Remembering Dame Vivienne Westwood

Vogue Australia’s visual director Alison Veness salutes the passing of a fashion icon.

British fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, left, and her husband Andreas Kronthaler, arrive for the world premiere of 'The Age of Stupid' in Leicester Square, London, Sunday, March 15, 2009. (AP Photo/Akira Suemori)

She was everything and she will be sadly missed. From the very beginning Vivienne Westwood put British fashion firmly and most anarchically on the map. She was never about half measures, she had swagger, her work was always all in.

From the 1970s when she worked with Malcolm McLaren, manager of the Sex Pistols, their language of fashion was raw, anarchic and powerful.

She defined punk. But she was more than punk; she had poetry in her work and an appreciation for art and language and beauty.

Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren and Westwood: Daily Mirror / Bill Kennedy/Mirrorpix via Getty Images

I think the first Vivienne Westwood show I went to was in 1987. Sara Stockbridge was on the catwalk and Susie Bick. It was sensational – a riot of crowns, ermine and red velvet. And attitude – an explosion of excess and fearlessness, a call to action to be yourself. And be damned.

Westwood’s legacy is a rhythm of remarkable excess – from the “Too fast to live too young to die” ethos to bondage, destroyed tartan, corsets, the 1980s mini-crinolines, and the later epic Winterhalter inspired ball gowns and the English eccentricity that she brought to the runways of Paris.

\Westwood with models during the finale of her catwalk show at the Autumn / Winter 2016 London Fashion Week in London. Picture: LEON NEAL / AFP

I invited her to Wimbledon once and picked her up at her home on Clapham Common.

On our walk through to centre court she just couldn’t believe all the attention and the autograph hunters that mobbed her. She was always down to earth, humble and funny, passionate and fabulously opinionated. She never held back using her influence to effect change in all that she believed in politically and socially, however uncomfortable.

In 2004 an exhibition of her work was transferred to Australia from the V & A. Vivienne was meant to come to Canberra but she never made the flight. She didn’t like flying. Andreas Kronthaler [her husband and design partner] came along and I interviewed him on stage at the The National Gallery of Australia. He talked all about her work and their work together, and her legacy which, even then was considerable. He was her biggest champion and the love of her life.

She spent the last few weeks in The Royal Marsden hospital in London surrounded by her family and friends. No one wanted to let her go.