A Conversation with The Queen of Extreme, R.E. Westwood: The Dead and the In-Distance Of Perversity
Westwood’s eponymous fashion house announced her death on social media platforms, saying she died peacefully. A cause of death was not disclosed in the statement.
She was the high priestess of punk and “Queen of Extreme” to the media. To the fashion world she was a beloved character who energized and pushed the boundaries of the industry until her death.
She twirled sans culottes for photographers after receiving her Order of the British Empire from the Queen in 1992. In April 1989 she was on the cover of a magazine, dressed in a suit she claimed was intended for Margaret Thatcher.
Westwood, frankly, didn’t give a hoot. She rose to the stature of British national treasure because of her age, her alabaster complexion and occasionally orange-tinted hair.
“I have an in-built perversity which always reacts against anything that is orthodox,” Westwood was reported to have said in the seminal book “England’s Dreaming: The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock.”
Vivienni Westwood: From Punk to High-Dimensional Featherwear: A Portrait of the Queen
She was born Vivienne Isabel Swire in Derbyshire, England on April 8, 1941. Her mother worked as a weaver at local cotton mills; her father came from a family of shoemakers. She started making clothes when she was a teenager.
Andrew Bolton, curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of New York, said Westwood would be celebrated for pioneering the punk look, pairing a radical fashion approach with the anarchic punk sounds developed by the Sex Pistols, managed by her then-partner, Malcolm McLaren.
Westwood told Time magazine in 2012 that it had changed the way people looked. “I was messianic about punk, seeing if one could put a spoke in the system in some way.”
Her clothes ranged from pornography gear to platform shoes and slogan T-shirts. The Queen with a safety pin through her royal lip is shown in a t-shirt sold by the Seditionaries.
In her punk days, Westwood’s clothes were often intentionally shocking: T-shirts decorated with drawings of naked boys, and “bondage pants” with sadomasochistic overtones were standard fare in her popular London shops. But Westwood was able to make the transition from punk to haute couture without missing a beat, keeping her career going without stooping to self-caricature.
She designed corsetry for women with breasts and hips, as well as flesh-colored tights with modesty fig leaves and mini-crini, which was a combination of the tutu and Victorian crinoline.
John Fairchild, then the all-powerful editor of Women’s Wear Daily, conferred his blessing in 1989. In his view, she was one of the six most influential designers of the 20th century, along with Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, Giorgio Armani, Christian Lacroix and Emanuel Ungaro. He didn’t have a multi-million dollar brand and only one woman, Westwood, was on his list. In 1989 she was in an ex-council flat in South London, which is where Jane Mulvagh’s 1998 biography “Vivienni Westwood: An Unfashionable Life” is located.
Style writer Peter York summed her up in a 1990 documentary: “All the things that fuel her, and all the obsessions she builds her work around are typically British: The obsession with the Queen is a part of class and sex. Those could not be developed anywhere else.
Westwood was honored several times by Queen Elizabeth II, but she was also a lifelong rebel. She became known as an advocate of fighting global warming because of her age and she warned of doom if the issue was not addressed.
The Vivienne Foundation, a not-for-profit company, founded by Westwood, her sons & granddaughter in late 2022, will officially launch next year. It will honor, protect and continue the legacy of Vivienne’s life, according to her spokespeople.
Westwood became synonymous with style and attitude as she shifted focus from year to year. Her work was always varied and never predictable.
She started out with gusto, but over the years it became apparent that she didn’t like the buzz or clamor from her work. She sometimes talked wistfully about moving beyond fashion so she could concentrate on her educational and environmental projects.
One of those designs featured an inverted image of Jesus Christ and a swastika. In an autobiography written with Ian Kelly, she said it was meant as part of a statement against politicians torturing people, citing Chile’s Augusto Pinochet. When asked if she regretted the swastika design in a 2009 interview with Time magazine, Westwood said no.
A Conversation with Janet Monge: “Fashion can’t be so boring,” she told The Associated Press in an ‘Epoch of Science and Art’
“Fashion can be so boring,” she told The Associated Press after unveiling one of her new collections at a 2010 show. “I’m trying to find something else to do.” At the time, she was talking up plans to start a television series about art and science.