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“... time​ in 1979, after the death of Sid Vicious and before the enthronement of Margaret Thatcher, Vivienne Westwood ‘lost interest’ in punk. She and her lover Malcolm McLaren had been at the heart of the British version: they had dreamed up much of the look, the attitude and the lyrics, though not the sound. A full year before David Bowie adopted the ...”

“... In 1972, Vivienne Westwood, a 31-year-old mother of two, sat down at the kitchen table of her council flat in Clapham and began decorating white T-shirts to sell at Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die, the shop at 430 King’s Road owned and run by her boyfriend, Malcolm McLaren. Westwood’s previous T-shirts, which bore screenprint images of rock’n’roll idols and slogans like ‘Vive la Rock’, had not sold well ...”

“... than in women’s – there seems to be an element of aesthetic clowning. One men’s jacket by Vivienne Westwood is an exaggerated male torso made of tinted pearls, while another is made of coloured ostrich feathers. There is a man in a plastic blue and yellow space jacket, with fins instead of cuffs and epaulettes. This is fashion display in its pure ...”

“... casualness’, the heavy jeans with deep cuffs and tight white T-shirts, influenced Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren to call their King’s Road shop Sex after an entry in Orton’s diary: ‘sex is the only way to infuriate them.’ They stocked a suitably lurid Prick Up Your Ears T-shirt. The most intricate and poignant of ...”

“... espadrilles are as timeless as the welted shoe made on your own last in St James’s, the shoes Vivienne Westwood models have been known to fall off are stylish. The products of the Wiener Werkstätte were that above all. Hoffmann’s coffee pot, like many traditional ones, has a handle that sticks out from the side. But traditional coffee-pot handles ...”

“... anarchic antics and seditious lyrics, none of those involved – among them Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood – faced criminal charges. The performance was a publicity stunt devised by McLaren and Richard Branson to promote the band’s new single. The Silver Jubilee’s real radical was the Black activist Darcus Howe, born in Trinidad in ...”

“... in May 1968. Some of these utopian battle-cries reappeared on the T-shirts designed by McLaren and Vivienne Westwood and sold in their King’s Road boutique. Slogans and recycled Situationist graphics popped up on Sex Pistols record sleeves and promotional material. Even before this, during his brief stint managing the New York Dolls in 1975, McLaren had ...”

“... exhibitions in the museum’s history: Radical Fashion (2001); Versace at the V&A (2002); the Vivienne Westwood retrospective (2004); The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London 1947-57 (2007); the spectacular Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (2015); and Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up (2018). She has worked on two major reorganisations of the ...”

“... of a succession of youth tribes themselves. There is a telling photo here of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood in 1971, posing in their first shop, young and hungry-looking and dressed for attention. But it would be another five years before they became famous, for stage-managing the rise of the Sex Pistols. In the British 1970s, even in the most ...”

“... in the King’s Road. The space being discussed is the shop that was to become Sex, where Vivienne Westwood invented the Destroy T-shirt, where Malcolm McLaren conspired with his cronies and first met Johnny Rotten. Sex went on to become Seditionaries, and is still World’s End, the shop with the backward-running clock outside it and the crooked ...”

“... was another of McQueen’s maxims. Customising was a watchword of punk, with Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood the subject of a more recent show at the Met also created by Andrew Bolton. Customising is a form of bespoke and bespoke relies on those trades that go back to the Middle Ages and are commemorated in the names of the City Companies and ...”

“... endlessly recycling the aesthetic challenges of the fringe into mainstream culture. Paul Smith and Vivienne Westwood introduced the mod and punk to high-end tailoring; Ozwald Boateng and Richard James brought peacock colours and a new, sharp swagger back to Savile Row; Tom Ford and Christopher Bailey revived the louche elegance of Walter Albini and 1930s ...”

“... in them shaven-headed. For a woman to cut off her long hair was still a transgressive act when Vivienne Westwood did it, at Malcolm McLaren’s urging, half a century later, and Westwood stopped short of shaving her eyebrows, as Cahun did, to remove cues of expressiveness we take for granted. The effect is in great ...”

“... where around six we join a straggling queue of notables, the actors the most obvious, though Vivienne Westwood is her usual unobtrusive self. Talk to various people in the queue, one of whom seems to know my plays well but then congratulates me on my paintings of trees – she’s the first of three people who confuse me with Hockney and though he ...”

“... is a curious production, both off-the-peg and strangely skewed, like some sweatshop version of Vivienne Westwood. There are jokey names (Page and Turner for a publisher, John Elton for an American literary agent with a disfiguring hair transplant) and passages of broad pastiche, such as this from a novel about Shakespeare: ‘“Fye, Will,” said ...”