Vivienne Westwood Dead: Fashion Designer Was 81

Vivienne Westwood, the English fashion designer who brought punk fashion to the earth, died on Thursday. She was 81.

“Vivienne Westwood died currently, peacefully and surrounded by her loved ones, in Clapham, South London,” a publish on her formal Twitter site reads. “The environment needs folks like Vivienne to make a transform for the improved.”

The announcement includes the following estimate from Westwood: “Tao non secular system. There was never ever additional need for the Tao currently. Tao offers you a sensation that you belong to the cosmos and gives objective to your life it offers you these kinds of a sense of identification and strength to know you’re dwelling the lifetime you can reside and hence should to be living: make full use of your character and total use of your life on earth.”

First mounting to prominence in the 1970s as the co-owner of the boutique Sex alongside with Sexual intercourse Pistols supervisor Malcolm McLaren, Westwood assisted to shape the design of the U.K. punk scene.

The store turned a conference place for punk bands, and Westwood’s creations, worn by London punk rockers, released a new type to the planet that made use of pinned-together items, rubber and plastic apparel, loads of zippers, tartan bondage trousers, torn fabric and graffitied t-shirts. Chrissie Hynde and associates of the Intercourse Pistols were being amid the influential shop’s staff.

The store was renamed Seditionaries – Apparel for Heroes and then World’s Close as Westwood’s interests moved away from the punk scene.

Members of bands including Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Slits had been affected by her vogue, and Viv Albertine of the Slits wrote in her memoir, “Vivienne and Malcolm use clothing to shock, irritate and provoke a response but also to inspire transform. Mohair jumpers, knitted on major needles, so loosely that you can see all the way by means of them, T-shirts slashed and written on by hand, seams and labels on the outdoors, displaying the design of the piece these attitudes are reflected in the music we make. It is Alright to not be ideal, to display the workings of your lifetime and your brain in your songs and your clothes.”

In addition to her fashion collections, she developed the uniforms for flight attendants from Virgin Atlantic and furnished wardrobe for Elisabeth Shue in “Leaving Las Vegas” as very well as for “Shadowboxer” and “Twenty-Just one.”

A 2018 documentary, “Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist” lined her life and operate, and she was portrayed in the Fx mini-collection “Pistol” by Talulah Riley. Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw character wore a person of Westwood’s marriage dress creations in the film variation of “Sex and the Metropolis.”

Westwood was a longtime political activist, operating to combat consumerism, defend the setting and protest results in this kind of as wage inequality.

She is survived by her partner, Andreas Kronthaler, and two sons.