For too long, the fashion industry has been seen as a realm of frivolity, where everything and everyone is for show and nothing has any real importance. For Westwood, fashion was not about decoration and clothes were not just clothes, they were somewhere to hang ideas, they were the ideas of protest embodied.
Vivienne Westwood was one of the first voices of punk, she was more than just a designer, she was also an artist and an activist her designs were ideology stitched into seams, protest worn on the body.
Starting in the 1970’s and continuing across the worlds fashion shows, Westwood was promoting protest against the oppression of the individual, the destruction of the environment as well as civil and political rights. Using protest as a visual means of communication, Westwood was promoting new style of fashion and protest, where the clothes worn did not conform to the existing political, social and environmental practices.
When Westwood first entered the fashion world, she was able to use the ideas found in the punk movement, social and political resistance, to redefine the boundaries of fashion. Working with Malcolm McLaren in the mid-1970's, Westwood was able to create the aesthetic of British Punk through the design of informal clothing. Clothing designed for the sedition of the British political system was created and for the first time in history fashion design was able to be used as a tool of social change.
Westwood and McLaren helped define the aesthetic of British Punk. Their shop at SEX on Kings Road became a cultural flashpoint. Ripped fabrics, safety pins, slogans and bondage trousers, these were not random stylish choices of fashion they were visual disruptions.
Westwood's design of clothes was not for the purpose of elegance but to protest the structure of the social system of the British government and remove the arbitrary division of the upper and lower classes. In order to make protest clothing accessible, Westwood dressed the Sex Pistols as the first British Punk movement band, this amplified this rebellion into mainstream consciousness. Clothing became a weapon a way to disturb comfort and question authority.
Westwood pushed back against power structures in all her work. She transformed historical forms such as corsets, crinolines and aristocratic tailoring, with much of her work she distorted, exaggerated and reshaped garments whilst revealing how fashion-controlled bodies, particularly women's bodies.
Her designs questioned: who decides what is respectable? Who benefits from tradition? Who is excluded? With such a perspective, fashion is a form of cultural memory and a form of resistance.
In her final years, Westwood's activism focused on the climate crisis, she placed anti-consumerism and climate activism messages on her runway shows: she stated ‘Buy less, Choose well. Make it last.’ in a world of consumerism this was radical. Westwood presented fashion as intentional self-expression, not a cycle of trends. She valued identity as something that was thoughtful, not something to be collected.
The visibility of Westwood's protest was what made it powerful. Fashion is public, its worn in the streets, at work, in schools and across social settings. It is not something that can be ignored. Wearing her designs was to engage in conversation about politics and about women.
Vivienne Westwood's legacy reminds us that identity is not passive, its constructed, preformed and sometimes fought for. Clothing can reinforce systems of power. In a world where image is currency, Westwood asked us to consider what our image stands for.
Fashion in her hands became more than aesthetic.
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