstract print for her silk taffetas this season, which she twisted and tailored into a bunch of fine cocktail looks, and her awkwardly cut suits in velvet and check had a nice dandyish feel. She also sent out one of this season's really good pieces of outerwear: a simple wool coat set askew, as though someone had buttoned it the wrong way and decided she liked the rakish look. There was a lot to like, in fact, if you were willing to dig for it. In that way, the collection really did feel like a day at Portobello.
19 February 2011
AVivienne Westwoodshow, at least in the current era, is an opportunity for a little soapboxing and a little showboating from Dame Vivienne. Her men's collection today provided both: a reminder about the seriousness of climate change (a warning was stamped on her invites and projected on the wall) and about the serious commitment she makes to madcap mania—sartorially speaking, at least.The show notes spoke of a gang of multiethnic but recognizably British student boyfriends, and glanced for a moment at the most famous student boyfriend in recent memory, Prince William. (Let's not forget that he met his commoner princess-to-be while hitting the books at St. Andrew's.) "With royal marriage in the air, who would you choose to be your bridegroom?" Westwood challenged. "Come on, girls, our catwalk is your chance to dream."Take your pick: Out paraded a cast of poli-sci revolutionaries, class clowns (with oversize pants hanging loosely off suspenders), baggy-jean hoods, even a Groucho Marx, complete with cigar. This being a Vivienne Westwood show, each wore a bloody swath of lipstick. The moments that veered closest to trad—the suits thrown only slightly askew by sagging trousers and jackets buttoned on the bias—were the strongest. Or at least, you'd imagine they will be on the sales floor. But there was a daffy coherence to the whole. "Our MAN collection has plenty of choice," Westwood wrote by way of preface. And choose she did. When she took her bow, bouquet in hand, as a sort of blushing bride, she was arm-in-arm with a quilted-jacket tough. But lest that choice be too constricting, there were four other lads trailing behind.
15 January 2011
"Who's Leonard Peltier?" a front-rower at today's Vivienne Westwood Red Label show asked. The question was apropos of the assertion, printed at the bottom of the Westwood credit sheet, that the long-jailed American Indian activist is innocent. Elsewhere in the front row, as a clutch of Westwood's old-school punk pals took their seats, editors flipped through brochures for the legal organization Reprieve, which works on behalf of prisoners at Guantánamo and on death row.Would that the women on Westwood's runway were as engaged as Westwood herself. That's not to ask that the designer's collections be radical—her legacy there is secure, her influence felt daily. It's plenty fair that, at this point, she simply enjoy making clothes. Her high-spirited collection for Spring demonstrates that she does. But this show also expanded the disconnect between Westwood's own persona and politics, and the woman for whom she designs. A model wearing an oversize top and baggy shorts in a chintzy silk—part of an odd interior decor-themed section—could have been clacking around her country estate in high-heeled mules, going from room to room out of boredom. Political injustice seemed the farthest thing from her mind.Still, clothing-wise, there were smart ideas here, like a sporty stripe of stretch leather running down the side of pencil skirts and lean suit trousers. There were curve-complementing pencil dresses with ruffled necklines, executed with pop in an orange and white check, and ageless, universally flattering draped silk dresses and tops. There were a plethora of great jackets and pants and the occasional outstanding accessory, like an oversize bag in Navajo-print felt and color-blocked patent-leather brogues and high-tops. Perhaps the large, heart-shaped necklaces Westwood designed for Reprieve, which accessorized nearly every look, were meant not only to raise funds for the organization but to send a message to the restlessly idle Westwood woman on the runway.Good God, girl, there's plenty to do—so do something.
18 September 2010
After Anastase on day one and Todd Lynn earlier today, the third time made the trend with Vivienne Westwood's Red Label collection: London's Fall 2010 catwalk is Copenhagen-conscious. As in keenly aware of the impact of climate change. Without acknowledging global warming per se, Westwood was apocalyptically predicting a billion people left on earth by 2100. Her antidote to mass extermination? "Loyalty 2 Gaia," love and respect to Mother Earth. That's what the T-shirt said. Quite how the rest of the collection was supposed to inspire Gaia love remained a mystery. It did, however, serve as yet another reminder of how rich the Westwood legacy is, as it ran the gamut from a tribal blanket coat and a micro-mini suit in the designer's beloved tartan to a practically prim plaid skirt and puff-sleeved blouse that wouldn't have looked out of place in the sixties on the schoolteacher Westwood once was. (A strapless dress in a sequined leopard spot made me wonder if the designer was channeling the sexpots she remembered from that same era.)There aren't many other designers who could dress the Queen Mother and Pixie Geldof from the same collection. For the billions of women who aren't either of those individuals, standout items included some beautifully cut coats; some simple, chic shirtdresses, particularly an evening shift in midnight paillettes; and some sexy little suits, including one in purple with a heart-shaped lapel trimmed in pink. Inevitably, in a collection this broad, there were some real stinkers, but, with one model sharpening a long knife while she stalked the catwalk in a butcher's apron, it's best to stayschtumon those. Out of "Loyalty 2 Viv," of course.
