Women in Fashion: Vivienne Westwood: London and Paris Fashion Week 2022 (updated 8th March)

Tomorrow is International Women's Day (#breakthebias 🙅‍♀️🙅) so I thought I'd highlight my favourite British female fashion designer - Vivienne Westwood. I watched her runway at Paris Fashion Week and was excited to see that some of her iconic motifs are still used in her collections, as can be seen in her London Fashion Week digital presentation. 

Paris Fashion Week 2022 is going on right now and is focusing on womenswear (February 28 - March 8th). Menswear will be their focus in June, Haute Couture is celebrated in July, before womenswear returns to being centre stage in September. 

I was excited to watch Vivienne Westwood's runway live on their YouTube channel! It's still available to watch on-demand on Westwood's social media and on YouTube . What a visual feast of arty, creative, bold fashion statements! I enjoyed watching every outfit on the runway, the camera angle showing the front, side and back of all the clothes so we can see the different ways the material hangs, moves and any stylistic surprises once the model turns around. 

Her Creative Director and Design Partner is her spouse, Andreas Kronthaler. They have one of the longest lasting and blissfully close marriages in fashion. They met when Vivienne taught him while he was an art student. She was also his mentor. A year later he was working for her and four years later they were married. 💞.  

As I mentioned in my previous post, Westwood was the designer who turned my passion for self-expression through clothing into a lifelong fascination for fashion design, both in terms of appreciating the artistry of top designers as well as being inspired to start my own fashion sketchbook in which to draw my own fashion designs. There's always been something invigorating about her non-conformist, rebellious, anti-establishment, irreligious, irreverent, bold sense of style and I never tire of it. 

At the 2004 V&A exhibition of her work spanning many decades, I had the opportunity to see a range of her designs from punk to gowns inspired by the history of art and historical outfits. Here you can see photos and read a blog post by the V&A about Westwood's historical research and how she incorporates it into her fashion. It also shows how she was producing unisex clothing years ago. All her styles are stunning and amazing to see up close! 😍 They are both artworks and high fashion all rolled into one. I loved the edgy rock/punk genderfluid outfits and was surprised to find that I also enjoyed the classical gowns (given I wasn't someone who wore dresses after the age of 13) especially the mind-boggling shapes and folds she'd created with the flowing fabrics - genius! I'd never seen anything like it and haven't since - unforgettable. Unfortunately, it's impossible to fully appreciate on-screen, you have to stand close to it to analyse the fabric and how it's been sculpted. I've been experimenting with creatively folding and pinning the fabric of my old tops ever since! 

Now, since my latter 20's, I might wear the odd dress or skirt but there has to be something I find arty about them and they are usually also short or shorter. 😉 

I am aware that some of Westwood's punk designs were sexually explicit and would have made Mary Whitehouse's toes curl and driven her to more moralizing 🙄 stemming from her Ultra Conservatism based on evangelical Christianity. It's fashion, Mary, not filth! 🙄🤷And it doesn't mean that just because you like Westwood's punk style, that you are also into BDSM! 🤦Let's not conflate the two! It's simply daring, bold and in-your-face fashion. 

Sometimes I wore punk and rock-and-roll clothes and accessories during my uni days. Nothing too outrageous. I'm sure Prof Susan James saw me wearing such items. She was not in the least bit fazed. 🙂Curious but not bothered. She took it in her stride. As she takes most things!👍 She's not of a delicate constitution. 💪🙂 Here's one item Susan James would have seen during a lecture, as you do - the punk ring on my middle finger. below is my drawing of it on my hand:

This is a self-portrait of my hand and my accessories, drawn from life from my carry around punk/conceptual Art sketchbook (2005-6). The meaning of the words I wrote in my sketchbook at the time as part of the artwork is: F*CK 🤬religious people who tell LGBT+ they'll go to hell, I'll always live my life as a lesbian (pink) and feminist (purple). ✌️🏳️‍🌈💜 This was in response to what I heard in the news. Personally, I've never come across anyone who's said that to me, but then I didn't have anything to do with religious people.  

I bought postcards of some of Vivienne's outfits after the 2004 Westwood exhibition my mother and I went to together. I'm pleased to see that one of my favourite items on a postcard I display in my room is still very relevant to her current Autumn/Winter 2022 collection, namely T-Shirt 'Rock' - Boiled Chicken Bones and Chains (Malcolm McLaren {best known as manager of the Sex Pistols} and Vivienne Westwood): Let It Rock Collection 1970-2. As Vogue pointed out, Westwood's punk era style, including the F*CK slogan and chicken bone motif, has featured in her Autumn/Winter 2022 collection, showcased digitally for London Fashion Week. Click here to see an example of her latest chicken bone top spelling F*CK and how it fabulously evokes the T-shirt 'Rock' (link above). 

Here's my exhibition pamphlet I keep in my sketchbook:

Another ground-breaking aspect of Vivienne Westwood, as I mentioned previously, is that she was ahead of her time in creating unisex and genderfluid outfits before it was mis-labelled woke and mis-attributed to generation Z. 

Like me, GQ magazine also see Westwood as producing genderfluid fashion before the rest of the world woke up to it:

"In addition to being one of the principal architects of the punk movement, Westwood latterly redefined the way women dressed by sending models down her runways in 18th-century-inspired corsets and crinolines, and she was putting men in dresses and kilts long before the fashion world discovered gender-fluidity." 

I couldn't say it better myself! Click here for the quote, full article and photos. 

Vivienne Westwood is also generally creative and an activist. She's not just a fashion designer. She's written an anti-Propaganda manifesto. Vivienne, on occasion, has recited a poem in a dramatic and emotional way. Sometimes she reads an arty letter to convey an important message, such as her Letter to Earth. I often wonder whether she ever wanted to become an actress. 🤔At other times, she posts her artworks and snippets of her writings which often carry a social message. Recently, she has posted snippets of the book that she's writing about what's important to her in her life. She depicts the emotions behind the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. But Vivienne doesn't just express it through art, she's as vocal as ever about climate change, sustainable fashion, anti-war and social issues. And now, true to form, she's appealing for donations to help the crisis in Ukraine. 

There's never a dull moment with Vivienne Westwood. A couple of years ago, she staged a protest by suspending herself in a birdcage outside the Old Bailey at the fabulous age of 79!💖 How rock -and-roll is that! Will anyone of my generation manage this a few decades from now? Unlikely. 😪 Too many have been shoehorned into being so conservatively conformist. 

I'm off to build a birdcage. Come to think of it, I've already drawn a woman suspended in a golden gilded bird-feeder cage in one of my conceptual carry around sketchbooks way back in my youth (well, rising 20). My mother refers to it as the punk-inspired sketchbook.😂 

Here's my glitter ink pen and green highlighter drawing of woman in cage titled: The Gilded Cage in the Jungle of Life: 

Author and First Proofreader, Editor, IT: Liba Kaucky

Second proofreader: Jana Kaucky