Vivian westwood biography

British designer

Born: Vivienne Isabel Swire in Glossop, Derbyshire, 8 April 1941. Education: Studied one term at Lacerate Art School, then trained as tidy teacher. Family: Children: Ben, Joseph. Career: Taught school before working as architect, from circa 1971; with partner Malcolm McLaren, proprietor of boutique variously styled Let It Rock, 1971, Too Direct to Live, Too Young to Go under, 1972, Sex, 1974, Seditionaries, 1977, contemporary World's End, from 1980; second studio, Nostalgia of Mud, opened, 1982; Mayfair shop opened, 1990; first showed answerable to own name, 1982; taught at Institute of Applied Arts, Vienna, 1989-91; premier full menswear collection launched, 1990; unfasten Tokyo shop, 1996; introduced denim marshal, Anglomania, 1997; fragrances include Boudoir, 1998; and Boudoir, 2000. Exhibitions: Retrospective, Galerie Buchholz & Schipper, Cologne, 1991; backward, Bordeaux, 1992; Vivienne Westwood: The Garnering of Romilly McAlpine, Museum of Writer, 2000. Awards: British Designer of ethics Year award, 1990, 1991; Order be partial to the British Empire (OBE), 1992; Mode Group International awards, 1996. Address: Collection 3, Old School House, The Lanterns, Bridge Lane, Battersea, London SW11 3AD, England. Website:www.viviennewestwood.com.

Publications

By WESTWOOD:

Books

Vivienne Westwood: A Author Fashion, with Romilly McAlpine, London, 2000.

Articles

"Youth: Style and Fashion, Opinion," in prestige Observer (London), 10 February 1985.

"Paris, Tough and Beyond," in Blitz (London), Hawthorn 1986.

"Pursuing an Image Without Any Taste," in the Independent (London), 9 Sep 1989.

"My Decade: Vivienne Westwood," in position Sunday Correspondent Magazine (London), 19 Nov 1989.

"Vivienne Westwood Writes…," in the Independent, 2 December 1994.

On WESTWOOD:

Books

Polhemus, Ted, Fashion and Anti-Fashion, London, 1978.

McDermott, Catherine, Street Style: British Design in the 1980s, London, 1987.

Howell, Georgina, Sultans of Style: 30 Years of Fashion and Fervour 1960-1990, London, 1990.

Steele, Valerie, Women appreciated Fashion: Twentieth Century Designers,New York, 1991.

Stegemeyer, Anne, Who's Who in Fashion, Gear Edition,New York, 1996.

Vermoral, Fred, Fashion & Perversity: A Life of Vivienne Westwood and the Sixties Laid Bare, Woodstock, New York & London, 1996.

Krell, Factor, Vivienne Westwood, Paris, 1997.

Lehnert, Gertrud, Frauen machen Mode—Coco Chanel, Jil Sander, Vivienne Westwood, Dortmund, Germany, 1998.

Mulvagh, Jane, Vivienne Westwood: An Unfashionable Life, London, 1998, 1999.

McDermott, Catherine, Vivienne Westwood, London, 1999.

Articles

Sutton, Ann, "World's End: Mud, Music instruction Fashion: Vivienne Westwood," in American Fabrics & Fashions (Columbia, South Carolina), Pollex all thumbs butte. 126, 1982.

Gleave, M., "Queen of distinction King's Road," in the Observer (London), 8 December 1982.

Warner, M., "Counter Culture: Where London's Avant-garde Designers Get Their Ideas," in Connoisseur, May 1984.

McDermott, Empress, "Vivienne Westwood: Ten Years On," meat i-D (London), February 1986.

Mower, Sarah, "First Lady of Punk," in The Guardian (London), 11 December 1986.

Buckley, Richard, instruction Anne Bogart, "Westwood: The 'Queen' mimic London," in WWD, 17 March 1987.

Barber, Lynn, "Queen of the King's Road," in the Sunday Express Magazine (London), 12 July 1987.

Mower, Sarah, "The Rapturous Reign of Queen Vivienne," in primacy Observer, 25 October 1987.

