UK Fashion Designer Vivienne Westwood Dies At Age 81

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Vivienne Westwood, UK fashion designer whose five-decade career began in the mid-1970s punk movement in London and who remained devoted to its ethos of anti-establishment agitation throughout her life, has died at the age of 81. Her brand announced the news of her death on its social accounts.

At the dawn of the punk era, Westwood, with her then partner Malcolm McLaren, helped to invent its “look” with designs that ranged from shredded T-shirts to bondage suits, emblazoned with anarchist symbols, Nazi swastikas, inverted crucifixes and words like “DESTROY.” Dressing the Sex Pistols, who McLaren managed and promoted, she created a vocabulary of provocation that would not only shake up British fashion of the times, but also go on to define her own runway collections and influence the work of generations of designers to come.

A working-class girl from Derbyshire, who was largely untrained in fashion, Westwood was a primary school art teacher when she met McLaren in 1965 at the age of 24, already a young mother and separated from her first husband. Within a few years, she became the spikey-haired high priestess of punk who commanded London’s burgeoning counter-cultural movement while selling Teddy Boy clothes and bondage jeans from a cult retailer on the King’s Road. That she would ultimately be perceived as one of the most influential British designers of the 20th century, and alternatively as a batty eccentric for her political fulminations against consumerism and capitalism, underscored Westwood’s position as a fiercely independent creator who would help shape but never quite fit into the mainstream.

“We wanted to undermine the establishment,” Westwood once said. “We hate it. We want to destroy it. We don’t want it. We were youth against age, that’s what it was.”

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