Vivienne Westwood Profiles

Vivienne Westwood is a British fashion designer who was born Vivienne Isabel Swire in Glossop, Derbyshire on 8th April 1941. This profiles page completes her record in this guide: the collections, fall fashions, fashion week and news pages filed the work first, and this page — with the runway, spring fashions and main pages — sets out the life the work came from, in the order it happened. Of all the pages in this series, this is the one the others depend on.

The biography searches in the references gather the wider career coverage, the guide's Punk Fashion and Vivienne Westwood Anglomania pages are linked there, and the official Vivienne Westwood website is linked there as well. The collections, runway and news pages in this series file the fashion record the career produced.

Illustrative image created for this guide — an artistic impression, not this designer's own garments.

Glossop to London

She was born in Glossop, Derbyshire, and at the age of 17 Vivienne and her family moved to London — the move that placed her in the city where her designing life would happen. London in the years that followed was, in the words of her record, at the forefront of cultural trends, and it was in that London that she began designing in 1971, along with her partner Malcolm McLaren. The pairing matters to everything that followed: the clothes were designed inside a partnership that treated fashion as part of a wider cultural argument, not as decoration apart from it.

The collections page in this series files what that beginning became in fashion terms; this page files how it began: a Derbyshire childhood, a family move to the capital at 17, and a designing start in 1971 in the most culturally charged city in the country.

Punk and New Wave, Brought Mainstream

Vivienne is largely responsible for bringing modern punk and new wave fashions into the mainstream — the achievement her name stands for in fashion history. Styles that began as a challenge to convention became, through her work, part of what the wider wardrobe could contain: the bold, statement-making design language filed across this series, from the draped and tartan pieces of the collections to the Anglomania name the guide files alongside her own.

Read with the collections page, the profile completes its arc: the designer who started in 1971 with Malcolm McLaren carried a street-born style into the mainstream without sanding down what made it matter. The runway and spring fashions pages complete the filed record of that work, and the news page gathers its continuing coverage.