“Vivienne Westwood Magnetism Abundant”

Richard

Carroll

Vivienne Isabel Swire was born, April 8, 1941, in Tintwistle, a village in the High Peak District of Cheshire, England. In 1957 she moved with her parents, Gordon and Dora to Harrow, a London borough twelve miles northeast of the city’s center where her parents managed a post office. She attended Harrow School of Art enrolling in a silversmithing course for one semester, then switching to a secretarial college, and finally studying to become a primary-school teacher at a teacher-training college. During her teenage years she would carefully evaluate used clothing to comprehend the technique of tailoring, and crafted her own clothes using store-bought patterns, and gathering ideas from her silversmithing course she created jewelry which she sold from a stall at the historic Portobello Road Market.

Vivienne met Derek Westwood in 1962, and they were married the same year, wearing a dress she designed. Benjamin was born in 1963 and three years later they separated when art student Malcolm McLaren moved into her life. She had her second son, Joseph Corré in 1967 with McLaren, and her two boys grew up together in London.

Birth of London’s Punk Rock Fashion

Her primary school teaching days ended in 1971 when McLaren became manager of the punk band the Sex Pistols. The couple opened a small shop on Kings Road in Chelsea, named Let It Rock, where they made drape coats, teddy boy trousers, and mohair sweaters. The now famed shop underwent numerous name changes, including Seditionaries and SEX, but nevertheless, the shop became a favorite hangout for musicians and early members of the punk rock scene. Westwood and McLaren dressed the Sex Pistols and other punk rockers, replacing the long-haired hippie look with clothes ranging from platform shoes, slogan and lacerated, handwritten T-shirts that were often vexatious, as well as fetishistic bondage gear, and clothing displaying its construction with visible seams and labels, all of which went hand-in-hand with a growing counterculture that involved atypical hairstyles, and body modifications using cosmetics and showy jewelry. Westwood, like Coco Chanel, Ralph Lauren, Louis Vuitton, and Emilio Pucci, never attended a fashion school and was self-taught, but with a matchless creativity and political visualization to upset the norm.

Richard Carroll is a nationally known travel writer honored with eight international writing awards. Richard has covered all seven continents, and with family heritage dating to early Colorado.

Beyond Punk

Westwood and McLaren expanded in the 1980’s to rave reviews with a series of fashion shows in London and Paris introducing Rocking Horse shoes and the Mini-Crini, inspired from the ballet Petrushka. She labeled the 1981-85 period “New Romantic,” and 1988-91 as “The Pagan Years” changing her style and creations from punk to Tatler girls wearing clothes that parodied the upper class. The partnership with McLaren was dissolved, but her reputation was growing using classic British tailoring, Scottish textiles, and the French style of embellished proportions. Following her first Paris show the critics credited her with the revival of the British fashion scene. Later, she introduced wedding gowns into her collection, one worn by Sarah Jessica Parker’s character, Carrie Bradshaw in the movie Sex and The City, as well as producing 20 academic gowns for King’s College London, and, working with Richard Branson, creating uniforms for Virgin Atlantic. By December 2015, Vivenne Westwood Ltd had stores in the UK and 63 worldwide including: Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, and South Korea.

Political Edicts

Throughout Westwood’s successful career and despite her fashion empire developing into a multimillion-dollar company, she was front page material for her dynamic activism and undaunted by the consequences with her irreverent attitude towards the establishment. In 1989 she posed for a Tatler Magazine cover dressed as Margaret Thatcher, with a caption that read: “This woman was once a punk.” She later told Dazed Digital, “The suit she wore had been ordered by Thatcher but was then cancelled.”

In 1992 she was honored with an Order of the British Empire for services to fashion design from Queen Elizabeth II, and outside Buckingham Palace, she did a famous pirouette to a large crowd of photographers, revealing to all the world that she was not wearing underpants. But even so she was invited back for the designation of Dame Commander of the British Empire. In 2015 she drove a tank to the then prime minister, David Cameron’s home to protest fracking. Up until the end, Westwood wrote on issues of climate and social justice, cut off her hair to emphasize the threats of climate change, and campaigned in person for Nuclear Disarmament, she also appeared in a PETA crusade to support World Water Day and vegetarianism, drawing awareness to the meat industry’s water consumption. In 2015 Westwood became involved with the Green Party donating 300,000 euros to the Party, and in a campaign in 2020 on World Earth Day, she supported the protection of forests with ethical fabric choices.

In 1992 Westwood married her second husband, former fashion student, Andreas Kronthaler. whom she met when teaching at the Vienna School of Applied Art, and in 2016 he became director of the brand. Upon her death he said, ” I will continue with Vivienne in my heart. We have been working until the end and she has given me plenty of things to get on with. Thank you darling.”

Fashion commentator Derek Blasberg wrote, “That while textbooks may remember Westwood for ushering in London’s counterculture scene to high fashion, I think she’d want to be remembered most for her advocacy, specifically global warming. Her life was aggressive, relentless, and fabulous. A total original.”

Dusseldorf, Germany’s Fashion Capital

Richard Carroll

Photography: Halina Kubalski

Dusseldorf, Germany’s Fashion Capital

Richard Carroll

Photography: Halina Kubalski

The name rolls off the tongue in a poetic and memorable ring, the resonance tantalizing the ear like a beloved song. Dusseldorf, a little over an hour train ride from Frankfurt is world removed, and refreshingly faithful to art and fashion. Overlooking the vast Lower Rhine River in the heart of Germany, the city is brimming with energy and vitality with an elevated living standard and a five-star lifestyle, eminent among the best cities in Europe.

The creativity swirling through the city on the wings of fashion designers and students, ongoing fashion trade shows, and fervent fashion boutiques, has taken hold in Dusseldorf, not unlike the fashion cities of Milan, Rome, Paris, and London. With four public and ten private universities as well as Gallery Dusseldorf, Breuninger, and Fashion Design Institute, the dominant fashion school in Germany, everyone seems to be young, and even the older Dusseldorf folks look youthful.

The destination is one of the country’s brightest stars, yet often bypassed thanks to a rather threadbare tourist trail. With sustainability an ongoing focus, and Germany being one of Europe’s top solar producers, Dusseldorf is a green city with gorgeous leafy parks and gardens, ponds with snooty swans, impressive art centers, grand palaces smartly converted to elegant museums, and designated bicycle lanes with a cycling community not yet on the level of Amsterdam but inching forward. Bicycles or not, Dusseldorf is a compact city the residents say just relax everything in the city is only 20 minutes away, which includes the neighborhood near the main train station, home to one of the largest Japanese communities in Europe, and thriving Old Town adjacent to the Rhine River.

Fashion, City Center

For a mid-sized city, Dusseldorf has the most attractive city-center fashion shopping street in Germany, if not all Europe. The hefty bouquet of fashion influence drifts through the city center on a silver chalice. Mile-long Konigsallee, called Ko by residents and visitors alike, is lined with Prada, Miu Miu, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Dior, Hermes, Armani, Fendi, Fashionette, Barbara Freres storefronts, and engaging fashion boutiques casting a huge presence in their shadows. Ko is separated by a large garden-like pond canopied with trees, small street bridges with Victorian-style lamps offering access to either side of Ko, while the island of green alters Ko as if it has been separated into two different streets. A visitor said, “It’s like shopping in a big park!”