20 February 2010
Given Dame Westwood's memorably unmediated declaration that she had nothing to do with her Red collection, she has been remarkably well-served by whoeverisresponsible. They've managed to commercialize her Queen Mother-on-crack aesthetic so that it plays to a whole new audience of pop-ettes, a posse of whom were parked in the front row, alongside hoary old fans like Boy George. The pop-ettes cheered lustily every time Pixie Geldof, one of their own, passed by on the catwalk, trying her hardest to cop some bad-girl attitude. Once, that would have been entirely in keeping with the clothes, but it's funny how Viv's fashion radicalism has devolved into the kind of decorous dresses that would be suitable for a garden party at the local vicarage: tulip-printed (paired with a white cardigan); draped and polka-dotted with a portrait neckline. Even her exaggerated forties-styled tailoring, for all its asymmetrical touches, now looks more and more conservative (though a brocade jacket and swagged lilac skirt on Coco Rocha proved that Westwood's va-va-voom factor remains undiminished). For Spring, Red occasionally mixed up the classicism with argyle-patterned short shorts, or diaper shorts, or a pair of drop-crotch linen pants cut on the bias. But what ultimately lingered were the high-waisted gray trousers worn with a lilac blouse, a distinctly ladylike counterpoint to the save-the-rain-forest message the dame printed on her invitation.
19 September 2009
When Vivienne Westwood was complimented recently on last season's Red Label showing, she replied with typical can't-help-herself candor that she actually had nothing to do with it. In which case, whoever is channeling her is doing a pretty good job of duplicating her signature. The corseting, the asymmetry, the tartans, the tailoring, the general air of wanton womanliness that is personified by Pamela Anderson, the new face of the business…they can all be found in Red Label.This particular edition went slack toward the end with one too many asymmetrically draped jersey dresses, which looked cheap. But before that moment, a tweed jacket with dimpled shoulders, a poncho-dress hybrid (droncho?) in olive green, and some capacious hooded winter wraps had an air of downplayed drama. The collection offered its own twist on the perennial naughty schoolgirl look with a tiny striped jacket and fiercely tailored pants (better make that "naughty schoolboy"). The invitation was a school report card. Seeing the sun is shining, we'll give this effort a B-.
20 February 2009
The Earls Court venue was vast, the faithful were out in force (looking a little more ragged each year), and of course there was an hour's wait. But aside from those echoes of Westwood spectacles past, Queen Viv's show for her secondary Red Label line was actually an up-to-date collection of appealing outfits with just enough of her legendary iconoclasm and body-consciousness to give the clothes some kick. The story could have been "The Berber and the Brit." There was a flavor of North Africa in the hooded dresses, the hats, the stripes, the prints, and the long white shirt worn with a waistcoat over dropped-crotch pants. But the plaid suit with the flared peplum, the severely tailored jackets with draped or origami-ed lapels, and the tea dresses with fabric draped around the hips and knotted in front were vintage Anglomania. The chic of a navy halter sheath or a black silk shirtdress almost compensated for the metallics, which just looked cheap.
17 September 2008
Dame Viv is back in London! Showing a collection that glories in the girls who turned King's Road into an endless fashion show from one end of the seventies to the other. Glam poseurs, sexy secretaries, and perverse punks—all present and correct!Actually, for accuracy's sake, the above needs a little qualification. Vivienne Westwood has never stopped living in London, though she's shown her main line in Paris for almost a decade and has no plans to change that. The collection she showed today was her second line, Red Label, and it was here by popular demand from retailers. "I never really wanted to show a second line [on the runway] because it's such a lot of work," she said. "But it's good because it means I don¿t have to let go all of the ideas I have so quickly. There¿s an awful lot of energy in London now, and I found it much easier to show than it used to be. There's help; sponsorship; fantastic hair, makeup, production people; and really top girls."If Britain's national fashion treasure had any lingering reservations that showing her commercial line might tarnish her reputation, the effect ended up just the opposite. Fifteen years ago no one would have predicted such an incendiary nutcase would ever survive in business, let alone live to swish a wearable collection of in-demand Westwood-isms in the face of her gainsayers. But that was what it was: a lineup of pinstripe tailoring, tartan kilts, knits, and coats with rounded lapels stamped with the baggy-hemmed, asymmetric hallmarks of the Westwood classic. The fact that it's all at an accessible price—even the gorgeous versions of her draped-bosom evening dresses—is, for a democrat like Viv, perhaps the biggest triumph. No wonder it looked like a victory parade when she came out at the end of the show arm in arm with one of London's It girls of the moment, Lily Donaldson.
13 February 2008