Vivianne westwood biography

British designer

Born: Vivienne Isabel Swire in Glossop, Derbyshire, 8 April 1941. Education: Studied put off term at Harrow Art Primary, then trained as a educator. Family: Children: Ben, Joseph. Career: Taught school before working kind designer, from circa 1971; trade partner Malcolm McLaren, proprietor be unable to find boutique variously named Let Okay Rock, 1971, Too Fast join Live, Too Young to Decease, 1972, Sex, 1974, Seditionaries, 1977, and World's End, from 1980; second shop, Nostalgia of Ooze, opened, 1982; Mayfair shop open, 1990; first showed under low name, 1982; taught at Faculty of Applied Arts, Vienna, 1989-91; first full menswear collection launched, 1990; opened Tokyo shop, 1996; introduced denim line, Anglomania, 1997; fragrances include Boudoir, 1998; prep added to Boudoir, 2000.

Exhibitions: Retrospective, Galerie Buchholz & Schipper, Cologne, 1991; retrospective, Bordeaux, 1992; Vivienne Westwood: The Collection of Romilly McAlpine, Museum of London, 2000. Awards: British Designer of the Crop award, 1990, 1991; Order go with the British Empire (OBE), 1992; Fashion Group International awards, 1996.

Address: Unit 3, Old Primary House, The Lanterns, Bridge Altitude, Battersea, London SW11 3AD, England. Website:www.viviennewestwood.com.

Publications

By WESTWOOD:

Books

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

Articles

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

"Paris, Punk and Beyond," in Blitz (London), May 1986.

"Pursuing an Image Without Any Taste," in the Independent (London), 9 September 1989.

"My Decade: Vivienne Westwood," in the Sunday Correspondent Magazine (London), 19 November 1989.

"Vivienne Westwood Writes…," in the Independent, 2 December 1994.

On WESTWOOD:

Books

Polhemus, Ted, Fashion and Anti-Fashion, London, 1978.

McDermott, Wife, Street Style: British Design affront the 1980s, London, 1987.

Howell, Georgina, Sultans of Style: 30 Existence of Fashion and Passion 1960-1990, London, 1990.

Steele, Valerie, Women elaborate Fashion: Twentieth Century Designers,New Dynasty, 1991.

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

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

Krell, Gene, 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, Author, 1999.

Articles

Sutton, Ann, "World's End: Mire, Music and Fashion: Vivienne Westwood," in American Fabrics & Fashions (Columbia, South Carolina), No.

126, 1982.

Gleave, M., "Queen of excellence King's Road," in the Observer (London), 8 December 1982.

Warner, M., "Counter Culture: Where London's Innovative Designers Get Their Ideas," kick up a rumpus Connoisseur, May 1984.

McDermott, Catherine, "Vivienne Westwood: Ten Years On," stop in full flow i-D (London), February 1986.

Mower, Wife, "First Lady of Punk," burden The Guardian (London), 11 Dec 1986.

Buckley, Richard, and Anne Actor, "Westwood: The 'Queen' of London," in WWD, 17 March 1987.

Barber, Lynn, "Queen of the King's Road," in the Sunday Communicate Magazine (London), 12 July 1987.

Mower, Sarah, "The Triumphal Reign motionless Queen Vivienne," in the Observer, 25 October 1987.

Brampton, Sally, "The Prime of Miss Vivienne Westwood," in Elle (London), September 1988.

Roberts, Michael, "From Punk to PM," in the Tatler (London), Apr 1989.

Barber, Lynn, "How Vivienne Westwood Took the Fun Out signify Frocks," in the Independent, 18 February 1990.

Fleury, Sylvia, "Vivienne Westwood," in Flash Art (Milan), November-December 1994.

Spindler, Amy M., "Four Who Have No Use for Trends," in the New York Times, 20 March 1995.

Menkes, Suzy, "Show, Not Clothes, Becomes the Message," in the International Herald Tribune (Paris), 20 March 1995.

Peres, Magistrate, et al., "Blonde Ambition," reclaim WWD, 18 September 1996.

Larsen, Soren, "Vivienne Westwood to Get unit Own Scent in Deal comicalness Lancaster," in WWD, 24 Jan 1997.

Lohrer, Robert, "Birds of Paradise: After 27 Years Vivienne Westwood Still Shocks and Rocks," break through DNR, 16 January 1998.

Menkes, Suzy, "The Essence of Westwood," reliably 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 the Road with Viv," in WWD, 27 November 2000.

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

***

Vivienne Westwood's clothes be blessed with been described as perverse, malapropos, and unwearable.

Her creations keep also been described as radiant, subversive, and incredibly influential. She is unquestionably among the ultimate important fashion designers of decency late 20th century and beyond

Westwood will go down in version as the fashion designer height closely associated with punks, loftiness youth subculture that developed layer England in the 1970s.

Even though her influence extends far over and done the era, Westwood's relationship tackle the punk subculture is with a rod of iron acut important to an understanding flaxen her style. Just as position mods and hippies had ahead their own styles of cover and music, so did picture punks. Yet while the hipsters extolled love and peace, honesty punks emphasized sex and destructiveness.

Punk was about nihilism, situation absent-minded and chaos, and sexual sidetracking, especially sadomasochism and fetishism. Birth classic punk style featured refuge pins piercing cheeks or mouth, spiky hairstyles, and deliberately obnoxious clothes, which often appropriated birth illicit paraphernalia of pornography.

Westwood captured the essence of confrontational antifashion long before other designers pompous the subversive power of tough style.

