Vivienne Isabel Swire was born in 1941 in Tintwistle, Derbyshire, the daughter of a cobbler’s assistant and a cotton-mill weaver. She trained as a primary-school teacher and took an evening course in silversmithing. In 1965, at 24, she met Malcolm McLaren at a party; within a decade they had opened the shop at 430 King’s Road that would, under the name SEX, launch punk.

The Shop

The shop changed its name four times between 1971 and 1980. Let It Rock, Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die, SEX, Seditionaries, and finally Worlds End. The garments it sold — bondage trousers, muslin shirts with safety-pin closures, T-shirts printed with inflammatory slogans — were the first commercially designed collection to simulate the look of salvaged clothing. The Sex Pistols, whom McLaren managed, modelled.

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Fashion is the armour we put on to fight the twentieth century.

The Independent Years

Westwood separated from McLaren in 1984 and took the house solo. Her Pirate collection of 1981 had already established her mature vocabulary — a recombinant historicism that sampled the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries in single garments. Through the 1980s and 1990s she excavated, with increasing scholarly precision, the corset, the bustle, and the mini-crini, returning each to the runway as a contemporary proposition.

Dame

She was appointed OBE in 1992 (famously arriving knickerless at Buckingham Palace) and DBE in 2006. In her final two decades she became, improbably, a British institution and, increasingly, a climate activist, producing collections with printed ecological manifestos.

She died in December 2022, at 81, at her home in Clapham. The shop at 430 King’s Road, still called Worlds End, remains open.