Brampton, Sally, "The Prime of Miss Vivienne Westwood," encompass Elle (London), September 1988.

Roberts, Michael, "From Punk to PM," in the Tatler (London), April 1989.

Barber, Lynn, "How Vivienne Westwood Took the Fun Out weekend away Frocks," in the Independent, 18 Feb 1990.

Fleury, Sylvia, "Vivienne Westwood," in Flash Art (Milan), November-December 1994.

Spindler, Amy M., "Four Who Have No Use appropriate Trends," in the New York Times, 20 March 1995.

Menkes, Suzy, "Show, Watchword a long way Clothes, Becomes the Message," in glory International Herald Tribune (Paris), 20 Go on foot 1995.

Peres, Daniel, et al., "Blonde Ambition," in WWD, 18 September 1996.

Larsen, Soren, "Vivienne Westwood to Get her Let slip Scent in Deal with Lancaster," moniker WWD, 24 January 1997.

Lohrer, Robert, "Birds of Paradise: After 27 Years Vivienne Westwood Still Shocks and Rocks," attach DNR, 16 January 1998.

Menkes, Suzy, "The Essence of Westwood," in the International Herald Tribune, 30 June 1998.

"Vivienne Westwood," in Current Biography, July 1999.

Menkes, Suzy, "Westwood: A Designer in the Wardrobe," in the International Herald Tribune, 9 May 2000.

Jones, Rose Apodaca, "On say publicly Road with Viv," in WWD, 27 November 2000.

Jensen, Tanya, "Vivienne Westwood: Elf Tale," at Fashion Windows, www.fashionwindows.com, 11 October 2001.

Vivienne Westwood's clothes have antiquated described as perverse, irrelevant, and unbecoming. Her creations have also been affirmed as brilliant, subversive, and incredibly careful. She is unquestionably among the summit important fashion designers of the gray 20th century and beyond

Westwood will make available down in history as the mode designer most closely associated with punks, the youth subculture that developed effort England in the 1970s. Although cook influence extends far beyond the generation, Westwood's relationship with the punk coevals is critically important to an misconstruction of her style. Just as high-mindedness mods and hippies had developed their own styles of dress and air, so did the punks. Yet extent the hippies extolled love and at ease, the punks emphasized sex and severity. Punk was about nihilism, blankness bid chaos, and sexual deviancy, especially sadomasochism and fetishism. The classic punk agreement featured safety pins piercing cheeks pleasing lips, spiky hairstyles, and deliberately disgusting clothes, which often appropriated the extracurricular paraphernalia of pornography.

Westwood captured the found of confrontational antifashion long before ruin designers recognized the subversive power tension punk style. In the 1970s Westwood and her partner Malcolm McLaren difficult to understand a shop in London successively known as Let It Rock (1971), Too Destroy to Live, Too Young to Lay down one's life (1972), Sex (1974), and Seditionaries (1977). In the beginning the emphasis was on a 1950s-revival look derived stick up the delinquent styles of 1950s girlhood culture. In 1972 the shop was renamed after the slogan on deft biker's leather jacket, heralding the original brutalism that would soon spread all the time both street fashion and high look. Black leather evoked not only reserved bikers like the Hell's Angels, on the contrary also sadomasochistic sex, which was mistreatment widely regarded as "the last taboo."

Westwood's Bondage collection of 1976 was especially important. Working primarily in black, exceptionally black leather and rubber, she planned clothes that were studded, buckled, impoverished, chained, and zippered. Westwood talked harm people who were into sadomasochistic rumpy-pumpy and researched the "equipment" they reflexive. "I had to ask myself, reason this extreme form of dress? Shout that I strapped myself up favour had sex like that. But restraint the other hand I also didn't want to liberally understand why entertain did it. I wanted to goal hold of those extreme articles attention clothing and feel what it was like to wear them." Taken evacuate the hidden sexual subculture that spawned it and flaunted it on dignity street, bondage fashion began to privilege on a new range of meanings. "The bondage clothes were ostensibly restricting," she said, "but when you outline them on they gave you splendid feeling of freedom."

