I’m madly in love with a woman I’ve never met.
She’s saucy, witty and revolutionary. I dream of being inside her clothes. No, literally, though. She’s a fashion designer and I would love to have one of her original outfits.
Her name is Vivienne Westwood.
Westwood is responsible for a large part of the way we dress today. She is proof that fashion can shape the way we identify ourselves, in that fashion and the politics of our public selves are highly intermixed.
She has been revolutionizing the way we dress since 1970. Your faded, ripped Urban Outfitters jeans are a corporate reappropriation of what was largely started by Westwood and Malcolm McLaren. Your disheveled, every-strand-out-of-place hairstyle originates from the same scraps of fabric cut up on her kitchen table.
Westwood has traveled every part of fashion, from being an integral part in creating the gutterpunks around the world, to work you might be more familiar with: high-class runway extravaganzas with transfigured shapes, sizes and gendered garments. She is always doing something new and always doing something interesting.
I see a lot of myself in her, though I’m a long way off from being named one of the world’s top six designers as she was ““ along with Armani, Lagerfield, Saint Laurent, Lacroix and Ungaro ““ in John Fairchild’s book “Chic Savages” in 1989. Still, I feel that she and I are on the same page about a lot of things.
Fashion interests me from the standpoint that it shapes the way we interact as communicating individuals. She has even said herself that “you have a much better life if you wear impressive clothes.” “Impressive clothes” doesn’t necessarily mean designer brands to her, though ““ she means interesting clothes that make you feel important just wearing them.
Even dressing “interestingly” at 16 and altering her school clothes, her love affair with fashion began at an early age. Having two careers before becoming a fashion designer ““ she first made money selling jewelry that she learned to make in art school, and then taught primary school ““ her path shows that we don’t have to have it all figured out; she didn’t start really designing clothes until her second marriage. She, like me, is an art school dropout (or in my case, junior transfer) looking for something influential and interesting to do with herself.
It all started with Malcolm McLaren, her then-husband and fashion cohort who founded and managed the Sex Pistols. Because the band wore these punk clothes, the genre spread even faster than fashion styles normally did.
With a provocative shop filled with pseudo-bondage gear, torn-up shirts with zippers to reveal nipples, and full latex bodysuits, it’s no wonder her two sons grew up to be an erotic photographer and a lingerie designer. I guess what we grow up around really does affect us later in life.
The shop has gone through many iterations, being called Let It Rock, SEX, Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die, Seditionaries and now World’s End, which has been selling Westwood’s clothes to this day.
Her tastes, as reflected by the store’s many names, and her views of fashion, have now traveled away from punk creations to high-fashion runway gowns and massive, high-class stilettos.
Vivienne Westwood has always drawn on the past, as good taste and good fashion are not just something to be pulled out of a hat. Feminist ideals surrounding corsets aside, I find it fascinating that she was the first one to reintroduce the corset as sexy outerwear rather than an 18th-century garment of functionality.
Her interest in fashion laid in aims to “destroy conformity.” This is interesting because, as the punk movement continued (or died out, depending on whom you ask), she got bored with it as it became just another thing to conform to.
At a certain point, Westwood realized that she was surrounded by ideas and didn’t need to be told what is possible, but that she could invent it herself.
I take this very deliberately in my practice, not only as a designer, but as a wearer of fashion. It inspires people like me to change the way we view ourselves through fashion.
Who knows who will invent the next iteration of something as shocking as a punk, full latex body suit in the 2000s?
It could be you, of course. I bet you’ve got a kitchen table and some scissors. Now, get to work.
Have photos of yourself in a latex bodysuit? E-mail someone else.
Have ideas about a new way to create fashion? E-mail Rood at drood@media.ucla.edu.