With a background in customising her own clothes as a school girl and studying fashion and silversmithing she pursued a career as a primary school teacher and selling her own made jewellery at Portabello market on the side and went on to create her own wedding dress when she married Derek Westwood in 1962. She didn't believe as a normal, working class girl she could make it in the fashion world. This is why I feel a lot of people can relate to her so well as she came from a completely regular background and wasn't thrown into the industry by status and money, it all came to her after hard work and her designs being original and quirky, just like her. She started out in 1971 designing clothes for her lover McLaren (Manager of the Sex Pistols) shop on the Kings Road called Let It Rock, later and more commonly known as Sex. Her clothing was inspired by the punk scene, bikers, fetishists and prostitutes. Some say she was responsible for bringing punk styling into the mainstream during this time. Together her and McLaren dressed the Sex Pistols in their designs. This was the beginning of her huge and amazing career, still and if not more one of the most famously known fashion labels and designers of all time and was named Britains Greatest British Fashion Designer in 2011.
Sex Pistols T-shirt designed by Westwood and Jamie Reid, customised by Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols in the late 70's
I
find Vivienne Westwood to be a very relevant New Elizabethan due to her
love and fascination of The Golden Age and Queen Elizabeth I. A lot of
her collections are clearly inspired by the era and the fashions of the time and I think Westwood uses a bit of inspiration from Elizabeth in her own style and the way she likes to look, she see's a bit of herself in her which I wrote a bit about in a post on period hairstyling on my other blog which will be linked at the bottom of the page. In this portrait of Westwood she looks like she is supposed to be Queen Elizabeth I as the whole image is so heavily inspired by her, she is even posing like the Queen did! Her hair and styling looks so similar to the Elizabethan fashion at the time that you couldn't possibly miss the reference, she is wearing pearls around her neck and to adorn her hair which was a sign of wealth and status in the Golden Age and I love that she is wearing her labels orb in the center of her hairstyle at the top to add a personal touch. The shape and style of the garments look very Elizabethan and her jacket looks velvet in the image which reminds me of luxury fabrics in which rich people would wear at the time.
When talking about how she thinks this is the worst time for fashion and that people have never dressed as poorly as the present time, Westwood said "in History people dressed much better than we do. If you saw Queen Elizabeth it would be amazing, she came from another planet. She was so attractive in what she was wearing." Quote found from: http://www.vogue.co.uk/spy/biographies/vivienne-westwood-biography
In many ways Vivienne Westwood reminds me of Queen Elizabeth I. Like the Virgin Queen, Vivienne Westwood is loved and respected and highly influential in her own way and both have the achieved a lot throughout their lives. They are both strong and inspirational characters for women to look up to and will both be remembered for a very long time and remembered for the work they did and what they created and that will live on long past Westwoods time, just like it has with Queen Elizabeth I. That to me is why Dame Vivienne Westwood is a New Elizabethan.
References:
http://www.vogue.co.uk/spy/biographies/vivienne-westwood-biography
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/v/vivienne-westwood-designs/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivienne_Westwood
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