Vivienne Westwood’s death left millions of dollars and strange fashion behind

The queen of punk style has left this world at 81

She was called granny in the last century, but they thought that such women live at least a hundred years. The death of Vivienne Westwood is likely to create a buzz around her designs and has already been the subject of remarks that the fashion world would be much more boring without her.

According to official reports, Vivienne passed away “peacefully, surrounded by her family.” The fashion house Vivienne Westwood said that until her last days, the designer worked on creating clothes, art and writing a book. She left her business in a prosperous state. The fashion house produces four clothing lines, as well as shoes, accessories and perfumes. Vivien’s fortune was estimated at fifty million dollars, which may not be so much compared to the income of the owners of other well-known brands, but a lot for a designer with an extremely extravagant look at fashion.

Some local critics sometimes called her clothes, obviously not from a great mind, the aesthetics of ugliness. However, even in the UK, where they love something incredibly strange, Vivien was treated with ill-concealed irony for a long time, and from time to time they asked if she herself believed that her things make people more attractive. However, “attractiveness” is not quite the correct assessment of Westwood’s activities. Her fashion is very social and almost every collection is a manifesto of a person who cares.

Vivien was born into a poor family and was able to realize her interest in design and art thanks to the post-war reform of British education. At that time, many people from the middle and lower strata of society got the opportunity to study at art schools, and subsequently this turned the cultural landscape not only of Britain, but of the entire civilized world. Educated and trained, the brisk youth brought non-conformism to the culture, contempt for the establishment and strongly promoted the idea that art can be made by ordinary people for ordinary people, even if it ends up being obscenely expensive.

If in America punk culture was more of a musical nature, then in Britain ideas were first formulated, to which they managed to write soundtracks. The first store that Vivien and her husband Malcolm McLaren opened in a less prestigious part of London could hardly be called a fashion business in the truest sense. Let it Rock sold ordinary items that Vivienne had repurposed into what could have been the assortment of a BDSM shop. But in the end, Vivienne and Malcolm managed to create a demand for protest, and make the protest itself a powerful idea in which fashion and art were combined with music. The Sex Pistols group assembled by the spouses, in fact, managed to record only one album, which did not prevent her from becoming a punk rock legend, and Vivienne and Malcolm turned into the creators of a new cult.

The path from selling torn T-shirts and badges with slogans to creating designer collections was by no means an easy one for Westwood. Inventing clothes, Vivienne always meant that people who would not be afraid to make public statements with their appearance would wear them. The design itself was also in many ways contrary to all the rules of the fashion business. Vivienne was inspired by the outfits of Victorian and Georgian England, inspired by the Diaghilev seasons, she created a crinoline skirt, used classic Scottish plaid fabric, returned corsets to the catwalks, offered complex asymmetric cuts and always added a fair amount of punk madness and political activism to this.

But if the fashionable design from Vivien could be appreciated by a trained public, then absolutely everyone liked her desire to make some noise on a variety of occasions. The lack of underwear at a reception at Buckingham Palace, a tank ride to the Prime Minister’s residence as part of an environmental protest, support for eco-activists who poured soup on a Van Gogh painting. It may seem that this lady had a very specific idea of ​​decency. But defending her ideas, Vivien did not seem to think about how people would look at her. According to rumors, while discussing the scent of her new perfume, Westwood asked to make it smell of “freshly washed slit”, which confused the perfumers a little, but in the end everything was as she wanted.

The designer repeatedly expressed her contempt for various politicians, but this did not harm the popularity of her clothes among the establishment. Vivienne dresses were worn by royalty, and Prime Minister Theresa May announced Brexit in a pantsuit from her designer label. But at the same time, the designer made a dress for the bride Julian Assange for a wedding ceremony held in prison.

Andreas Kronthaller, husband and colleague of Vivien, announced his intention to continue the work of his deceased wife. And it will most likely be very difficult for a designer to do this. In a world where there are more and more rules and monotony, only romantics can create collections that seem to laugh at these rules.