Way out West
The remarkable career of fashion designer Vivienne Westwood
WAY OUT WEST
As the doyenne of British fashion, Vivienne Westwood is famed for her rebellious nature, but underneath the shock tactics lurks a true love of the traditional
portrait: rankin
words: josh sims
“ONE OF THE BEST things about my work is that I have the most incredible clothes to wear,” Vivienne Westwood once said, with characteristic immodesty – one of the main things about her that isn’t terribly English. “Just don’t let me near a washing machine. I hate washing.”
The idea that Westwood should put any of her fantastic – and often fantastical – creations on anything as mundane as a spin cycle may seem a far cry from the perceived glamour of fashion, and of her reputation as something of an eccentric.
But then Westwood cycles to work each morning, cooks each evening for her husband, and sometimes they go to the Festival Hall together for a concert.
It paints a picture of unexpected domesticity for the fashion designer who went knickerless to Buckingham Palace to receive her OBE from the Queen and, in her fl oaty skirt, did a twirl for the paparazzi outside – revealing more than her pride.
Yet the unexpected is what Westwood has always been about. To call her an eccentric – as she often is – is somehow to belittle her talent. No doubt about it, if she were Italian or French (like her fashion hero Yves Saint Laurent), she would be hailed as a national institution. Instead, it has taken 35 years since she began designing for her fi rst retrospective (currently on international tour), and, while her fans are both legion and dedicated, her designs are too often dismissed by the middle brow as shocking or unwearable.
Her business fi gures sing a different tune. Off the back of her many shops, from Paris and Milan to Moscow and Seoul, diffusion brands, fragrances, sunglasses and cosmetics, homewares for Wedgwood, wallpaper for Sanderson, most recently a new diamond jewellery collection and an atypically profi table couture line, last year her sales jumped by 37 per cent to over £60m. What is more, all of that is Westwood’s. She has never had any backers. All the more impressive for someone who never trained in fashion: she started, but dropped out of Harrow College in the 1950s after a few weeks, convinced that London’s middle-class arts scene would fi nd no place for her.
Crucially, this independence has given Westwood the freedom to pursue her own design agenda, one that is founded more in ideas and concepts than controversy – Westwood, an ex-teacher, is an extreme bibliophile and museum groupie – and one that has never sought to slot neatly into seasonal trends. Indeed, Westwood has repeatedly set the broad sweeping trends that defi ne an era: punk, new romanticism (trends so massive their association could easily have hobbled her creativity, pigeon-holing her for life), underwear-as-outerwear, asymmetrical layering, conical bras, tube skirts, bondage trousers… Westwood was there with them all. Many more commercial designers and many other precocious talents, from John Galliano to Alexander McQueen, owe a debt to her originality.
But for all that Westwood subverts the very forms she references, she is actually an arch traditionalist, with precision pattern cutting at the heart of it all and a belief that to do something new is not to dispense with the techniques or conventions of the past. She looks forward only by looking back and reinterpreting. Westwood, as she herself describes it, “composes on the body” (she rarely sketches), and her designs very much relate to the body they swathe. “Eventually,” the designer has noted, “people buy clothes in order to wear them. That’s why, in spite of designers’ efforts or revolutions, the traditions of fashion should be taken into account. One can’t neglect customs.”
Ardent feminists may not approve of the overtly sexy, almost restrictive femininity of her designs – many of which make a highlight of bust and bum, set upon the pedestal of vertiginous clumpy shoes – but it is by reinventing historical dress that she takes fashion forward: bustles, frills, corsets, petticoats, voluminous skirts, mini-crinolines and kilts, tweed remodelled as medieval armour, 18th-century costume reconsidered for the 21st century, have all become signatures of her collections. “I certainly think that people wouldn’t look the way they look or think about clothes in the same way if I had never lived,” she has said. It is a statement of some grandeur, but no less true for that.
She has not been alone in recognising her talent. Women’s Wear Daily, the US fashion industry bible, claimed that she was one of the six most important designers of the 20th century, alongside Yves Saint Laurent and Giorgio Armani. The V&A Museum had started collecting her work as long ago as 1983. “[Westwood] ploughs her own furrow,” as Claire Wilcox, the curator of the designer’s retrospective has put it. “She’s trying to present an alternative way of looking. She is an inventor.” And last year Westwood was made a Dame, of the ‘national treasure’ rather than the pantomime variety, for all that the colour and exaggerated proportions of her clothes are wonderfully theatrical.
This was perhaps especially surprising given her anti-establishmentarianism: not so much that of her punk days but her outspokenness on everything from Tony Blair (“a monster”) to religion (“anybody who is religious is a nutcase”) to the monarchy (“I’m doubtful of anything that promotes nationalism”). It is perhaps little wonder that, in England at least, with its preference for sinning behind closed doors only, Westwood’s reputation as idiosyncratic precedes her.
Certainly it must all seem a long way from her native Glossop, in Derbyshire, where Vivienne Isabel Swire was born in 1941 – her mother a sausage factory worker, her father a greengrocer – a long way from selling her self-designed jewellery on London’s Portobello Road market, as her fi rst foray into fashion would be, and a long way from Let It Rock. This was the shop opened on London’s Kings Road in 1971 by one Malcolm McLaren – and he needed Westwood’s then rocker style clothing to fi ll it. She gave up ideas of going to university to make clothes – and highwaymen and Buffalo girls, Brummellian dandies and Neo Marie Antoinettes, catwalk tumbles and record-making consecutive British Designer of the Year awards would all follow.
Both the shop, and what was on the rails, would go through many permutations over the coming years: renamed Too Fast To Live, Too Young to Die, Sex, and then Seditionaries in 1976, it was to be the birthplace of punk, a look (a whole ethos really) she pioneered with McLaren, then manager of the Sex Pistols. If McLaren – for whom Westwood would leave her fi rst husband Derek Westwood in 1965 to marry – still seeks praise for his contribution to the Westwood story, it is at least fair to say that it was his exhibitionist nature that unleashed her talent. And it was he who put the bra over the blouse – some small contribution to fashion history.
Today Westwood works closely with her husband, Andreas Kronthaler, whom she met when he was a fashion student and after whom, sweetly, her own MacAndreas tartan is named. He effectively designs her menswear collections on her behalf, shunning, with old-fashioned values, any opportunity to take the credit for it. He is 25 years her junior, and maybe that is what keeps Westwood’s energy at a peak – certainly Westwood has said that she has no issues with ageing at all. She even revels in gently mocking her industry’s obsession with it. When her students at the Berlin University of Art fashion department unveiled their fi nal year collections, they were modelled by residents of the local old people’s home.
One only has to take a look at eBay – where old Westwood t-shirts sell for hundreds – or attend auctions at the likes of Sotheby’s – where pieces go for as much as £2,500 each – to get a measure of Westwood’s enduring infl uence. Her clothes shape fashion, but also defy it – they remain as current now as they did when they were designed.
“The last thing I’m interested in is keeping up with the times,” Westwood once said. “If you keep up with the times you’re always just missing something.“ Clearly that is a sentiment her many dedicated followers agree with.
www.viviennnewestwood.com
Hilary Riva, Chief Executive of the British Fashion Council, on championing home-grown design talent
LONDON FASHION WEEK is sometimes seen as the Cinderella compared to the other three fashion weeks (New York, Milan and Paris). It is smaller than its competitors and involves fewer ‘big name’ designers with large advertising budgets. London is also one of the most expensive cities in the world to visit. Consequently, there is less of a media-pull from the international fashion press to report on London Fashion Week. There is also no large-scale textile or manufacturing industry which can support designer businesses that need to think and act globally. Despite these issues, London remains the creative lifeblood of the international fashion industry. Many of the world’s most important designers, including Vivienne Westwood, Paul Smith, Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, Matthew Williamson and Sophia Kokosalaki, were given their fi rst opportunity at London Fashion Week.
While London attracts and develops some of the best design talent in the world, it is criticised for not being able to retain that talent. This is indeed a disappointment for us but we are thrilled every time one of London’s alumni takes a place in a global fashion house. Indeed, if London retained all of the talent it generated, there would be no room for the new creativity which continues to fl ow from our colleges.
