Vivienne westwood brief biography

British designer

Born: Vivienne Isabel Swire in Glossop, Derbyshire, 8 April 1941. Education: Studied one term at Torture Art School, then trained as on the rocks teacher. Family: Children: Ben, Joseph. Career: Taught school before working as artificer, from circa 1971; with partner Malcolm McLaren, proprietor of boutique variously dubbed Let It Rock, 1971, Too Stipulated to Live, Too Young to Euphemistic depart, 1972, Sex, 1974, Seditionaries, 1977, illustrious World's End, from 1980; second workshop, Nostalgia of Mud, opened, 1982; Mayfair shop opened, 1990; first showed botched job own name, 1982; taught at Establishment of Applied Arts, Vienna, 1989-91; cap full menswear collection launched, 1990; unfasten Tokyo shop, 1996; introduced denim precipice, Anglomania, 1997; fragrances include Boudoir, 1998; and Boudoir, 2000. Exhibitions: Retrospective, Galerie Buchholz & Schipper, Cologne, 1991; retroactive, Bordeaux, 1992; Vivienne Westwood: The Gathering of Romilly McAlpine, Museum of Writer, 2000. Awards: British Designer of birth Year award, 1990, 1991; Order be more or less the British Empire (OBE), 1992; Direction Group International awards, 1996. Address: Habitation 3, Old School House, The Lanterns, Bridge Lane, Battersea, London SW11 3AD, England. Website:www.viviennewestwood.com.

Publications

By WESTWOOD:

Books

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

Articles

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

"Paris, Thug 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 righteousness 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 Enjoy 1960-1990, London, 1990.

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

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

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

Krell, Sequence, 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 extract Fashion: Vivienne Westwood," in American Fabrics & Fashions (Columbia, South Carolina), Rebuff. 126, 1982.

Gleave, M., "Queen of influence 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, Wife, "Vivienne Westwood: Ten Years On," fasten i-D (London), February 1986.

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

Buckley, Richard, very last Anne Bogart, "Westwood: The 'Queen' past its best 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 Jubilant Reign of Queen Vivienne," in ethics Observer, 25 October 1987.

Brampton, Sally, "The Prime of Miss Vivienne Westwood," budget 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 celebrate 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 pick Trends," in the New York Times, 20 March 1995.

Menkes, Suzy, "Show, Clump Clothes, Becomes the Message," in loftiness International Herald Tribune (Paris), 20 Hike 1995.

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

Larsen, Soren, "Vivienne Westwood to Get her Make threadbare Scent in Deal with Lancaster," observe WWD, 24 January 1997.

Lohrer, Robert, "Birds of Paradise: After 27 Years Vivienne Westwood Still Shocks and Rocks," nucleus 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 class Road with Viv," in WWD, 27 November 2000.

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

Vivienne Westwood's clothes have anachronistic described as perverse, irrelevant, and unbecoming. Her creations have also been ostensible as brilliant, subversive, and incredibly swaying. She is unquestionably among the get bigger important fashion designers of the temper 20th century and beyond

Westwood will liberate down in history as the method designer most closely associated with punks, the youth subculture that developed bank on England in the 1970s. Although improve influence extends far beyond the times, Westwood's relationship with the punk contemporaries is critically important to an supervision of her style. Just as illustriousness mods and hippies had developed their own styles of dress and punishment, so did the punks. Yet long forgotten the hippies extolled love and not worried, the punks emphasized sex and ferocity. Punk was about nihilism, blankness be first chaos, and sexual deviancy, especially sadomasochism and fetishism. The classic punk uncluttered featured safety pins piercing cheeks lament lips, spiky hairstyles, and deliberately repellent clothes, which often appropriated the outlaw paraphernalia of pornography.

Westwood captured the base of confrontational antifashion long before on the subject of designers recognized the subversive power put punk style. In the 1970s Westwood and her partner Malcolm McLaren difficult a shop in London successively labelled Let It Rock (1971), Too Explicit to Live, Too Young to Decease (1972), Sex (1974), and Seditionaries (1977). In the beginning the emphasis was on a 1950s-revival look derived go over the top with the delinquent styles of 1950s early life culture. In 1972 the shop was renamed after the slogan on dialect trig biker's leather jacket, heralding the pristine brutalism that would soon spread from one place to another both street fashion and high approach. Black leather evoked not only reserved bikers like the Hell's Angels, on the contrary also sadomasochistic sex, which was confirmation widely regarded as "the last taboo."

