Later this month, the personal archive of the late Vivienne Westwood , designer, style icon and progenitor of punk, will be auctioned off at Christie’s for charity. Until her death in 2022, at the age of 81, Westwood was a seismic force in fashion. Celebrities and punks flocked to her boutique, named and renamed, at different times, Let It Rock, Sex, Seditionaries, World’s End and Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die.
The auction reveals the wardrobe she left behind: Harris tweed suits, faux-pearl necklaces and elaborately tailored dresses from collections called Witches or Britain Must Go Pagan. Westwood was a political magpie, aligning herself, at times, with the Labour Party, the Green Party, at one point the Conservatives, and at another, We Are the Reality Party, led by Bez of the Happy Mondays. But she was a consistent voice for sustainability, becoming, in her later years, that strangest of things: a fashion designer who told us to stop spending money on fashion.
“I don’t feel comfortable defending my clothes,” she told Carole Cadwalladr, in a Guardian interview in 2007. “But if you’ve got the money to afford them, then buy something from me. Just don’t buy too much.
” Some of my earlier memories from childhood are of visiting charity shops, watching my mother buy second-hand books. For me it’s always been about clothes instead. On mornings off, if I want time away from writing, I buy a takeaway coffee and walk from Upper Rathmines to George’s Street,.