One of my key goals is to raise the profi le of London Fashion Week, so that we can not only develop but also retain more of our home-grown talent. Already this season, we are hosting Emporio Armani as a guest show, witnessing the re-launch of some quintessential British names such as Biba and Zandra Rhodes and introducing the Estethica space, where Katherine Hamnett will be showcasing her new line.
London Fashion Week 18-22 September; www.londonfashionweek.co.uk
First-class Stemp
words: paul hunwick
IN THE WORLD of fashion you’re either hot or not. And at present, there is one rising star who is currently scorching: the English-born, New York-based fashion designer, Sue Stemp.
When I call her studio in the Garment District of Manhattan, Stemp’s downtown at a yoga class for expectant mothers. An hour later, I answer my phone to hear a chirpy voice – not dissimilar to that of a young Barbara Windsor: “Hi! It’s me. Sue!” With the infectious seaside laugh she uses to punctuate each sentence, she’s very distinctive.
Stemp, 36, is an export we can all be proud of. The daughter of an Essex plumber, she caught the fashion bug early. “I used to watch Top of the Pops as much for the clothes as the music. Debbie Harry was my favourite. I loved Paula Yates, too – such pretty dresses.” Smitten, Stemp enrolled on a fashion course in London, where she went on to achieve a fi rst class honours degree. Her infl uences were Zandra Rhodes and Vivienne Westwood. “I love Zandra for her use of colour and just for being, well, Zandra. Vivienne, of course, is a legend. I think her pattern cutting is the cleverest around. You put on a Westwood outfi t and it literally changes your posture. Suddenly your back’s straight and your boobs are out. Fantastic.
She makes women look very sexy but doesn’t take the most straightforward route to it.” Straight after her degree, Stemp got a design assistant position at British design house, Ghost. While she learnt much here, it was the London nightclub scene of the early 1990s – such as Leigh Bowery’s infamous club Taboo – that also inspired her early career direction. It was out clubbing that she made some serious fashion friends: the celebrity hairdresser James Brown and his client and close friend, Kate Moss. But more of that later.
After moving to New York in 1995, Stemp worked with the American designer Daryl K. “America was so welcoming. For a little British girl like me it seemed all blue skies and big white smiles. People seemed enthusiastic about everything,” she says. She did a stint as co-designer with the established fashion house, Tocca, and later some consultancy work for an old dancing friend from London, one Mr Alexander McQueen, whom she describes as “inspirational”.
In September 2005 she launched her fi rst collection under her own name. “I felt it was the inevitable next step,” she says. “I’d been doing one-off pieces for friends and it grew from there.” When Stemps says “friends”, however, we’re not talking your average mates. She made a dress for Kate Moss’s 30th birthday, which in turn led to a commission to create a stunning wedding dress for supermodel Rosemary Ferguson’s marriage to Britart star, Jake Chapman.
Fashion is a notoriously risky business. The industry is dominated by giant houses whose clout and budget leave little room for the independent designer. Setting up on your own is rather like someone musing, “Mmm, perhaps I’ll enter the oil business today”. And then having to compete with Shell and Esso. So was Stemp nervous? “Yes. Terrifi ed,” she laughs. “I still am.”
But all the ingredients are in place to turn her small label into a serious player. She has the talent, the credentials and the connections. The designs are sexy, sassy, playful. They make ‘cool’ look effortless – no mean feat, as any fashion stylist will testify. She makes clothes girls like to wear and – almost as importantly – clothes men like to be around. The prints and colours display optimism and confi dence.
Along with commissions from famous artists and celebrity pals, she’s starting to attract press attention, too; having already appeared in British Vogue and The New York Times. Stores from Los Angeles to Tokyo are buying her work.
This is clearly a young woman going places. In an industry that can take itself too seriously, Stemp is a welcome antidote. Taking the vibrancy of London’s club scene, she’s refi ned it for fashion. As she says: “I tend to create dresses for the sort of girls who are fi rst on the dancefl oor.”
www.suestemp.com
