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Westwood: A daredevil designer

Vivienne Westwood and Sex Pistols Manager Malcolm McLaren, 1972
Vivienne Westwood and Sex Pistols Manager Malcolm McLaren, 1972

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LONDON, England -- For over a quarter of a century Vivienne Westwood's off-the-wall designs have challenged social and cultural expectations and provoked a 'love it or hate it' attitude.

As the first punk and original buffalo girl, she designed underwear to be worn as overwear, printed breasts on T-shirts for men and showed up at Buckingham palace wearing a see-through shirt and no knickers.

Although her radical transgressions have brought her to where she is today, Westwood doesn't like revivals.

"I think our life is like a kind of cross country walk and the things that you come across are the things that you deal with and it's not a plan and somehow you can sort of re edit everything from the past but ... for me looking at the past is almost like another person," she told CNN.

Although famous for creating the best cleavages in the business, her latest collection was all about smoothing the edges, making the fabrics drop fluidly along the hips and deconstructing the female body rather than throwing its anatomy in the beholder's face -- but even this apparently tamed collection had a radical twist.

At her latest show in Paris, Westwood said: "I was not interested too much about how this cloth was going to enhance the femininity of the woman but interested to see how it could be a bit more brutal to her and hurt her a bit and see what happens.

"I really enjoyed the show a lot because I'm tired. I've been thirty years or more in fashion and every six months I do something new and this time I was tired of doing something new."

Westwood may well think she can afford not to shock anymore -- something radically new, after all, it's what she's been doing all her life.

Although Westwood says punk rock was the "strongest thing" she has ever done, it wasn't until her 1981 catwalk debut that the fashion establishment did a double take at her designs.

But it was her personal and professional relationship with Sex Pistols' manager Malcolm McLaren in the '70's that first helped channel her creativity into an idea of fashion never seen before.

In their London boutique, the couple broke one taboo after the other. In the shop called "Sex," they sold rubber and bondage clothing. After being charged with sedition over their allegedly pornographic T-shirts, they turned the accusation into a badge of honor and renamed the shop "The Seditionaries."

A model wearing a Westwood design in Paris
A model wearing a Westwood design in Paris

"Well what we were trying to do, Malcolm and me, was to see what it was that would confront the establishment -- that's how we saw it in that day; we wanted to confront our parents generation.

"The thing is I wasn't even trying to shock people. I don't know why I was angry. I mean just like all young people ... they always want to be rebels, so they should be," Westwood said.

Westwood thinks a rebel designer today is the one who dares defying the corporate nature of the fashion industry.

"At one point I did think of the establishment as being something that one needed to attack right and putting a safety pin in the queen's lip and all this kind of thing.

"I look back on it as an exercise to, I don't know, to change the world in some way. And when I look back it's an exercise because I don't think that you can change the world by attacking things.

"I think you have to have ideas. I think ideas are the only thing that are subversive – that's what changes people's point of view. Culture is more subversive than politics, it's what changes people's way of looking at the world really."


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