“She was tough, quite fierce,” says the British photographer Ki Price of Dame Vivienne Westwood. “But it was amazing to work with someone who always knew what she wanted.”
Westwood was fierce from the get-go, those days in the early 60s when she worked as a primary-school teacher while also selling her jewelry designs at a stall in Portobello Road. In 1965, she left her husband, Derek Westwood, and soon after met Malcolm McLaren, who would manage the Sex Pistols and who convinced Westwood to give up her day job and join him in running a boutique in 1972. Together they set up shop in Chelsea and made clothes.
Westwood brought her own touch to the fashions they created, pieces such as T-shirts emblazoned with daring slogans like PERV and ROCK. In 1974, she changed the name of the store to Sex and amped up the radical. Her designs alluded to bondage and homoerotic art, challenging the status quo and seducing sheltered middle-class kids. In short, the store became the epicenter of punk, that scraggly aesthetic of skinny tees and torn tartans, silver studs and safety pins. Westwood and McLaren parted ways in 1984, and she moved on to high fashion. When, in 1989, Westwood dressed up like Margaret Thatcher for the cover of Tatler, the coverline read, “This woman was once a punk.”
Price met Westwood much later in her life, after the rebel had become a knighted dame. But she still used the Paris catwalk to convey political statements. In 2008, Westwood advocated for nuclear disarmament; in 2014, she cut off her hair to combat climate change. When Price met her, in 2013, she was busy defending Julian Assange, of WikiLeaks. And in 2015, Price shadowed her during an anti-fracking campaign across the U.K.
“Vivienne didn’t stay in hotels,” he says. “She slept in the bunks with us. And whenever we traveled, she always flew economy. She never, ever upgraded herself.” They traveled together until 2020, two years before Westwood died.
To celebrate her birthday, on April 8, Price presents a few of his portraits of Britain’s rebel poster child, along with imagery from fashion shows. He shares the story behind one particular photograph, which captures Westwood on the beach, posing naked under a draped Welsh flag as the waves roll behind her. “As I was shooting, she was a bit nervous,” he recalls, “which was unlike her. I didn’t know why.” It was only shortly before she died that he learned why. “She’d had a double mastectomy just a month before doing that picture. Perhaps that’s the reason for its power.”
Westwood would have turned 83 this Monday, but her legacy lives on. “When I was shooting her, I don’t think she ever really thought it was about herself,” Price reflects. “It was always about something bigger than her.” —Elena Clavarino
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at AIR MAIL