To ask how Vivienne Westwood revolutionised everyday fashions.

[WatchoRulo]

I will admit I know little about fashion. Hearing all the glowing tributes has made me wonder what effect she had (that I'm not aware of).
My recollection is of that talk show where the audience laughed at her creations and she had a strop - but there must be more to the story than that?

After the punk movement, in terms of pop culture, she influenced the style of Adam Ant in the 80s as well as Boy George. Adam was managed by the manager of Sex, Jordan (she married Kevin Mooney from the Ants). Boy George was a customer of her later Seditionaries brand.

Currently I have some reissued 80s Pirates Boots that I still wear but my days of corsets tops are long gone sadly (In the 90s I had a camouflage version in olive and an exquisite angel print corset top that I wore till it burst).

In terms of influence, I'd say Pam Hogg and Jean Paul Gaultier owe Vivienne a debt.

I'm old enough to remember her welll.

She was outspoken and didn't take any crap. Her Sex shop was risque and she employed strong, tough women and quirky characters.

This was the 1970's, when sexism, homophobia etc was rife. It was perfectly ok for your 6 year old to be confronted by a 16 years olds breasts.on page 3 of The Sun. Soft porn type images were ,considered acceptable and women were harassed and treated objectified. I'm not saying some of this doesn't go on today unfortunately, but Vivienne stuck two fingers up at the expectations for women at that time.

I think quite a few posters here are mixing up McLaren and Lydon. Weird given the reality of them both! But maybe that's because I am old enough to know who they were when they were on front pages...

Most recently she was a HUGE campaigner for climate change & social equality.

Please watch this:

I was telling my co-author in the US about her, just a few months ago, as I was hoping to interview her for our next book.

Her recent achievements:

She donated £1million to a charity dedicated to saving the rainforest.

She identified the crazy financial system as a core reason for these problems.

She discussed the problems of poverty with some creative and brilliant ideas about solution.

Far, far more than who she associated with. She took ideas beyond fashion to consider world problems. It’s a shame she wasn’t better known for the intellectual heavyweight she had become.

I think even she acknowledged that she saw what the punks were wearing and copied. She and Malcolm McLaren took a lot of credit for other people's ideas.

Some of her clothes were lovely and looked comfortable but the wild stuff.. no. I'm not much into fashion and don't get the adulation

I'm not sure a beautifully made t-shirt with FUCK PROFIT or some such platitude sold for 800quid on Liberty (no s please) means anything.⁹

That's because you have no idea about the role she played in gay rights and holding politicians to account. Perhaps she made no impact on your life but she did on many of us. Why do people pull down others achievements ?

If I could be 1/2 the person she was I would be very happy

So go and look her up and educate yourself. Until then, anything you post is going to be just as ignorant and reductive.

Look at the uniform she designed for virgin Atlantic, I know a few people who got to wear it.

And Issy Miyake in August. Huge losses to the fashion world. Not only was Viv an innovative and iconic designer but she was a great philanthropist and environmentalist. The world’s a poorer place without her.

Corsets didn't need liberating. They were supportive undergarments in the days before elastic,. The idea that they were just for controlling women is a myth.

VW Desert Island Discs is interesting for people who want to understand VW a bit better

Oh lovely! Thanks for sharing that, I love Desert Island Discs!

Her ideas for design were hardly suitable for everyday wear. She was part of the punk movement which tells you all you need to know.

That was David Icke he was talking to. And it was still bloody rude.

I love her stuff but could never afford it. Sure would buy it if I had a lottery win!

Her clothes were much more mainstream post Punk. I’ve rather lusted after a lot of her clothes.

Someone I know posted this by someone she knows, and I think it might help with understanding VW’s contributions.

She was a genius who took the (self developed) skills of the then dying breed of court dressmakers and used them to create a global fashion brand without taking the easy route of designing clothes to look good on the hanger/a skinny supermodel rather than on a real woman who has a bust and hips etc. Even her more "mass market" clothes were beautifully cut and well finished. Her clothes were often also designed so that they could be worn more than one way. I had a VW blouse once that was designed to look like a high necked blouse but had a cut out at the throat. It was unique at that time but has now disseminated into the vast slew of choker neck tops on the high street. However it could also be worn with the neck open in which case it looked like a large and asymmetrical rever neckline. I am well endowed and had to buy a size smaller than usual because VW cut properly for a bust.

Loads of people wear them every day and look fabulous.

Meant in response to this. There are plenty of people wearing whatever they want, everyday. Punks too.

Corsets were made from elastic from the twenties. They didn’t die out because of elastic but because fashions changed. They were certainly seen as constraining women not empowering them until Westwood used them.

Westwood was a proper genius and had a huge influence on fashion.

Corsets were not ‘supportive’ they were constrictive and very bad for women’s health. The reason they began to loosen in the early 20th c was due to the work done by male doctors on just how bad they were for women medically. (Collapsed lungs, displaced and prolapsed organs, back pain, poor digestion, poor reproduction etc).

In WW1 women found it difficult to work in factories or as nurses with restrictive lacing and when female servants left for war-work upper class women had no-one to lace them in.

At that point corsets were replaced with bras and ‘girdles’.

I think this has been mostly debunked by now. There's a nice article here about how we bought that myth because it was a convenient shorthand for oppression: www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-bridgerton-gets-wrong-about-corsets-180976691/

And also one here about what was really going on: www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/everything-you-know-about-corsets-is-false/]]

Male doctors have a fairly long history of claiming women brought all their health problems on themselves.