https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2022/dec/29/dame-vivienne-westwood-fashion-designer-dies-aged-81

Dame Vivienne Westwood, fashion designer, dies aged 81

Iconoclastic British designer rose to prominence by outfitting the Sex Pistols as punk took off in the 1970s

Dame Vivienne Westwood, the pioneering British fashion designer who played a key role in the punk movement, has died in London at the age of 81.

Westwood died “peacefully, surrounded by her family” in Clapham, south London on Thursday, her representatives said in a statement.

She had continued to do the things she loved, including designing, working on her book and making art, “up until the last moment”, they added.

Her husband and creative partner, Andreas Kronthaler, said: “I will continue with Vivienne in my heart. We have been working until the end and she has given me plenty of things to get on with. Thank you darling.”

Born in Derbyshire village of Glossop in 1941, Westwood’s family moved to London in 1957, where she attended art school for one term. A self-taught designer with no formal fashion training, Westwood learned how to make clothes as a teenager by following patterns, and by taking apart secondhand clothes she found at markets in order to understand the cut and construction.

She met band manager Malcolm McLaren in the 1960s, while working as a primary school teacher after separating from her first husband, Derek Westwood. The pair opened a small shop on the King’s Road in Chelsea in 1971, which became a haunt of many of the bands she outfitted, including the Sex Pistols, who were managed by McLaren.

Her provocative and sometimes controversial designs came to define the punk aesthetic, and Westwood would become one of Britain’s most celebrated fashion designers, blending historical references, classic tailoring and romantic flourishes with harder edged and sometimes overtly political messages.

Westwood and McLaren’s shop changed its name and focus several times, including rebranding as Sex, which saw the pair being fined in 1975 for an “indecent exhibition” there, as well as World’s End and Seditionaries.

Westwood’s first catwalk show in 1981, for her Pirates collection, was an important step for the punk rebel becoming one of the fashion world’s most celebrated stars. But she still found ways to shock: her Statue of Liberty corset in 1987 is credited as starting the “underwear as outerwear” trend.

Even as Westwood’s design empire grew into a multimillion pound business, the designer never lost her activist streak. In 1989, she posed for the cover of Tatler magazine dressed as Margaret Thatcher, over a caption that read, “This woman was once a punk”. She later told Dazed Digital that “the suit I wore had been ordered by Margaret Thatcher from Aquascutum, but she had then cancelled it.”

Since her earliest punk days, Westwood remixed and inverted imagery drawn from the British monarchy. When she was granted an Order of the British Empire medal in 1992, the designer accepted the honour from Queen Elizabeth II while wearing a sober grey skirt suit. Outside Buckingham Palace, she gave a twirl to waiting photographers, revealing to all the world that she had worn no knickers to meet the Queen.

But Westwood was invited back in 2006 to receive the even more auspicious designation of Dame Commander of the British Empire.

In the mid-2000s, Westwood turned her political focus toward the climate crisis. In 2007, she published a manifesto titled Active Resistance to Propaganda, in which she wrote: “We have a choice: to become more cultivated, and therefore more human - or by not choosing, to be the destructive and self-destroying animal, the victim of our own cleverness (To be or not to be).”

As an anti-consumerist, Westwood gleefully undermined her own business interests. In 2010, she told AAP: “I just tell people, stop buying clothes. Why not protect this gift of life while we have it? I don’t take the attitude that destruction is inevitable. Some of us would like to stop that and help people survive.”

In 2015, she drove a tank to then-prime minister David Cameron’s home in Oxfordshire, in a protest against fracking. As a vegetarian, Westwood lobbied the British government to ban the retail sale of fur alongside other top designers including Stella McCartney.

She was also an outspoken supporter of Julian Assange. In 2020, she suspended herself in a birdcage to protest the Wikileaks’ founder’s extradition from the UK. In 2022, she designed the suit and dress worn by Assange and his wife Stella Morris at their wedding.

Right up until the end, Westwood wrote regularly on issues of climate and social justice on her website No Man’s Land. Last month, she made a statement of support for the climate protestors who threw soup on Van Gough’s Sunflowers, writing: “Young people are desperate. They’re wearing a t-shirt that says: Just Stop Oil. They’re doing something.”

Tributes poured in for the designer on Thursday night. “Vivienne is gone and the world is already a less interesting place. Love you Viv,” tweeted Chrissie Hynde, the frontwoman of the Pretenders and a former worker at the couple’s store.

Model Karen Elson, who frequently collaborated with the designer, wrote on Instagram: “She tore apart notions of femininity, sex, and was one of the first to demand that fashion do better in regards to the climate and without a doubt was one of the most effortlessly original people I’ve ever met. Fashion, art, culture will mourn this loss of a gargantuan woman who shaped how we wear and what we wore.”

Fashion commentator Derek Blasberg wrote that while textbooks may remember Westwood for “ushering in London’s counterculture scene to high fashion … I think she’d want to be remembered most for her advocacy, specifically [concerning] global warming … Her life was aggressive, relentless and fabulous. A total original.”

Westwood is survived by Kronthaler, who is her second husband, and her two sons: fashion photographer Ben Westwood, her son with Derek Westwood, and her son with McLaren, Joe Corre, who co-founded the lingerie company Agent Provocateur.