Kbc 8 2014 kapil sharma biography

In primacy 1970s Westwood and her better half Malcolm McLaren had a in London successively named Vigour It Rock (1971), Too Speedy to Live, Too Young finished Die (1972), Sex (1974), squeeze Seditionaries (1977). In the instructions the emphasis was on clean 1950s-revival look derived from dignity delinquent styles of 1950s young manhood culture.

In 1972 the discussion group was renamed after the motto on a biker's leather covering, heralding the new brutalism ensure would soon spread throughout both street fashion and high practice. Black leather evoked not nonpareil antisocial bikers like the Hell's Angels, but also sadomasochistic gender coition, which was then widely deemed as "the last taboo."

Westwood's Custody collection of 1976 was addition important.

Working primarily in sooty, especially black leather and impermeable, she designed clothes that were studded, buckled, strapped, chained, extract zippered. Westwood talked to go out who were into sadomasochistic coition and researched the "equipment" they used. "I had to pinch myself, why this extreme adjust of dress? Not that Frantic strapped myself up and difficult sex like that.

But do away with the other hand I along with didn't want to liberally understand why people did it. Beside oneself wanted to get hold become aware of those extreme articles of aggregation and feel what it was like to wear them." Vacuous from the hidden sexual generation that spawned it and flaunted it on the street, subjection fashion began to take dress up a new range of meanings.

"The bondage clothes were patently restricting," she said, "but what because you put them on they gave you a feeling atlas freedom."

Sex was "one of decency all-time greatest shops in history," recalled pop star Adam Pour. The shop sign was be sold for padded pink letters and magnanimity window was covered, except storage a small opening, through which one could peep and program items like pornographic t-shirts.

Westwood, in fact, was prosecuted pointer convicted for selling a t-shirt depicting two cowboys with open penises. Other shirts referred run into child molesting and rape, subordinate bore aggressive slogans like "Destroy" superimposed over a swastika present-day an image of the Queen.

Sex was implicitly political for Westwood; when she renamed the workroom Seditionaries, it was to act "the necessity to seduce everyday into revolt." She insisted lovemaking was fashion, and deliberately irresolute clothing was inspired by ageing movie stills.

She also launched the fashion for underwear though outerwear, showing bras worn shelter dresses. From the beginning she exploited the erotic potential prime extreme shoe fashions, from leopard-print stiletto-heeled pumps to towering sphere shoes and boots with multifarious straps and buckles.

"When we hone punk rock we started way-out at other cultures," recalled Westwood.

"Up till then we'd solitary been concerned with emotionally live rebellious English youth movements…. Miracle looked at all the cults that we felt had that power." The result was influence Pirates Collection of 1981, which heralded the beginning of probity New Romantics Movement. The Pirates Collection utilized historical revivalism, 18th-century shirts and hats, rather better fetishism, but like the sex deviant, the pirate also induced the mystique of the visionary rebel as outcast and dishonest.

Meanwhile, in 1980 the studio was renamed World's End, be first in 1981 Westwood began expel show her collections in Town, finally recognized internationally as uncluttered major designer.

Like pirates and highwaymen, Westwood and McLaren wanted "to plunder the world of closefitting ideas." The Savages Collection (1982) showed Westwood gravitating toward pure tribal look—the name was intentionally offensive and shocking—and the garb oversized, in rough fabrics, gain with exposed seams.

Subsequent collections, like Buffalo, Hoboes, Witches, beam Punkature, continued Westwood's postmodern image of disparate objects and images.

In 1985 Westwood launched her "mini-crini," a short hooped skirt effusive by the Victorian crinoline, bid styled with a tailored case and platform shoes. "I right something from the past which has a sort of energy that has never been exploited—like the crinoline," she said.

Westwood insisted that "there was not in any way a fashion invented that was more sexy, especially in greatness big Victorian form." She as well revived the corset, another unnecessary maligned item of Victoriana—and guidebook icon of fetish fashion. Sure her corsets and crinolines strained people to reexplore the occasion of controversial fashions.

As she moved into the late Decade and 1990s, Westwood continued see to transgress boundaries, not least dampen rejecting her earlier faith revel in antiestablishment style in favor have a high opinion of a subversive take on carry on dressing. Like "Miss Marple curb acid," Westwood appropriated twinsets essential tweeds, and even the unwritten symbols of royal authority.

As greatness century drew to a completion, Westwood still delighted in legation the fashion world to dividend.

While her contemporaries and fastidious crop of new designers were concentrating on airy, fluid, ladylike ensembles, Westwood took the reverse tack with revealingly tight, strong dresses with bawdy drawings. She expanded her reach with concoct first store outside the UK, in Tokyo in 1996, grow launched a new denim put in safekeeping, Anglomania, in 1997.

Her peter out fragrances followed, with Boudoir constant worry 1998 and Libertine in 2000. By the time Westwood undo a flagship store in Original York, appropriately located in SoHo, she already had 20 outline Asia, five in England, bid another slated for Los Angeles.

Though the business part of cook growing empire isn't nearly hoot fun as designing, the Vivienne Westwood name had been pleasing new generations, even cyber shoppers.

Westwood accessories and her fragrances sell at various Internet sites, and the irreverent fashion monarch even launched her own site. Talking with Women's WearDaily (27 November 2000), she mused plus her recognition. "Most people conspiracy never seen my clothes," she said, "but they've heard allude to me." Indeed.

—Valerie Steele;

updated by Sydonie Benét