Vivienne Westwood passed away at the age of 81. Image Source: GQ
Vivienne Westwood passed away at the age of 81.
Vivienne Westwood, the fashion legend and activist, died at the age of 81, according to her eponymous fashion house, which stated that she died peacefully on Thursday in Clapham, South London, surrounded by her family. The cause of death was not disclosed.
The post also stated that up until the very end, fashion legend and activist Vivienne Westwood kept going to do what she adored, which included creating, continuing to work on her art, drafting her book, and adjusting the world for the better. The late designer led an amazing life, according to the post, and her innovation and influence over the last 60 years have been huge and will continue.
Finally, the assertion mentioned that Vivienne Westwood was a Taoist who had specified the Tao spiritual system. Never before has there been a more urgent need for the Tao than now. She stated that Tao provides individuals with a sense of people who belong to the cosmos and an intention for life; it provides individuals with a sense of identity and power to know that they are living, can end up living, and thus would need to live: making use of one's character and life on earth. In conclusion, it was asserted that the world requires Vivienne to make a difference.
Andreas Kronthaler, Vivienne Westwood's husband and creative partner, said in a declaration to The Guardian that he will keep going with Vivienne Westwood in his heart and that they've been working until the end and that she has given him plenty to move forward. Andreas Kronthaler completed with a thank you, darling.
The Vivienne Foundation, a non-profit organization created in late 2022 by Westwood and her sons and granddaughters, will formally announce next year to honor her legacy. The Organisation's mission will be to raise public awareness and effect substantive improvement in four areas: global climate, conflict, civil rights, and capitalism.
Vivienne Westwood was born in the Derbyshire village of Tintwistle in 1941 and moved to London with her family in 1957, where she did attend art school for one term. Vivienne Westwood, was a self-taught designer with no official fashion training, who started making clothes as a young teen by following trends and dissemble vintage clothes she discovered at markets to comprehend the cut and fabrication.
After divorcing her first husband, Derek Westwood, she met band manager Malcolm McLaren in the 1960s while working as an elementary school teacher. In 1971, the pair opened a modest shop on Kings Road in Chelsea that grew into a hangout for a number of the bands she outfitted, such as McLaren's Sex Pistols. Her provoking and every once-in-a-while debatable designs became synonymous with the punk aesthetic, and Westwood would go on to become one of Britain's most lauded fashion designers, fusing historical documents, classic customizing, and romance flourishes with extremely hard and sometimes overtly political statements.
Vivienne Westwood's first catwalk show, for her Pirates collection, in 1981, was an important advance in the punk rebel's transition into one of the fashion world's most well-known stars. But she never stopped surprising: her Statue of Liberty corset from 1987 is given credit with sparking the "underwear as outerwear" trend. The designer's activist-run of success never faded. In 1989, she posed as Margaret Thatcher for the cover of Tatler magazine, with the caption, "This woman was once a punk." She later spoke to Dazed Digtal and said that the suit she wore was decided to order by Margaret Thatcher from Aquascutum, but she eventually cancelled it.
Vivienne Westwood shifted her political focus to the climate crisis in the mid-2000s. She wrote at the time in a policy platform titled Active Resistance to Propaganda in 2007 that they have an option: to become more cultured, and thus more sentient, or to be the catastrophic and self-destructive animal, the death of their cleverness (To be or not to be).
The late fashion designer and activist gleefully undermined her business interests as an anti-consumerist. She told AAP in 2010 that she would simply tell people to stop buying clothes. Why not safeguard this precious gift of life while we still have it? She went on to say that she does not believe that destruction is unavoidable and that some of them would like to stop it and help people survive. She delivered a tank to the then-prime minister David Cameron's home in Oxfordshire in 2015 to protest fracking.
Westwood preserved a regular blog on her website, No Man's Land, about weather and social equity concerns until her death. She released a statement last month in support of the climatic change protesters who threw soup on Van Gogh's sunflowers, writing, Young individuals are desperate and they're dressed in a "Just Stop Oil" T-shirt adding that they're taking action.
We send our deepest condolences to the family
