Vivienne Westwood: Contemporary Designer

Vivienne Isabel Swire was born in Glossopdale, Derbyshire, on the 8th April 1941. Westwood's father came from a family of shoe makers and her mother worked at the local mills as a weaver.  In 1965 Vivienne Westwood had met Malcolm McLaren and had relationship together. In 1971 McLaren and Westwood opened a shop named ''Let it rock'' where they sold creepers, drape coats, mohair jumpers and drainpipe trousers.  Westwood's approach to clothes is that she is very anarchical and perverse about what she does with her clothes but then she likes to also simplify them in a way, she wants her clothes to make the person feel grand and sexy and emphasise the persons body and make the person aware of it. 

                                                              Creepers at the time.

In 1979-1981 Vivienne Westwood started to look at history and designed a collection named The Pirates Collection which was influenced by the romanticism era. She had come about to her designs by first researching  in the National Art Library in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and had found patterns for 18th century mens clothing. These formed the base style of her Pirates collection. The clothes evoked the golden age of piracy, highwaymen, dandies and buccaneers. The collections garments included asymmetric tee-shirts, petti-drawers, pirate shirts and breeches in rich brocades and ikat fabric. 

Vivienne Westwood had used mixed materials in the clothes shown in the photo above such as rayon and cotton ensemble with printed plain weave cotton shirt and sash, muslin stockings, and a hat made of felt trimmed with leather and a braid.  

In 1990-1991 Westwood debuted another one of her collections named Portrait which was another historically inspired collection. The intention for this collection was that her models had just stepped out of a painting. She had used Rococo designs which were derived from 18th century furniture printed in gold ink on to stretch black velvet and she had also designed photographic prints of Boucher's paintings onto shawls and corsets. Vivienne said that she believes in copying things from the past and that she takes something from the past that has a sort of vitality that has never been exploited before and make something very intense because she believes that in the end you create something original because you can overlay your ideas and add things to it. 

For her other pieces of the portrait collection she had found inspiration from the furniture which had been made and designed by Andre Charles Boulle. She created elegant dresses made from black velvet which were over-printed in gold. 

Piece of furniture she was inspired from.

                                                    A couple of pieces from her Portrait Collection.

Personally I love Vivienne Westwood's style, I love how she combines things from past era and modernises them to make these sexy tight garments that emphasise ones body. I also love how she can make such kooky wacky colours and things that usually wouldn't match together work.

08245498D, 2009. Vivienne Westwood 1990 A/W Collection : Portrait. http://08245498d.blogspot.com/ fashion blog, [blog] 23rd March, Available at: <http://08245498d.blogspot.com/2009/03/blog-post_30.html>  [Accessed 27th April 2013]

National Gallery of Australia, 2005.  Vivienne Westwood
34 years in fashion. [Online] Available at: <http://nga.gov.au/westwood/Wilessay.cfm>
[Accessed 27th April 2013]

Victoria and Albert Museum, 2013. Vivienne Westwood designs. [Online] Available at: <http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/v/vivienne-westwood-designs/>
[Accessed 27th April 2013]