westwood

Not even Vivienne Westwood herself could have foreseen the strange trip her career would take. From engineering the original punk uniform over 30 years ago—resulting in prosecution under England's obscenity laws—to accepting the Export Designer of the Year award from the Queen in 2003, Westwood has seemingly done it all. But the 63-year-old matriarch is perhaps best known for her radical interpretations of the corset, crinoline and bustle of European historical dress in later collections. To commemorate the homegrown powerhouse, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London has put together a retrospective, curated by Claire Wilcox, featuring more than 150 original designs—its largest show dedicated to a British designer. In conjunction, the first comprehensive book of Westwood's past and present has also been released. Here, a slideshow, with sound bites from the living legend.

VIVIENNE WESTWOOD IN HER FIRST STORE, LET IT ROCK, OWNED WITH MALCOLM MCCLAREN, 1971
"Malcolm's a one-off. He was fascinating and mad, and it was as though I was a coin and he showed me the other side. I wanted to escape my own upbringing. (Malcolm) introduced me to things that excited me and made me think. We were interested in rebellion—we felt that the hippie movement had waned, and we were never interested in their clothes."

EARLY PUNK SHIRT, CIRCA 1971

"First of all we wrote 'rock' (with boiled chicken bones), then we wrote 'fuck,' then somebody came and commissioned one—he wanted 'perve' written on it."


ROCK CHICKEN BONE T-SHIRT, 1971

PHOTO FRANCOIS LAMY

BLITZ MAGAZINE, TIME MACHINE COLLECTION, F/W 88/89

"Picture galleries are essential to my work, and not merely paintings containing costumes but also landscape and still-life, in which harmonies of color, design and movement can germinate so many fashion ideas."


PHOTO GILLES BENSIMON, ALWAYS ON CAMERA COLLECTION, F/W 92/93, FEATURING A PORTRAIT BY THE BAROQUE MASTER FRANZ HALS

"(I was) really inspired by the Queen at the moment, and all that pomp and circumstance and Norman Hartnell that you associate with her. The crown is comic but it's terribly chic. I like to keep it on when I'm having dinner—like ladies who keep their coats on to take tea. It's so English, yet terribly attractive."

MUSE AND MODEL SARAH STOCKDALE, PHOTO NICK KNIGHT, HARRIS TWEED COLLECTION, F/W 87/88

"The models looked incredible because they had all this hair and lots of white make-up, and incredibly high shoes. I remember saying I didn't know whether they were monsters or goddesses, knowing that that's a statement that the press kind of like. But you really thought, they are freaks, definitely. They look so freaky, so different, but so beautiful."


   NAOMI CAMPBELL'S "MOCK CROC" RUNWAY SHOES, ANGLOMANIA COLLECTION, F/W 93/94

ITALIAN VOGUE, PHOTO STEVEN MEISEL, MINI CRINI COLLECTION, S/S 85

"Fashion to me is like walking a tightrope, where you risk falling off into the ridiculous, but if you can stay on that tightrope you can achieve a triumph."


ELLE BRAZIL, PHOTO MARC HISPARD, CUT AND SLASH COLLECTION, S/S 91

VERUSCHKA, PHOTO GIAN PAOLO BARBIERI, STORM IN A TEACUP COLLECTION, F/W 96/97

PHOTO MIKAEL JANSSON, NYMPHS COLLECTION, S/S 02

"I've got a real sense of three-dimensional geometry. I can look at a flat piece of fabric and know that if I put a slit in it and make some fabric travel around a square, then when you lift it up it will drape in a certain way, and I can feel how that will happen."   
  


LINDA EVANGELISTA, PHOTO NIALL MCINERNEY

VIVIENNE WESTWOOD AND HUSBAND ANDREAS KRONTHALER, PHOTO ANNIE LEIBOVITZ

VIVIENNE WESTWOOD AS MARGARET THATCHER, TATLER, PHOTO MICHAEL ROBERTS, 1989
"When you look into the past, you start to see the standards of excellence, the good taste in the way things were done, put together, formed. By trying to copy technique, you build up your own technique. I'm no trying to do something different. I'm trying to do the same thing in a different way."

品味时尚，看似静止　却能令人游离

NANA的罪爱
半生的梦想

今季的vivien