Vivienne Westwood

I want to be precise about something with Westwood, because it's usually flattened: she isn't a designer who noticed punk and interpreted it for a couture audience the way some of her contemporaries did. She and Malcolm McLaren were, with the Sex Pistols and the King's Road scene around them, actually inventing the look in the first place, in real time, out of one small shop that kept changing its name as fast as the ideas inside it changed.

That shop is really the whole story of her 70s. It opened in 1971 as Let It Rock, selling teddy-boy revival gear; by 1972 it had become Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, moving into biker leather and rocker references; by 1974 it was SEX, stocking rubber, bondage gear, and fetish-adjacent clothing under a hot-pink shopfront sign that was, deliberately, exactly as confrontational as it sounds; and by 1976-77, as the shop became Seditionaries, Westwood was producing the actual garments that would define punk's visual vocabulary - bondage trousers with connecting straps between the legs, safety-pinned and deliberately ripped T-shirts, slogan shirts with cut-up text and inflammatory imagery, tartan reworked with zips and D-rings. None of this came out of a design studio's mood board. It came directly out of clothing a specific group of musicians and regulars around the shop, McLaren managing the Sex Pistols out of the same social circle, which is exactly why the look reads as authentic street rebellion rather than a runway's idea of one - because that's literally what it was before it was anything else.

The punk silhouette entry and the punk rock and anti-fashion entry both cover how quickly the wider fashion industry absorbed and resold what had started as a genuine rejection of it - and I think that irony is really the throughline of Westwood's whole career, not just her 70s output. She spent the decade building a visual language meant to be unsellable, and the fact that it got sold anyway, immediately and everywhere, is less a failure of the original idea than proof of exactly how powerful it was.