Obituaries: Dame Vivienne Westwood, iconoclastic fashion designer in the vanguard of punk

Dame Vivienne Westwood, fashion designer. Born: 8 April 1941, in Glossopdale, Derbyshire. Died: 29 December 2022, in London, aged 81.

Vivienne Westwood walks the runway during her show at Paris Fashion Week in 2014 in Paris

If Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols gave English punk rock a sound, then it was a former primary school teacher called Vivienne Westwood who gave it a look. At a time when torn clothing was routinely repaired with needle or thread, Westwood was putting designer rips into tee-shirts and jeans.She was at the heart of the whole punk rock scene in the 1970s. She was married to and designed clothes in partnership with Malcolm McLaren, who was manager of the Sex Pistols. The couple’s London store SEX became the HQ of the punk rock movement.

Westwood retained the essence of punk into middle age and beyond. In 1991, the year in which the British Fashion Council declared her Designer of the Year, she was still stitching clothing on a sewing machine in the former council flat in Clapham where she lived, before heading for the Paris catwalks by van.

In 1992 when she was made an OBE s he wore a smart suit for the ceremony at Buckingham Palace, with tights, but without knickers, as she demonstrated for photographers with a twirl. "I wished to show off my outfit by twirling the skirt. It did not occur to me that, as the photographers were practically on their knees, the result would be more glamorous than I expected,” she said.

She was always a rebel, a symbol of the resistance, whatever that might be. Nevertheless she was elevated to damehood in 2006, by which time she had also graduated from punk to that most quintessentially English of characters – the eccentric. And of course she accepted the awards where others declined. She was not quite that anti-establishment.

She was born Vivienne Isabel Swire in Glossopdale, Derbyshire, in 1941. Her mother had been a weaver at the local cotton mills. Her father was a grocer by trade, but was working as a storekeeper in an aircraft factory during the Second World War. They subsequently moved to London and ran a sub-post office.

Showing creative potential, Westwood began making her own clothes while still at school, including sleeveless shifts. She enrolled at Harrow Art School to study fashion and silversmithing, but left after just one term. "I didn't know how a working-class girl like me could possibly make a living in the art world,” she said.

Instead she trained and worked as a primary school teacher, identifying most readily with the naughty children. But she did also go on making her own jewellery, which she sold from a stall in the Portobello Road.

In 1962 she married Derek Westwood, a Hoover tool room apprentice, and they had a son the following year. But the marriage was short-lived and in 1965 she met her future business and personal partner Malcolm McLaren. “I felt there were so many doors to open and he had the key to all of them,” she said.

Their shop SEX was decorated with pornographic images and stocked rubber clothing and fetish items as fashion statements. “All the clothes I wore people would regard as shocking,” said Westwood. “I wore them because I just thought that I looked like a princess from another planet.”

In 1976 the shop was renamed Seditionaries – Clothes for Heroes, featuring ripped clothing that was inspired by pin-ups of the 1950s, leathers and chains borrowed from the bikers and straps and buckles from the fetish scenes.

McLaren always saw music and fashion going hand in hand and by this time he was managing the Sex Pistols and he and Westwood were dressing them. Where McLaren, Westwood and the Pistols led, many others followed, especially after the Pistols hit the charts in 1976-77 with Anarchy in the UK, God Save the Queen and Pretty Vacant. “You couldn’t imagine the punk rock thing without the clothing,” Westwood later commented.

Westwood and McLaren unveiled their first catwalk collection at London’s Olympia in 1981. Entitled Pirate it presented a unisex wardrobe that drew on the history and legends of buccaneers, highwaymen and other adventurers.

Broadening their horizons they drew on various exotic cultures and ethnic designs (and on National Geographic magazine) for subsequent collections. Westwood’s partnership with McLaren ended in 1983 and in 1984 she presented her Clint Eastwood collection, acknowledging a debt to western movies.

There was always a sense of expectation with Westwood and the question “Whatever will she do next?” with nothing off limits. There was a feeling of anything and everything goes, frequently with the added shock value of some erotica, though through her designs the avant garde would sometimes become mainstream.

It was Westwood’s 9 inch platform shoes that Naomi Campbell was wearing when she famously toppled over on the catwalk in 1993.

Westwood drew heavily on costumes of previous centuries, refashioning Victorian underwear as outerwear. But after ripped tee-shirts and rubber fetish wear, perhaps nothing could be more shocking than her adoption of Scottish tartan and Harris tweed in later collections, but with some wild Westwood reimagining.

Politically she endorsed the Greens until they dropped her from a campaign because of her company’s tax arrangements. Although her finances were precarious for many years, latterly she developed a huge international following, including many in the developing Chinese market, and she had an estimated personal wealth approaching $200 million.

Westwood was also a fan of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. She and her third husband Andreas Kronthaler designed the kilt for Assange’s wedding in prison last year.

In 2017 in her mid-seventies Westwood was still riding around on the shoulders of a young male model at London Fashion Week in big cloppity white shoes and a white multi-piece outfit that matched the colour of her hair on that particular day, though for many years it was dyed a fiery red.

She is survived by Kronthaler, who had been her student during a stint that she had teaching in Vienna and who was 25 years younger. They had been married for 30 years. She is also survived by one son from each of her first two marriages. Joe Corre, her son with McLaren, was co-founder of the lingerie company Agent Provocateur.

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