Freedom Fighter

Britain lost a second queen at the end of 2022, the regal figure in question being the iconoclastic and endlessly provocative fashion designer, VIVIENNE WESTWOOD.

- STEPHEN SHORT

"I've constantly tried to provoke people into thinking afresh and for themselves, to escape their inhibitions and programming."

Traditionalist, provocateuse and ultra-contemporary voice, Vivienne Westwood was one of British fashion's most famous and contradictory - designers. She helped create Punk with Malcolm McLaren, the Sex Pistols manager, with whom she sold off-the-peg bondage and fetish wear to prostitutes from their 430 King's Road, London store, which in 1974 changed its name to SEX to coincide with its collections. She transitioned to the New Romantic period of the early '80s (think dandy highwayman Adam Ant in turn-topped, buckled leather knee boots belting out "Stand and Deliver") and parodied Britain's upper classes by decade's end.

From edgy printed protest T-shirts to sumptuously elegant ballgowns, Westwood was a meticulous researcher and "plunderer" of the past, continually raiding historical fashion and art to realise contemporary fashion's most original looks. She appropriated from French Rococo painter Antoine Watteau (the sack dress) and François Boucher (Madame de Pompadour's silk dress) at the Wallace Collection, and printed facsimiles of favourite paintings directly on to her designs in the '90s.

And what about those shoes? Who can forget Naomi Campbell falling flat on her derriere in Westwood's vertiginous nine-inch platforms as part of the Paris autumn/winter '93 show. And Kate Moss, who walked the runway topless wearing Marie-Antoinette face paint while slurping ice cream for the Erotic Zones spring/ summer '95 extravaganza.

As the millennium came and went, Westwood leveraged her rebel aesthetic into a platform for activism. "Capitalism is a crime. It is the root cause of war, climate change and corruption," she said, and began compiling her own Manifesto.