The Great Fashion Designers

by Brenda Polan

  If it sounds elitist, it was meant to. Yamamoto started off more the fine artist than the fashion designer. His clothes were difficult to understand, loaded, like a difficult poem or painting, with references and symbols—often disguised or distorted—and layers of meanings. His collections still include garments of great strangeness and a sort of theatrical ugliness which makes unusual demands on the understanding of the observer. His attitude has inevitably undergone some changes. In 1984 he told Leonard Koren:

  Since I began this fashion-making job, I have been thinking, ‘What is fashion for me?’ For about ten years I couldn’t believe in it because fashion is always changing. The people who follow it are superficial. The most important thing is, ‘What’s new?’ But in the last two or three years I’ve found something in it. In fashion one can find new kinds of expression about human beings—things that pure art like painting, sculpture and cinema can’t express. Only fashion can. I can’t explain exactly why it is, but the problem of what people are wearing and the influence over people of fashion is awesome. I think there’s a new way to create so I think there’s a future for me.

  So it has proved. In shedding some of his seriousness, Yamamoto learned to love fashion and over the years a new joyfulness has been evident in his work. He enjoys the way women enjoy his clothes, recognising that the spirit of self-conscious playfulness they bring to them is that extra human element that makes them work, that extra element that neither a picture not a sculpture nor even a movie contains.

  Further reading: See Francois Boudot’s Yohji Yamamoto: Fashion Memoir (1997), for a quick overview, supplemented by Yuniya Kawamura’s The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion (2004) and The Cutting Edge: Fashion from Japan (2005) by Louise Mitchell, Bonnie English and Akiko Fukai.

  37 VIVIENNE WESTWOOD (1941–)

  In terms of creativity and the ability to place fashion at the heart of a vital popular culture, Vivienne Westwood may be the greatest designer of the twentieth century. Her method is not so very different from that of many designers, particularly other British designers trained in an art-school tradition and, interestingly, a generation of Japanese designers who used this occidental approach to invent an original oriental fashion, but the conscious, didactic way she demonstrates it is unique. In 1991 when she was working through ideas related to both Christian Dior’s New Look and early eighteenth-century clothing, she told Brenda Polan, writing for The Independent on Sunday:

  Clothing has always reconstructed and modified the structure of the body and it still does today. What seems to surprise and upset people is reconstructions that don’t accord with what they consider to be the norm, the present accepted idea of beauty. If you design a dress with a sellier, the padding that gives it a rounded form has become a subversive act. Perhaps I mean it to be a subversive act. Perhaps I want to question people’s prejudices about what is beautiful, what makes a lady beautiful. Through fashion I try to re-evoke the past and reflect on it.

  Westwood trained as a teacher, and there is still a good deal of the pedagogue about her; ideas and analysis excite her. Clothes are a language she uses to deconstruct cliché and convention. She confronts prejudices and questions them—not always totally coherently but with courage and purpose. The subjects of her explorations of dress and its emotional and rational subtext have always been clearly signposted in the names and themes of her collections, which, when watched on a catwalk, stimulate the intellect as well as the senses—including the sense of humour. While she revels in the joy, the sheer fun of the fashion she makes, she is serious and very political in the way she uses it as an investigative tool. She is much preoccupied with the culture and its decline, believing the French are the inheritors and keepers of a true intellectual tradition. In 2007, in a conversation with Brenda Polan at the ICA in London as part of a conference on The Death of Taste, she answered a question on her response to current culture and its relationship to her concept of civilisation thus:

  The best thing about my job, and the worst thing is that it is non-stop and you never, never can stop. Some of my best thoughts occur at night, just because I am reading and I am hatching ideas. Everybody must have that experience where the ideas are sort of there and then you develop them and you think you mustn’t forget that, and sometimes you even get up and write it down. And then I must just say, because it’s an incredible, fantastic tip to give to people, I always write 30 quotations, a few of them in French when I can, because it’s so brilliant, the body of literature in France, it’s amazing. I’ll write 30 quotations, poetry and all kinds of things. For example, Rousseau—if you read some it’s so concentrated, you can just go over that quotation and you can find answers for all sorts of things that are in your mind at that particular time … And culture is connected with human rights. If you want to be able to lock people in jail and never tell them why, then you can’t have civilisation. I mean you have to have habeas corpus; you have to have justice before the law. And I’ve recently incorporated this into my fashion. And it interests me much more to be able to do that because I am very literal and I really like to work out my ideas.

