For well over three decades Vivienne Westwood, along with her one-time partner Malcolm McLaren, has been at the centre of British fashion and one of its most inventive and influential designers. Westwood’s career in fashion was galvanised by McLaren and together they launched memorable fashion moments, including Punk in the early 1970s and later their Pirates collection. McLaren and Westwood conducted a design relationship between 1971 and 1983. In 1990 and again in 1991 Vivienne Westwood was named British Designer of the Year; she has also received an OBE.

Westwood’s unique mix of practicality and inventiveness, her preoccupation with silhouette and the manner in which she manipulates fabrics result in dynamic fashion. Westwood herself once said, 'You have a much better life if you wear impressive clothes.’

This skirt and scarf ensemble is from Westwood’s ‘Clint Eastwood’ collection; this title referenced the large-scale vistas of Western films. The skirt is rendered in purple knit wool with fringed felt at the hem decorated with hand prints inspired by national flags. Such design features also reflected the element of Punk that still permeated fashion of the early 1980s.