Vivienne Westwood
10 catalogued objects connected to Vivienne Westwood.
Biography
Person.
Photograph: See Li.
CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons.
Vivienne Westwood (1941–2022) was a British fashion designer whose work joined the provocations of punk to a sustained interest in historical dress. In the 1970s she and Malcolm McLaren developed clothes for their shop at 430 King’s Road, successively known as SEX and Seditionaries. Torn fabrics, confrontational printed imagery and references to fetish clothing helped shape punk’s appearance, including clothes worn by the Sex Pistols.
Their Pirate collection of 1981 marked a move onto the catwalk and towards the exaggerated proportions of earlier centuries. Westwood subsequently developed her own approach to corsetry, tailoring, tartan and the crinoline, transforming historical forms through unexpected scale and construction. Her later public work also addressed climate change and civil liberties. Across these different phases, clothing remained a means of making arguments about taste, authority and how people chose to present themselves.
Reviewed 2026-09-05Selected sources
- Victoria and Albert Museum — Vivienne Westwood: punk, new romantic and beyondKing’s Road shops, collaboration with Malcolm McLaren, punk clothing, the 1981 Pirate collection, later historical references and activism.
- Victoria and Albert Museum — Vivienne Westwood collectionLife dates, British design identity and the museum’s holdings across the principal periods of her career.
PER-42A00DDF4B137F78
Represented across objects dated 1981–2023.
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