Dame Vivienne Westwood Has Died at 81

An exhibition in Westwood’s honor opened at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2002, and her punk roots had been once more celebrated in 2013 at the Costume Institute’s “Punk: Chaos to Couture” demonstrate.  One of the exhibitions 7 galleries was influenced by her Seditionaries store. In 2004, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London held a retrospective, and Westwood received British Style Designer of the Year in 1990, 1991, and 2006 from the British Vogue Council. In 2007, she was handed the BFC Award for Fantastic Achievement in Trend Design and style, and in 2018, the Swarovski Award for Constructive Adjust, for her frequent climate-change activism. 

“Dame Vivienne Westwood was an remarkable expertise: an impressive and influential designer, and an iconoclast who pursued just about every perception and enthusiasm with a exceptional fervor,” claims Anna Wintour, main content material officer of Condé Nast and global editorial director of Vogue. “One of my extremely favored Costume Institute displays, Anglomania, celebrated British fashion, but actually it was a celebration of  Vivienne. She was at the heart of it all, the designer that each single designer preferred to satisfy at the gala. She was a provocateur, and a single with a deep comprehending of what designed her homeland tick: that peculiarly British mix of heritage, course, sex, Romanticism, and custom, which she worked up into the most magical and imaginative of dresses.”

Westwood’s runway has prolonged been her political platform. T-shirts in her spring 2006 selection read “I Am Not A Terrorist, Remember to Do not Arrest Me,” though types in her fall 2008 show carried signs demanding fair legal trials for Guantánamo Bay prisoners. A banner in the spring 2013 clearly show referred to as for a weather revolution. Other times she has shown help for U.S. whistleblower Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, as properly as political parties, environmental charities which includes Cool Earth and Greenpeace, and the Occupy demonstrations in 2011.

“We’re attempting to notify everyone the conclude of the globe is right here,” Westwood told Women’s Put on Daily backstage at her spring 2016 exhibit, wherever placards had been penned with the slogans “fracking is a crime” and “austerity is a criminal offense.” In 2014, Westwood shaved off her rooster-red hair to raise recognition for climate modify.

Westwood’s namesake label carried couture, bridal, and men’s and women’s ready-to-use collections. She met Austrian fashion student Andreas Kronthaler in the late 1980s when instructing at the Vienna School of Utilized Artwork and they married in 1992. They partnered under the Westwood label, but in 2016 he grew to become innovative director of the manufacturer, with the mainline remaining renamed Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood.