An oral history of Vivienne Westwood’s complicated relationship with punk
As if losing arguably the world’s greatest-ever footballer, Pelé wasn’t tragic enough, Vivienne Westwood exiting this mortal coil on the same day is beyond the pale. Westwood was one of Britain’s great movers and shakers, and throughout her life, before and after she partnered with the infamous peacock Malcolm McLaren, she fought her own battle to change the world, and it brought her many victories
Born in Tintwistle, Derbyshire, in 1941, her family moved to the London borough of Harrow in 1958, and it was here that the wheels were set in motion for the incredible life she would lead. She married the daytime factory worker and night-time Mod, Derek Westwood, in 1962. They had a son, Ben, the following year. However, a chance meeting with one of her brother’s friends would change her life not long after.
One day, her brother Gordon, brought a 19-year-old art student round to her Harrow flat. Sporting red hair and a face whitened with talcum powder, the man would go on to have a defining impact on Westwood and broader culture. He was Malcolm McLaren. The two quickly hit it off, and Vivienne soon left Derek, moving into a tiny flat in Balham, where their son Joseph Corré was born in 1967.
At the time, Westwood would continue her day job of teaching whilst designing garments on the side. However, when McLaren took over the back of the retail premises at 430 King’s Road in Chelsea, West London, the pair would gain the long-desired outlet they’d always required to disseminate their ideals and Westwood’s designs to the world.
Things went smoothly, and after a monumental trip to New York in August 1973, where they struck up an association with the rambunctious proto-punks, the New York Dolls, McLaren and Westwood were galvanised in their vision. The Big Apple was alive with sex, drugs, and unrelenting rebellion, which lit a fuse in their minds. The status quo was a sitting duck; they just needed to be brave.
In October 1974, they renamed their boutique SEX to reflect their interest in fetish wear as a means for taboo-busting. Duly, it would become the symbolic home of punk. They labelled their S&M-inspired garb and outlook as “anti-fashion”, and it would slowly spread, converging with the younger generation’s desire to change their increasingly bleak future. Britain was deemed the “Sick Man of Europe”, locked in a sclerotic economic and social state. People were angry that their futures, which had only just been reinstated after the war, were being disregarded by an out-of-touch establishment that continued to be comfortable whilst everyone suffered. Add to this the spectre of nuclear annihilation and The Cold War and the world suddenly felt extremely unfair.
Inspired by what was happening in New York, thanks to the slew of acts emerging in the wake of the New York Dolls, such as The Ramones, Richard Hell and Television, McLaren started to take an interest in a band known as The Strand. They would eventually become the Sex Pistols, and under his management, they became the poster boys of what SEX was all about, achieving a role as the vanguard of British punk in the process.
Discourse tends to miss just how important Vivienne was to McLaren and not the other way around, as is frequently noted. Without her input, he wouldn’t have had the basis to make Sex Pistols into the brand that sold SEX and punk to the masses. Discussing how Vivienne Westwood was the one to crystallise punk through her aesthetic and attitude, Viv Albertine of The Slits recalled in her memoir: “Vivienne and Malcolm use clothes to shock, irritate and provoke a reaction but also to inspire change. Mohair jumpers, knitted on big needles, so loosely that you can see all the way through them, T-shirts slashed and written on by hand, seams and labels on the outside, showing the construction of the piece; these attitudes are reflected in the music we make. It’s OK to not be perfect, to show the workings of your life and your mind in your songs and your clothes.”
Of her crucial role in the phenomenon of punk, Westwood told the Independent in 2002: “It changed the way people looked. I was messianic about punk, seeing if one could put a spoke in the system in some way. I realised there was no subversion without ideas. It’s not enough to want to destroy everything.”
This point is remarkably prescient. It shows why Westwood would go on to hit such spectacular heights after punk imploded. She had ideas of how to change what was in front of her, and she knew how to bring them to life.
Unlike most in the first wave of British punk, Westwood was a true subversive and continued to push fashion and thought to its limits right to the very end. Ironically, this would earn her a wide berth of followers ranging from art students to princesses. Ironically though, as she always maintained, she didn’t care about fashion. Her work had a higher purpose, to subvert the status quo, and fashion was merely a conduit for doing so.
