Dame Vivienne Westwood, the pioneering British fashion designer who played a key role in the punk movement, has died in London at the age of 81.
Westwood died “peacefully, surrounded by her family” in Clapham, south London, on Thursday, her representatives said in a statement.
She had continued to do the things she loved, including designing, working on her book and making art, “until the last minute,” she added.
Her husband and creative partner, Andreas Kronthaler, said: “I will continue with Vivienne in my heart.We worked to the end and she gave me enough things to keep going.Thanks darling.”
Born in the Derbyshire village of Glossop in 1941, Westwood’s family moved to London in 1957, where she attended art school for a semester.
She met band manager Malcolm McLaren in the 1960s, while working as an elementary school teacher after separating from her first husband, Derek Westwood.The pair opened a small shop on King’s Road in Chelsea in 1971, which became a meeting point for many of the bands they outfitted, including the Sex Pistols, who were managed by McLaren.
Her provocative and sometimes controversial designs came to define the punk aesthetic, and Westwood would go on to become one of Britain’s most celebrated fashion designers, fusing historical references, classic tailoring and romantic flourishes with tougher and sometimes overtly political messages.
Westwood was self-taught with no formal fashion training.As a teenager, she learned how to make her own clothes by following patterns and taking apart second-hand clothes she found at markets to understand the cut and construction.
Westwood and McLaren’s store changed names and focus several times, including rebranding to Sex, which led to the couple being fined in 1975 for an “indecent exhibition” there, as well as World’s End and Seditionaries.
Westwood’s first runway show, for her Pirates collection, was a major step for the punk rebel to become one of the fashion world’s most celebrated stars.But she still found ways to shock: her 1987 Statue of Liberty corset is credited with starting the “underwear as outerwear” trend.
Even as Westwood’s design empire grew into a multi-million dollar business, the designer never lost her activist nature.In 1989, she posed for the cover of Tatler magazine dressed as Margaret Thatcher over a caption that read, “This woman was once a punk”.She later told Dazed Digital that “the suit I was wearing was ordered by Margaret Thatcher of Aquascutum, but she then canceled it.”
Since her earliest punk days, Westwood has remixed and reversed imagery from the British monarchy.
When she was awarded an Order of the British Empire medal in 1992, the designer accepted the honor from Queen Elizabeth II while wearing a plain gray skirt suit.Outside Buckingham Palace, she gave a spin to waiting photographers and revealed to the whole world that she hadn’t worn any underpants to meet the Queen.
But Westwood was invited again to receive the even more favorable title of Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2006.
In the mid-2000s, Westwood turned her political focus to the climate crisis.In 2007 she published an Active Resistance to Propaganda manifesto, in which she wrote: “We have a choice: to become more cultivated, and therefore more humane – or by not choosing, to be the destructive and self-destructive animal, the victim of our own cleverness (to be or not to be).”
In 2015, Westwood drove a tank to the home of then Prime Minister David Cameron in Oxfordshire to protest against fracking.A vegetarian, Westwood along with other top designers, including Stella McCartney, lobbied the British government to ban fur retailing.
She was also an outspoken supporter of Julian Assange.
In 2020, she hanged herself in a birdcage to protest the extradition of the Wikileaks founder from the UK.In 2022, she designed the suit and dress that Assange and his wife Stella Morris wore to their wedding.
Until the end, Westwood wrote regularly on her website No Man’s Land on issues such as climate and social justice.Last month she issued a statement of support for the climate protesters who threw soup over Van Gough’s Sunflowers, writing: “Young people are desperate.They wear a t-shirt with the text: Just Stop Oil.
They are doing something.”
Tributes poured in for the designer on Thursday night.“Vivienne is gone and the world is already a less interesting place.I love you, Viv,” Chrissie Hynde, the Pretenders’ frontwoman and a former employee at the couple’s store, tweeted.
On Instagram, photographer Nick Knight described her as “a wonderful woman and a wonderful designer”, while fashion commentator Derek Blasberg said that while textbooks may remember Westwood as ” ushering London’s counter-culture scene into haute couture … I think she would like to be especially remembered for her advocacy, in particular [concerning] global warming… Her life was aggressive, unforgiving, and fantastic.A total original.”
Her representatives said that Westwood considered himself a Taoist – a follower of the Chinese philosophy of Taoism – and issued a statement previously made by Westwood on the subject.
“Tao makes you feel like you belong to the cosmos and gives meaning to your life; it gives you such a sense of identity and strength to know that you are living the life you can and therefore should live: make full use of your character and your life on earth to the fullest,” she wrote.
Westwood is survived by Kronthaler, who is her second husband, and her two sons: fashion photographer Ben Westwood, her son with Derek Westwood, and her son with McLaren, Joe Corre, who co-founded the Agent Provocateur lingerie company..
