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 ensemble is from Westwood’s ‘Punkature’ collection of Spring/Summer 1983. At the time, Westwood said, ‘I’m not interested in tailoring, but in the push and pull of the garment against the body.’ As curator Claire Wilcox has written, ‘With its emphasis on distressed and inexpensive fabrics, Punkature was like a futuristic interpretation of Punk.’ (Wilcox, C., ‘Vivienne Westwood’, V & A Publications, 2004, p. 18).