“Letting go of the past is a dogma of the last century,” Vivienne Westwood once said. “It’s like telling scientists to throw away their laboratories. If you throw them away, all your techniques are wasted. You have to go back in time.” At Olympia in 1981. The legendary designer’s first ‘Pirate’ fashion show was held before the official London Fashion Week (which was officially launched in 1984 in collaboration with the British Fashion Council, which had been founded the previous year). Westwood witnessed and inspired the rise of unruly fashion in the Southeast. London upstarts John Galliano and Alexander McQueen, Katharine Hamnett and Margaret Thatcher face off on ‘58% Don’t Persh’ T-shirts, NEWGEN fundraising initiative and Fashion East’s own noisy talent incubator. Birth, mass exodus of designers. Their epic return to New York and Paris (including Westwood himself) and their love for the raw romance of a city that will never give up again.
London Fashion Week is a hotbed of newness, from McQueen’s dramatic robot-designed Shalom Harlow dress in 1999 to Christopher Bailey’s “See Now, Buy Now” strategy in 2016, but it’s also known for its outrageous parties. It would be held. Prince performed at Matthew Williamson’s homecoming show in spring/summer 2008, and Grace Jones performed in a limousine for Philip Treacy in the same year. From Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell walking in Stella McCartney’s graduate CSM show, to Hussein Chalayan’s live construction of a coffee table dress in 2001, to Henry Holland’s pornographic and poetic Naughties phenomenon, it really is It is impossible to keep track of all the wonderful and crazy sights. tea. Here, in celebration of his 40th birthday at LFW, we present some great snippets that you may have missed the first time around, and which, as Westwood said, certainly deserve another moment in the sun. Masu.