I’d have loved to have seen her first reaction to UK Conservative Theresa May wearing one of her Tartan suits, a two-piece eerily similar to the one Johnny Rotten wore to spit at fans during his heyday in the Sex Pistols. It was an outfit May regularly sported, with Westwood commenting on the Today programme in 2016: “Do I mind if Theresa May wears my clothes? No, but I certainly don’t admire her for anything. I think she’s awful.”
Of her general relationship to fashion, Westwood explained to The New York Times in 2013: “I don’t follow fashion. I really don’t. I’ve never been interested in it. I think punk has entered into the iconography of fashion. In 1970 or 1969, the shop we have, Worlds End at 430 Kings Road, that was Mr Freedom. I went in there and bought a pair of tight leopard-printed velvet trousers. I had never seen anything like it. It was the most amazing thing. Punk says rebellion. Now every child has seen this.”
Surmising the ethos underpinning all of her work, from the punk aesthetic to her activism, Westwood told the V&A: “I’ve constantly tried to provoke people into thinking afresh and for themselves, to escape their inhibitions and programming.”
In 2013, when the punk aesthetic made a bold return to the runway at global fashion shows, Westwood sat down with Vogue, and discussed her relationship with punk. Asked to speak on the significance she placed on the style within her oeuvre, she offered some enlightening thoughts. The Derbyshire native opined: “I don’t think punk fashion is a spectre or overemphasised—it made a big impression, as there had never been anything like it before. The Sex Pistols enhanced the punk fashion we were making, and then Adam Ant took on our Pirate collection, which made this look more popular. Yet every one of my collections has been something different—if there had been a band attached to each, they might have been just as influential.”
Focusing on the punk’s deeper meaning that purely anarchy, she explained: “The anarchy sign—this idea of ‘Destroy.’ The hippies had politicised my generation, and I was so upset with the death, destruction, and corruption in this world. That’s what I wanted to destroy; that’s what it meant to me. At the time, the movement was just iconoclastic, but for me, it meant more.”
One of her most essential takes on punk followed. Asked to what degree the movement was an accident or if, instead, it was a deliberate design of hers and McLaren’s, she clarified that it was all about rebelling, nothing else. Westwood continued: “As far as I know, it didn’t exist. For us, it began as a culmination of the hippies’ look, fifties teddy boys’ fashions, and fifties pinup magazines ([with their] torn clothes), then it morphed into rockers and Hells Angels—we called the shop at this time Let It Rock. The next step was rubber wear and bondage-inspired clothes, so we changed the name of the shop to SEX. We changed the name of the shop to fit each look. The clothes were a synthesis of all the things we were interested in—rebellion. We started to look back over our own lifetime’s culture of motifs.”
“When we started to do punk, we put all of these things together to create the look of an urban guerrilla—a rebel. It was a creation that evolved through our shop. When we started to do punk, I think it was the first time people saw clothes like ours, and they could buy them from our little shop. No one was wearing anything like it.”
Despite Vivienne Westwood’s defining impact on punk, she always had a complicated relationship with it, primarily because it became a parody of itself by the end. Although she might have looked back on the first wave of punk as highly flawed, she continued to deem herself a punk because it was a synonym for a fighter. She had a fire within, a burning desire to cure the world’s ills through any means possible, with punk and its aesthetic just a bi-product of the lifelong rebellion she waged.
Speaking to Dazed in 2018, Westwood was asked: “What is punk in 2018? When individualism, nonconformity, and rejection of government are commonplace in many countries, what makes for a modern punk?”
In her naturally lucid style, she responded: “First of all, I was very disappointed in punks, when I was a punk. I felt like I was the only one left, really. When the Sex Pistols started, Johnny Rotten really meant it. Later on he was perceived as a sort of token rebel. But he was great. What is a punk attitude? I guess I’m a punk because I’m a fighter. You’re born with the character you’ve got, and I will always fight. I can’t help it.”