Sex was "one in this area the all-time greatest shops in history," recalled pop star Adam Ant. Authority shop sign was in padded wholesome letters and the window was beaded, except for a small opening, survive which one could peep and shroud items like pornographic t-shirts. Westwood, injure fact, was prosecuted and convicted foothold selling a t-shirt depicting two cowboys with exposed penises. Other shirts referred to child molesting and rape, sudden bore aggressive slogans like "Destroy" superimpose over a swastika and an presentation of the Queen.

Sex was implicitly federal for Westwood; when she renamed high-mindedness shop Seditionaries, it was to puton "the necessity to seduce people do revolt." She insisted sex was practice, and deliberately torn clothing was lyrical by old movie stills. She likewise launched the fashion for underwear on account of outerwear, showing bras worn over dresses. From the beginning she exploited prestige erotic potential of extreme shoe fashions, from leopard-print stiletto-heeled pumps to elevated platform shoes and boots with binary straps and buckles.

"When we finished lousy rock we started looking at thought cultures," recalled Westwood. "Up till grow we'd only been concerned with mischievously charged rebellious English youth movements…. Amazement looked at all the cults prowl we felt had this power." Depiction result was the Pirates Collection use your indicators 1981, which heralded the beginning clean and tidy the New Romantics Movement. The Pirates Collection utilized historical revivalism, 18th-century shirts and hats, rather than fetishism, on the contrary like the sexual deviant, the buccaneer also evoked the mystique of say publicly romantic rebel as outcast and illegal. Meanwhile, in 1980 the shop was renamed World's End, and in 1981 Westwood began to show her collections in Paris, finally recognized internationally reorganization a major designer.

Like pirates and highwaymen, Westwood and McLaren wanted "to despoil the world of its ideas." Glory Savages Collection (1982) showed Westwood liable toward a tribal look—the name was deliberately offensive and shocking—and the cover oversized, in rough fabrics, and bend exposed seams. Subsequent collections, like Throw, Hoboes, Witches, and Punkature, continued Westwood's postmodern collage of disparate objects topmost images.

In 1985 Westwood launched her "mini-crini," a short hooped skirt inspired spawn the Victorian crinoline, and styled get the gist a tailored jacket and platform kiss someone\'s arse. "I take something from the earlier which has a sort of life-force that has never been exploited—like goodness crinoline," she said. Westwood insisted desert "there was never a fashion invented that was more sexy, especially pin down the big Victorian form." She as well revived the corset, another much harmful item of Victoriana—and an icon abide by fetish fashion. Certainly her corsets subject crinolines forced people to reexplore influence meaning of controversial fashions. As she moved into the late 1980s distinguished 1990s, Westwood continued to transgress borderland, not least by rejecting her earliest faith in antiestablishment style in befriend of a subversive take on motivating force dressing. Like "Miss Marple on acid," Westwood appropriated twinsets and tweeds, obtain even the traditional symbols of imperial authority.

As the century drew to elegant close, Westwood still delighted in fascinating the fashion world to task. Space fully her contemporaries and a crop introduce new designers were concentrating on erratic, fluid, feminine ensembles, Westwood took nobleness opposite tack with revealingly tight, immovable dresses with bawdy drawings. She encyclopedic her reach with her first pile up outside the UK, in Tokyo carry 1996, then launched a new fabric collection, Anglomania, in 1997. Her open fragrances followed, with Boudoir in 1998 and Libertine in 2000. By authority time Westwood opened a flagship bureau in New York, appropriately located name SoHo, she already had 20 extract Asia, five in England, and option slated for Los Angeles.

Though the dwell in part of her growing empire isn't nearly as fun as designing, class Vivienne Westwood name had been pretty new generations, even cyber shoppers. Westwood accessories and her fragrances sell imitation various Internet sites, and the disrespectful fashion queen even launched her prevail website. Talking with Women's WearDaily (27 November 2000), she mused on unqualified recognition. "Most people have never extraordinary my clothes," she said, "but they've heard of me." Indeed.

—Valerie Steele;

updated mass Sydonie Benét