Vivienne Westwood

The single most Westwood object of the era was the printed T-shirt. She and McLaren turned the plain cotton shirt into a broadsheet, covering it with images and texts chosen to detonate on contact: pornographic cartoons, a portrait of the Queen defaced, lists of things they loved and hated, slogans lifted from situationist pamphlets. Wearing one was not a fashion choice so much as a public statement you couldn't take back once you'd left the house.

This was where the method showed itself most clearly. The garment carried an argument. A shirt that reproduced an offensive image forced everyone who saw it — and the person wearing it — into a position. Westwood understood, early and instinctively, that clothes are read in public before anyone speaks, and that a garment could do political work simply by existing on a body in a shared street. The T-shirt was cheap to make and impossible to ignore, which made it the perfect vehicle.

Her first solo catwalk collection, Pirate, arrived for autumn 1981 — flamboyant, historical, drawing on eighteenth-century swagger and folk costume rather than fetishwear. It confused people who expected more bondage trousers, and that was rather the point. Through the eighties she staged a series of collections mining the British past: crinolines, corsets, tweeds, tailoring lifted from portraits in the National Gallery. She was raiding history the way she had once raided fetish catalogues — pulling out what was supposedly finished and putting it, jarringly, back on a living body.

The corset is the clearest case. Long read as an instrument of female confinement, Westwood reintroduced it in the late eighties as outerwear, worn with pride and printed with old-master paintings. Critics could not decide whether this was reactionary or liberating, and she rather enjoyed leaving them stuck. The garment argued with its own history. It was the T-shirt trick again, made more sophisticated: take a loaded object and force the viewer to reconsider what it means.

The temptation is to read Westwood's life as a straight line from rebel to sellout, with the honours and the handbags as the evidence of surrender. That reading misses how consistent she actually was. Provocation, for her, was never a phase tied to being young and broke. It was a design method — a repeatable way of making a garment do something beyond covering the body. Take an object loaded with meaning, wrench it out of its expected context, and put it back into the world so that nobody can look at it neutrally. The fetish rubber, the defaced Queen, the resurrected corset, and later the slogans about climate and civil liberties she printed and wore into her seventies: all the same operation, run on different material.

The shop at 430 King's Road is still there — Westwood kept a store on that spot for the whole of her career, its clock running backwards over the door. From Let It Rock to SEX to Seditionaries to the World's End boutique it eventually became, the address stayed constant while everything on the rails kept mutating. The woman who opened it as a self-taught teacher with a partner full of scandal ended up running a global house from the same coordinates, still cutting garments meant to make a passer-by stop and take a position.