Vivienne Westwood and Lessons in Punk
Vivienne Westwood was punk before punk. In remembering her legacy these past couple weeks (and rewatching the 2018 documentary Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist) I’ve been trying to wrap my head around just what that might mean. Here’s one thing I know: for Westwood, there was always more to understand about the world. And seemingly, a commitment to never just take things as they were. It was ingrained in her spirit, and that curiosity and resistance were with her till the end.
The thing about trying to understand ‘punk’ is that it never wanted to be defined or categorized – that would be inherently against the point. “All punk is attitude,” said Joey Ramone. Punk as attitude suggests that it is not the content itself but the style, the sentiment, and the intention. And it’s one against “the system”. Which might be taken to mean, the limiting need in our society to systemize and categorize everything. In his book, Punk Sociology, David Beer writes of the concept, “one of the defining characteristics of punk is this very discomfort with categorization and definition”. This is probably why, in punk history, punk is so resistant to being boxed (stubbornly, and rightfully so). To defy definition is punk.
Still, in approaching that attitude- in all its grey-area glory- Vivienne Westwood’s clothes freed people of so many of the sartorial symbology that the fashion system had pushed them into. Women didn’t have to look ‘pretty’. Sex and sexuality didn’t have to be hushed. People could be loud and wild and angry. They no longer had to buy in. They could take what was in the world and make it their own.
Of course, there is an irony to her story: showing at Paris Fashion Week, selling at high-end auction houses, archival pieces displayed at the V&A and all. This is what the system does when something resonates, even at its own expense. Westwood recognized that the moment it started to happen. She recollects in the documentary, “I realized we weren’t really attacking the system at all. [Punk] was being marketed.”
And it is at these moments I think it is so important to return to the attitude rather than the aesthetic. For it’s the attitude that is at the root of the movement, and it’s the attitude that cannot be systemized. Through Vivienne Westwood’s career punk took so many shapes. “A climate revolution” is one she left us with. “You’ve got to kill the machine that is destroying us,” Westwood preached of the change that needed to happen. Perhaps because, too many times, she’s seen resistance become inherited by the machine itself. Maybe at some point, it has to be more about building a new one.
This kind of reinvention and bold intent is exactly what keeps punk alive. Attitudes like Vivienne Westwood’s are a gift to the world– daring to disrupt the system even when her rebellion became a part of it.