  As Susannah Frankel remarked in The Guardian in 1997, ‘At any given time Westwood has at least two, maybe three ideas, or even sentences on the go concurrently, uttered in hushed Derbyshire tones, that career and collide until they either explode into meaning, often minutes and even hours later, or at times peter out entirely, leaving anyone who’s interested to fill in the gaps.’ Among fashion journalists and academics, there are very many who, out of admiration for the woman and her spirit as well as her work, are happy to do that.

  Vivienne Isabel Swire was born in Glossop, Derbyshire, in 1941, the first of three children. Her father came from a long line of shoemakers, and her mother worked as a weaver in one of the town’s cotton mills. She always liked fashion and remembers her mother pointing out a neighbour’s New Look outfit in 1947. It was a look she would emulate in her teenage years when she made her own clothes. She remembers customising her grammar school uniform into a pencil skirt. ‘It was a new thing, putting that on was such a symbol of sexuality,’ she told Claire Wilcox in 2003. In the late 1950s, the family moved to Harrow on the outskirts of London and at sixteen, Vivienne started a foundation course at Harrow School of Art but left after one term and began to support herself selling jewellery from a stall in the Portobello Road market. She abandoned this for work in a factory that would enable her to save up for teacher-training college. In 1962 she was working as a primary-school teacher when she met her first husband, Derek Westwood, at a dance, but the marriage failed some time after the birth of their son, Ben. In 1965 she met Malcolm McLaren, the father of Joe, her second son, born in 1967. Malcolm was to change the course of her life.

  McLaren, a typically rebellious child of the sex, drugs, and rock and roll 1960s, was influenced by the situationists and Guy Debord’s book, Societé du Spectacle, a collection of perverse aphorisms that was later to give a language to Punk. He loved clothes but thought there was nothing for him in the current boutique culture of London. He would style Vivienne with traditional garments juxtaposed in subversive ways and encouraged her to razor-cut and bleach her hair. They opened their first shop, Let It Rock, which launched Punk, on the King’s Road in 1971. By 1975, however, the shop had been renamed Sex, the interior sprayed with pornographic graffiti, hung with rubber curtains and stocked with sex and fetish wear. Westwood thrilled to the sense of trespass the clothes aroused. ‘All the clothes I wore people would regard as shocking, I wore them because I just thought that I looked like a princess from another planet.’

  In 1976 McLaren, now manager of the Sex Pistols, renamed the Kings Road shop Seditionaries—Clothes for Heroes and redesigned its interior to feature shots of an upside-down Piccadilly Circus and a ruined Dresden, spotlights poking through roughly hacked holes in the ceiling, and a live, caged rat. The Seditionaries collection summed up Westwood and McLaren’s work so far, encompassing the ripped garments of 1950s pin-up
pictures; the leather, chains and badges of the bikers; and the straps, safety pins and buckles of the fetishists. As Westwood said, ‘You couldn’t imagine the Punk Rock thing without the clothing.’ Deliberately confrontational, of course, the look was first excoriated then absorbed into mainstream fashion as a style element with a frisson of danger.

