Last April 8th dame Vivienne Westwood, a living institution of British and world fashion, has turned eighty. If the registry puts it mercilessly – but we do not invoke the specter of ageism – in the category granny, the spirit is more recalcitrant than ever; so the look – long white banshee hair, theatrical make-up, the lithe body of a woman who goes everywhere on a bicycle – and the increasingly libertarian, progressive, counter-current beliefs.
The environmentalist Westwood
For years, Westwood has been preaching, with a veritable adolescence, in favor of a reduction in consumption, attention to the environment, now against the arms market and the impact it has on the whole planet. Fashion seems to interest her less and less – left her husband, Andreas Kronthaler, the reins of the main line, keeping for himself the one that bears his name, made up of updated reissues of a catalog of ideas more alive than ever. Again and again, she maintains the independence that gives her the freedom to do as she wants, even to make mistakes. Vivienne Westwood is one of the few characters of whom one can truly say that they have changed the course of fashion: not by communicating, but by doing.
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From extreme punk to new romantic
Initially a partner of the cynical and brilliant Malcolm Mclaren, a musical impresario with Situationist ancestry, ransacked sex shops and hardware stores, inventing the British punk look of straps, safety pins and razors; then, at the beginning of the 1980s ebb, the two created the new romantic, which would have inspired Blitz Kids and Duran Duran so much, and which found its summa in the corsair iconography of the Pirates collection (1982). But dame Vivienne expressed her best when she set up her own business and channeled transgressive verve through a powerful reinterpretation of historical costume – from the eighteenth century to the belle epoque, with Renaissance incursions – distorting an apparently conservative iconography to make it a vehicle for progress and break.
First there were the bustiers and the mini crinolines with rocking shoes, then the fig leaves between Watteau and Fragonard, finally again the poufs, the draperies, the grandeur, with a rare mastery of the cut. At the bottom, always, the mockery, the irreverence, the taste for the game. In 1989 Tatler put her on the cover, disguised as Margaret Thatcher, with the scream “this woman was once a punk” (this woman was a punk).
The true transgression knowledge
In fact, the parable of Vivienne Westwood, a teacher by training, was quite paradigmatic: from the vitriol of punk to crinolines and Rococo bagatelle there is a lot. But if punk is essentially a counter-current way of doing things, the tenacity of going the wrong way with the proverbial middle finger slapped in everyone’s face, the lady is still a punk. Indeed, it is more so today than it was then. Throughout his career he has shown that knowledge is true transgression. Knowledge is the only way to rebel, in an age like ours that denies history and culture in the blindness of ideology, whatever it is.