Vivienne Westwood Autumn/Winter, 1990 Portrait Collection
About the Item
- Creator:Vivienne Westwood (Designer)
- Dimensions:Height: 1 in (2.54 cm)Width: 1 in (2.54 cm)Depth: 1 in (2.54 cm)
- Materials and Techniques:
- Place of Origin:
- Period:1990-1999
- Date of Manufacture:1990
- Condition:
- Seller Location:New York, NY
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU791218459022
Vivienne Westwood
For someone who regularly swatted away the industry that made her, audacious British fashion designer Dame Vivienne Westwood certainly knew her way around a garment. And she knew how to provoke. “I don’t follow fashion,” Westwood once told the New York Times. “I’ve never been interested in it.” Collectors are certainly interested in her work, and vintage Vivienne Westwood dresses, handbags, lingerie and jackets have become very desirable over the years.
Westwood was born Vivienne Isabel Swire in a village in Derbyshire, in central England, but moved to London as a teen. In the early 1960s, she began to make her own necklaces and other jewelry and met an artist, activist and entrepreneur named Malcolm McLaren. They became involved romantically and she made clothes for him in the style of the Teddy Boys — the city’s music-crazed, occasionally violent teenagers at the time who wore high-waisted trousers and tailored velvet blazers that drew on Edwardian-era fashions.
Westwood and McLaren opened a vintage shop on King’s Road in London in 1971. The flared denim and peasant blouses of the 1960s, then still popular with the “peace and love” set, didn’t hold any weight for Westwood. Instead, she was interested in provocative, edgy apparel. She repaired used clothing and endeavored to create bold new designs from scratch.
Together Westwood and McLaren sold older rock-and-roll records, customized T-shirts with antiestablishment slogans, biker jackets and snug trousers inspired by the Marlon Brando film The Wild One as well as bondage fetish wear. The shop, once called Let It Rock and then Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die before Sex became a more appropriate moniker, evolved into a youth mecca. The DIY garments — zippered tops, burnt tees emblazoned with anarchist messages — flew off the shelves. More notably, it brought punk to the masses.
Westwood was soon dressing the Sex Pistols, a band that McLaren managed, all the while bridging the gap between music and fashion in a manner that has reverberated throughout the industry for decades.
In 1981, the couple’s first fashion show marked the debut of their Pirate collection — a swashbuckler-themed line that sprang from Westwood’s research into Indigenous Americans and the “power garments” of the Louis XIV era. The collection’s ample proportions and cutting-edge tailoring countered punk’s geometry and tight latex fits as well as what rocker Adam Ant called the “Puritanism” that plagued England at the time. The Pirate collection’s enduring influence on the world of fashion as well as the theatrical work of designers such as John Galliano and Alexander McQueen is undeniable.
For the colorful corsets of her 1990 Portrait collection, Westwood drew on 18th-century oil paintings — her models donned the pearl necklaces that have become a social media star and a favorite of influencers and fashion lovers all over the world. For a jacket-and-shorts suit from her Fall/Winter 1996–97 Storm in a Teacup line, the designer used the extreme asymmetry of a tartan mash-up to confront, according to Westwood, “the horror of uniformity and minimalism.”
The self-taught Westwood enjoyed a rapid ascent in fashion, with British society embracing her looks and Vogue immortalizing them in its glossy pages. She garnered accolades for introducing corsets to the runway and dressed Kate Moss and Helena Bonham Carter. And an original Vivienne Westwood wedding dress is featured in 2008’s Sex and the City film.
The fires of political and environmental activism burned brightly for Westwood: She was a Greenpeace ambassador, having designed the organization’s official “Save the Arctic” logo; her clothing brand is committed to using recycled canvas and other eco-friendly materials in the production process; and in 2020, she protested the extradition of Julian Assange by suspending herself in a bird cage outside London’s Old Bailey court. But she will always be the grande dame of British design.
Find an extraordinary range of vintage Vivienne Westwood shirts, shoes, gowns and other items today on 1stDibs.
- ShippingRetrieving quote...Ships From: New York, NY
- Return PolicyThis item cannot be returned.
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- Signed Naomi Campbell for Vivienne Westwood Large Format Polaroid Photo, 2008By Vivienne WestwoodLocated in London, GBA large format Polaroid of Naomi Campbell for the Vivienne Westwood Active Resistance limited edition book produced by Opus. Signed by Naomi Campbell and photographer Zenon Texeira in marker pen. Taken for the Vivienne Westwood Active Resistance Opus Limited Edition Book, which features 97 life size reproductions of these original photos. The photos were shown in various venues on a world wide tour to promote the book. One of them being the Serpantine Gallery in London. This is the actual one off Large Format Polaroid Photo taken on one of three of these camera in existence which are soon to be obsolete because no more of the photographic paper can be made. Polaroids Each Opus is characterised by a gallery section of stunning portraits taken on the rare Polaroid 20 x 24 Studio camera. The camera was brought from Prague to Paris and London for three separate photo shoots for The Official Vivienne Westwood Opus. Featuring Vivienne Westwood’s family and friends wearing clothes from her stunning collections, 97 selected Polaroids, shot by Zenon Texeira in black-and-white, colour and sepia, are displayed full-size in the Opus. At Serpentine’s Manifesto Marathon in 2008, Westwood presented her 22-page manifesto Active Resistance to Propaganda. Read by a multitude of characters, the manifesto is a meditation on the relationship between art and climate change and a critique of consumption and capitalism. “Dear friends. We all love art, and some of you claim to be artists…’ But, she wouldn’t have written the manifesto today,” she says. “I wrote it a couple of years ago. A few months ago it hit me. We absolutely must save the rainforests. Have we really got time to be art lovers?” Manifesto Marathon, the third in the Serpentine Gallery’s acclaimed series of Marathon events, took place in the closing weekend of the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2008, designed by Frank Gehry. The Manifesto Marathon came at a time when artists had begun to work less in formal groups and defined artistic movements. It showcased a new generation of artists alongside practitioners from the worlds of literature, design, science, philosophy, music and film who were returning to the historical notion of the manifesto. The Manifesto Marathon drew on the Serpentine Gallery’s close proximity to Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, which has been used as a platform by Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, George Orwell and William Morris, among many others. Participants of the Manifesto Marathon included: Vivienne Westwood, Pier Vittorio Aureli, Hilary Koob-Sassen, Ingo Niermann & Zak Kyes, Rasheed Araeen, Peter Cook, Richard Wentworth, Gilbert & George, Ben Vautier, Jonas Mekas, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Tom Mccarthy, Mark Wallinger, Yoko Ono, Barbara Steveni, Ekaterina Degot, Raqs media collective, Nathaniel Mellors, Lee Scrivner, Andrea Branzi, Henry Flynt, Marina Abramovic, Agnès Varda, Susan Hefuna, Stephen Willats, Falke Pisano, Adam Pendleton, Jimmie Durham...Category
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