  By the early 1980s McLaren was focused on music and Westwood began to see herself as a fashion designer. In need of change, they chose to examine history. The shop was renamed World’s End, and the interior was transformed into a pirate galleon complete with a sloping deck, a low ceiling and small windows. The fascia featured a large clock displaying thirteen hours and hands that travelled backwards. The new collection, shown at Olympia in spring 1981, was accompanied by cannon fire and McLaren’s rap music and was reminiscent of the age of pirates, highwaymen and dandies. It was immediately acclaimed and copied all around the world. That autumn, they showed Savage, which combined Native American patterns with leather frock coats, Foreign Legion hats worn back-to-front, ‘petti-drawers’ and shorts. Nostalgia of Mud (autumn/winter 1982) followed and featured large tattered skirts topped by raw-edged sheepskin jackets in muddy colours. Punkature (spring/summer 1983) maintained a rough, slightly distressed feeling but, melding ‘punk’ and ‘couture’, also referenced Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner.

  Witches, the collection for autumn/winter 1983, was the final collaboration between Westwood and McLaren. Borrowing motifs from Keith Haring, a New York graffiti artist, it featured oversized, double-breasted jackets and coats, huge cream cotton mackintoshes worn with knitted jacquard bodies, tube skirts and pointed hats. In 1984 West-wood moved her production to Italy (she had found her current business partner, Carlo d’Amario). Her spring/summer 1984 collection was called Hypnos and was heavily indebted to synthetic sportswear fabrics in fluorescent colours. The Clint Eastwood collection was a development, much inspired by Tokyo’s neon nights and Italian company logos.

  In 1985 Westwood deliberately broke with the wide-shouldered, executive-tart/Dynasty look that was dominating fashion. Taking the ballet Petrushka as her inspiration, she created a ‘mini-crini,’ which combined the tutu with a shortened Victorian crinoline. The mini-crini was pure Westwood, its blending of ingénue’s party frock with hints of a Dior-derived mature sexuality decidedly titillating. She herself was interested, too, in the fact that although a crinoline has become a modern symbol of women’s oppression, the sheer space it claimed, the presence it imposed signified something very different. The result of similarly mixed motives, the Harris Tweed collection that followed celebrated Westwood’s delight in traditional English clothing and her growing obsession with a royalty that was simultaneously frumpy and glamorous—the princess of her youth grown into deep-bosomed country housewife. Many of the garments—the knitted twin sets, the ‘Stature of Liberty’ corsets and the tailored ‘Savile’ jackets—became Westwood classics

  The collections that followed became known collectively as ‘Britain Must Go Pagan’ and promiscuously juxtaposed traditional British themes with classical and pagan elements, the latter often derived from the pornography of ancient Greece. In Time Machine she made prim Miss Marple tweed suits, the jackets articulated like medieval armour. Voyage to Cythera, named after a painting by Watteau, represented a renewed interest in archaic construction methods, this time of eighteenth-century France, and was developed in Pagan V in which Sèvres patterns were printed on classical togas. It was at this time (1989) that John Fairchild of Women’s Wear Daily named Westwood one of the six best designers in the world.

  From 1990, with the Cut and Slash collection inspired by Elizabethan men’s clothing, Westwood’s hours spent in museums, art galleries and libraries provide the dominant themes in her work. In a period of minimalism, she preferred decoration, romance and aristocratic grandeur—never, of course, played totally straight. She cited the refinement she found in French design and the ‘easy charm’ and impeccable tailoring of English dress. ‘Fashion as we know it,’ she claimed, ‘is the result of the exchange of ideas between France and England.’

  As Claire Wilcox wrote in the catalogue to the West-wood Retrospective Exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2003, Westwood ‘sees fashion as personal propaganda, as an agent of arousal both physical and mental. The way clothes feel is as important as the way they look. To this end, she distorts, exaggerates and pares away the natural shape of the body, often using the constructions that she found in historical costume. She also gives each ensemble an agenda, laden with historical references that she says, “have a certain type of nostalgia which is how I would define glamour. They are part of the story of human culture.”’

  Vivienne Westwood was made a Dame of the British Empire in 2006 at a ceremony presided over by the Prince of Wales. She confided that she was not wearing knickers.

