Fashion designer who from punk origins created an international brand with a dissident edge
No fashion designer ever had a Paris show like the one staged by Vivienne Westwood in 1991. Although she was by then 50 and had been making clothes for sale for 20 years – and the British Fashion Council had named her designer of the year – she stitched much of that collection on her own sewing machine in her shabby south London flat, hand-finishing it in the van that transported her, and the models, to France, where the couturier Azzedine Alaïa had invited her to guest-show. Despite those limitations, the collection was a major success.
The life of Westwood, who has died aged 81, was like that, both rackety and responsible. She went on behaving as an eternal student, although she had dropped out after one term at Harrow Art School because, as a working-class teen, she had no idea how to make a living from art. She was candid with biographers and interviewers that her real, worldly education came from relationships, usually with men for whom she was the practical back-up, paying the bills or totting up the till receipts.
