Vivienne Westwood is 80! Here’s five of her most iconic moments

We dive into some of the renegade designer's most memorable catwalk turns

8April 2021

Not long before she stormed the fashion world with her 1981 debut collection, Vivienne Westwood was a primary school teacher who sometimes sold jewellery on Portobello Road. It’s an easy image to conjure – the twenty-something Dame jangling through hallways in safety-pinned tartan bustiers, clunking platforms, and a school lanyard. Her back-combed, fiery mane bobbing along to her soapbox politics and impassioned tirades between hymns at Friday assemblies. Her inexplicable, but surely undoubted, beef with the PE department. It’s not too dissimilar to Westwood today, as she frequently takes to Instagram in full Elizabethan-punk attire to deliver feverish sermons on anti-capitalism and climate change.

While the designer’s attention has shifted even further in the direction of activism in recent years, with her husband Andreas Kronthaler now at the helm of her eponymous brand, Westwood is, and always will be, fashion royalty. Her renegade aesthetic, synonymous with its use of 18th century cutting techniques, BDSM accents, and sexed-up tartan forged a whole new vernacular within the industry. Her consistent and searing twists on tradition (think the mini-crini, boucher corsets, and cut-and-paste Marie Antoinette gowns) have become touchstones of the designer’s anti-establishment philosophy. “I’ve constantly tried to provoke people into thinking afresh and for themselves, to escape their inhibitions and programming,” she explained in the show notes to the V&A’s 2004 exhibition, Vivienne Westwood: 30 Years in Fashion. Now over 50 years in fashion, Westwood continues to poke and prod at our conditioning.

Be it flashing photographers at her damehood, swinging from a birdcage outside the Old Bailey, or breakdancing to ABBA at an anti-fracking protest, Westwood has rarely played it by the book. And as a result, her shows – full of swaggering buccaneers, transgressive dandies, and bawdy mistresses – have created some of the most memorable snapshots of fashion history. On her 80th birthday, we take a look at some of the defining moments on Vivienne Westwood’s runways. Happy Birthday, Queen Viv!

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NAOMI’S TUMBLE

Dressed in a knee-length tartan skirt and a pink feather boa so hefty it makes Harry Styles’ look like a wisp of thinning tinsel, it was by complete accident (and a pair of 9-inch mock croc platform heels) that a then 23-year-old Naomi Campbell took a dive at Vivenne Westwood’s FW93 show. Of course, Campbell laughed it off and flounced her way down the remainder of the runway but the image was plastered across front pages the following day. If it could have gone viral, it would’ve. In a recent video with British Vogue, the supermodel admitted to Westwood that other designers have asked her to fake a fall in a bid to make their runways just as memorable – to which she replied: “absolutely not, it goes against everything that I stand for. I'm not falling purposefully”. “I didn't pay any of you very much,” Vivienne replies, “so you can take it for granted that I didn't pay you to fall down.”

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KATE AND HER MAGNUM

Almost two years later, Westwood presented her lustful SS95 offering, which saw models canoodle and feed each other (and the audience) melting ice creams, licking their lips as if they were in some kind of budget porno. It was then that a bare-breasted and perfectly-powdered Kate Moss sauntered onto the runway, sucking on a chocolate magnum. Dubbed Erotic Zones, the show cut through clear historical references with heavy-handed innuendos. Neoclassical makeup was offset with mini-skirts and 15cm heels as Crakow shoes (a pointy, child-catcher style from the 15th century) were embellished with buzzing vibrators. The Daily M**l described Westwood’s previous collection as “dragging haute couture to a new low”, calling Carla Bruni a “cheap tart” and Kate Moss a "child prostitute”. If SS95 was anything to go by, Westwood clearly did not give a fuck.

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PAMELA ANDERSON’S CAMEOS

Pamela Anderson first stepped into the world of Westwood when she closed the label’s AW09 show, making an appearance more recently as the star of its SS17 campaign shot by Juergen Teller. While it may have seemed like an unlikely pairing – an all-american TV star and a Derbyshire-born anarchist – it was the duo’s respective journeys in activism that made the link-up make sense. Anderson has been a poster-girl for PETA since 1977 but has recently turned her attention to climate change. “I’m afraid it’s too late, but we must fight until the end,” she told Dazed in 2019. “We can’t give up for future generations, and for all (other) life too. We’re not more important than any other species; the world was not made for humans to gobble up”. Which tbh, could have easily been a refrain from one of Westwood’s own Instagram addresses.

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Courtesy of Vivienne Westwood

THE GENDER BENDER, CISTEM OFFENDER

Although we can’t give Westwood full credit for this iconic line, we do know that the designer was an inspiration to the great lyricist behind it, Bimini Bon Boulash. And throughout her half-century career in fashion, Westwood has often shown a disregard for gender categories. In 1985, she had men modelling her trademark mini-crinis, AW92 saw skirt suits and moustaches, for AW16 she sent out guys in lamé gowns, and there were male models in ruched pencil skirts for AW18. There are plenty of others, too, in the designer’s subversive back catalogue – AW14, for example, was a completely unisex offering. “A dress can work for both, because there is both in us, masculine and feminine,” Kronthaler told ELLE, “I'm 51 per cent man and 49 per cent woman, I think. I just look like a man. But I can feel like a woman, I can understand women”.

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AN ONGOING PROTEST

Over the last decade or so, the catwalk has become a site of protest for Westwood, who has chosen to use her seasonal collections as an opportunity to amplify the conversations surrounding the impending climate crisis, Brexit, and increasing austerity measures. Alongside slogan tees and cut-and-paste graphics, Westwood and Kronthaler assemble their models to charge down the runway as if it were a picket line stretching down Pall Mall, complete with placards, flags, and megaphones. SS16 protested fracking, AW08 addressed unlawful imprisonment at Guantanamo bay, and SS13 called for a complete climate revolution (to name but a few). And while this kind of campaigning can often feel shallow, it would seem an authentic call-to-action for Westwood, who says “the fight is no longer between the classes or between rich and poor but between the idiots and the eco-conscious”.

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