  Further reading: Jane Mulvagh’s Vivienne West-wood: An Unfashionable Life (1998) and Fred Vermorel’s Fashion and Perversity: A Life of Vivienne Westwood and the Sixties Laid Bare (1996) tell differing tales. Barbara Baines’s Revivals in Fashion: From the Elizabethan Age to the Present (1981) provides context and food for thought. Amy De la Haye’s The Cutting Edge: 50 Years of British Fashion (1996) is excellent background.

  38 PAUL SMITH (1946–)

  Since the 1980s, Paul Smith has been an outstanding force in British fashion, best known for a quirky, humorous design sensibility applied to classic British tailoring. For years he played down his abilities as a designer, but by the early 1990s Smith emerged as the complete package—a designer, retailer and businessman all rolled into one. A pioneering Western designer in Japan, Smith outsold Armani and Chanel there in the late 1980s.

  In creative terms, Sir Paul Smith (he was knighted in 2001) has been overlooked, perhaps because of his lack of formal fashion training. His consistent challenge to notions of good taste has made him an important postmodern influence in men’s fashion, spilling over into womenswear too (he launched a women’s collection in 1994). Smith loves the traditions of Savile Row–style tailoring, but he also loves kitsch and off-the-wall eccentricity. ‘What is good taste? What is bad taste?’ he said in 1990. ‘They are both so near. It’s just lovely to shove these in a food-mixer and throw them around.’ In a later comment, he said: ‘The wrong thing with the wrong thing is the speciality of the house.’ American novelist William Gibson, taking as his point of reference a nineteenth-century London clothes market, summed up his style neatly: ‘It is as though he possesses some inner equivalent of the Hounds-ditch Clothes Exchange—not a museum, but a vast, endlessly recombinant jumble sale in which all the artefacts of his nation and culture constantly engage in a mutual exchange of code.’

  Gibson highlights Smith’s fascination with the found object. Whether in London or Tokyo (undoubtedly his favourite city outside Britain), Smith is perpetually looking out for things that might be reinterpreted in the arena of fashion or simply sold in one of his shops for fun. Countless products, ranging from postage stamps to piles of fruit, are turned into T-shirt photo prints, reflecting a love of photography and the surreal inherited from his father. A childlike imagination is at work: a pair of fake eyeballs, for example, is turned into cufflinks and buttons. In the 1980s, veteran British designer Sir Hardy Amies was one of many who found his shops a treasure trove of ideas and entertainment.

  Smith was, and is, a unique figure in British fashion. Although British designers since the 1980s have proved among the most thrillingly imaginative in the world, filling the design studios of major fashion houses in Italy, France and America, they have shown little ability to build and sustain their own businesses. Before Smith, it was left to an American, Ralph Lauren, to translate classic British style for a modern international market. In the menswear market, some British names, such as Sir Hardy Amies, remained traditional in outlook, while others, including Aquascutum, Daks-Simpson, Jaeger and Gieves & Hawkes, made half-hearted efforts to move forward, rarely causing more than a ripple on
the international scene. Only Burberry, through the services of a farsighted American chief executive, Rosemarie Bravo, made progress in the late 1990s and the early noughties. Paul Smith might be compared to Vivienne Westwood, another great British designer who has played around with classic style. But where Westwood was an aggressively subversive force, Smith’s approach was playful and more accessible. He turned a quirky idea of Britishness into a global language of fashion. ‘My thing has always been about maximising Britishness,’ he has said. As he put it himself in an interview in 1981, he produces ‘classics with a twist’—a term that has since been used so often it has become a cliché.

  Smith has no time for conceptual fashion, saying ‘I don’t like … stupid ideas that can’t be worn.’ He is also proudly anti–big business, challenging the corporate style of the modern designer fashion business and the sameness of designer stores the world over. A portrait of the designer by James Lloyd in London’s National Portrait Gallery sums up his character well: energetic, irreverent, levelheaded and perhaps a good deal tougher than his easy-going public persona might suggest. Interviewed by Roger Tredre in 1990, Smith was modest about his design skills: ‘A few years ago, I would have said that I was just a getter-togetherer of fashion. But more recently I would say that I am a designer because I do have ideas that start with a blank sheet of paper.’