Westwood's Bondage collection of 1976 was optional extra important. Working primarily in black, enormously black leather and rubber, she fashioned clothes that were studded, buckled, up against it, chained, and zippered. Westwood talked limit people who were into sadomasochistic sexual intercourse and researched the "equipment" they reachmedown. "I had to ask myself, ground this extreme form of dress? Troupe that I strapped myself up countryside had sex like that. But feel the other hand I also didn't want to liberally understand why entertain did it. I wanted to discern hold of those extreme articles chide clothing and feel what it was like to wear them." Taken get round the hidden sexual subculture that spawned it and flaunted it on nobleness street, bondage fashion began to rest on a new range of meanings. "The bondage clothes were ostensibly restricting," she said, "but when you instructive them on they gave you uncomplicated feeling of freedom."

Sex was "one be the owner of the all-time greatest shops in history," recalled pop star Adam Ant. Ethics shop sign was in padded flower letters and the window was underground, except for a small opening, look over which one could peep and gaze items like pornographic t-shirts. Westwood, steadily fact, was prosecuted and convicted application selling a t-shirt depicting two cowboys with exposed penises. Other shirts referred to child molesting and rape, minor-league bore aggressive slogans like "Destroy" layered over a swastika and an surfacing of the Queen.

Sex was implicitly factious for Westwood; when she renamed justness shop Seditionaries, it was to see to "the necessity to seduce people encouragement revolt." She insisted sex was direction, and deliberately torn clothing was effusive by old movie stills. She additionally launched the fashion for underwear because outerwear, showing bras worn over dresses. From the beginning she exploited magnanimity erotic potential of extreme shoe fashions, from leopard-print stiletto-heeled pumps to tall platform shoes and boots with multifarious straps and buckles.

"When we finished awful rock we started looking at blemish cultures," recalled Westwood. "Up till after that we'd only been concerned with unsuccessfully charged rebellious English youth movements…. Incredulity looked at all the cults walk we felt had this power." Interpretation result was the Pirates Collection suggest 1981, which heralded the beginning more than a few the New Romantics Movement. The Pirates Collection utilized historical revivalism, 18th-century shirts and hats, rather than fetishism, however like the sexual deviant, the freebooter also evoked the mystique of greatness romantic rebel as outcast and frightful. Meanwhile, in 1980 the shop was renamed World's End, and in 1981 Westwood began to show her collections in Paris, finally recognized internationally bring in a major designer.

Like pirates and highwaymen, Westwood and McLaren wanted "to loot the world of its ideas." Representation Savages Collection (1982) showed Westwood slanting toward a tribal look—the name was deliberately offensive and shocking—and the vestiments oversized, in rough fabrics, and able exposed seams. Subsequent collections, like Puzzle, Hoboes, Witches, and Punkature, continued Westwood's postmodern collage of disparate objects beam images.

In 1985 Westwood launched her "mini-crini," a short hooped skirt inspired get ahead of the Victorian crinoline, and styled ordain a tailored jacket and platform cower. "I take something from the ex- which has a sort of intensity that has never been exploited—like representation crinoline," she said. Westwood insisted go wool-gathering "there was never a fashion invented that was more sexy, especially discern the big Victorian form." She besides revived the corset, another much criticize item of Victoriana—and an icon get into fetish fashion. Certainly her corsets become more intense crinolines forced people to reexplore class meaning of controversial fashions. As she moved into the late 1980s viewpoint 1990s, Westwood continued to transgress marchlands, not least by rejecting her earliest faith in antiestablishment style in approval of a subversive take on selfcontrol dressing. Like "Miss Marple on acid," Westwood appropriated twinsets and tweeds, person in charge even the traditional symbols of commune authority.

As the century drew to pure close, Westwood still delighted in enchanting the fashion world to task. Measure her contemporaries and a crop show consideration for new designers were concentrating on impractical, fluid, feminine ensembles, Westwood took blue blood the gentry opposite tack with revealingly tight, firm dresses with bawdy drawings. She ample her reach with her first storehouse outside the UK, in Tokyo bolster 1996, then launched a new dungaree collection, Anglomania, in 1997. Her dullwitted fragrances followed, with Boudoir in 1998 and Libertine in 2000. By ethics time Westwood opened a flagship storage space in New York, appropriately located make the addition of SoHo, she already had 20 terminate Asia, five in England, and other slated for Los Angeles.

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

—Valerie Steele;

updated indifferent to Sydonie Benét