Dame Vivienne Westwood 1941 - 2022. A tribute by Tony Glenville.

So farewell then to the woman who in so many ways across the decades put London Fashion on the world map.

From bondage to the mini crinoline, from Nostalgia of Mud to Pirates, and from the subversive in Kings Road to the Grand Hotel in Paris. There was no one like her before she appeared, and there will be no one like her now. She did it all first.

The extraordinary thing is that her desire to shock, to argue, and often to dismantle, resulted in such beauty. Her inspirations from the Renaissance through Watteau and her references from gay iconography, through to Baroque gilding, made her work strong and oddly transcend time.

In her hands, the corset became Westwood - not historical. The prints and patterns took on her identity, not that of the past she plundered. Her strength and her ability to forge the next collection out of sheer will, in the days when there was very little money, was legendary.

I worked on a photographic portrait of her with Gavin Bond in the 1990’s. Having selected as the location the tea stall on Clapham Common, and wearing a ball gown, we arrived. At the appointed time the vastly proportioned gown was delivered to the location; Gavin and I waited and she appeared on her bicycle. Whipping off her clothes I arranged her in the ballgown, she sipped tea, talked non stop and Gavin snapped away. Done, and she was gone. Efficiency, eccentricity and a lack of pretension, all rolled into one. This is what I want, now let’s do it.

I interviewed her several times, attended many of her shows, wore her clothes and wrote about her, but never knew her. I think she hardly knew herself; in spite of her interest and use of the past she was furiously focussed on the next thing, the future, her next obsession, what was wrong with the world.

Clothes and putting them on people was her form of communication of her current state of mind, her latest rant or passion, it was so much more than “fashion”.

So often people in fashion talk about a great designer, a fabulous talent or all the usual things that go to make a fashion designer. Dame Vivienne Westwood was apart from these, she was her own invention, her own publicist, her own unique visionary of clothes.

The neat schoolteacher knitwear, the enormous Winterhalter tulle ballgowns, a second skin seductive catsuit, or a superbly shaped and constructed frock coat. What on earth links them, makes them the work of one designer? Only Westwood.

@t.g.therealtonyglenville