Now you can have a piece from every Vivienne Westwood runway collection, thanks to this new book

It’s 40 years since Vivienne Westwood staged her first runway show to, as she put it, “destroy the word ‘conformity’.” She added: “It’s the only reason I’m in fashion.” At a time when we are craving the atmosphere and theatricality of physical fashion shows more than ever, Thames & Hudson is taking us on a trip back in time to every Vivienne Westwood show there’s ever been with a sumptuous new book, Vivienne Westwood Catwalk: The Complete Collections.

With an introduction and collection of texts by fashion journalist Alexander Fury, and biographies written by both Westwood and her husband and longtime collaborator Andreas Kronthaler, Vogue got an exclusive peek inside the tome, which released on June 24, 2021.

Here, we go back in time to 1981 to Westwood’s first catwalk collection, Pirates, with its swashbuckler boots, squiggle prints and fall-down stockings—pioneering fashion’s neo-romantic movement—complete with a text from the book by Fury.

Pirate

Vivienne Westwood’s catwalk debut came late in her career. By 1981, aged 40, she had been designing for a decade, creating clothes to fill the ever-transforming King’s Road, London, boutique she ran in partnership with [Sex Pistols manager and then-boyfriend] Malcolm McLaren. Westwood, however, reasons that this show—retrospectively dubbed Pirate, although that name did not appear on the invitations—was the actual beginning of her career as a fashion designer.

The show chimed with a reinvention of the boutique as Worlds End, inspired by pirates (its logo, a cutlass-brandishing arm, was the flag of 17th-century English privateer-turned-pirate Thomas Tew), allied with McLaren and Westwood’s underlying theme of plundering history and cultures worldwide for inspiration.

With no experience of a formal fashion show, Westwood allowed the mostly non-professional models to choose their own outfits. Looks mixed together menswear and womenswear, as Westwood would do on her catwalks for the next 15 years. Makeup artist Yvonne Gold, who worked on Westwood’s first eight shows, covered the models’ teeth with gold foil from cigarette packets—an idea inspired by stylist Caroline Baker. The colour gold was important: it linked to the idea of plunder.

The show, staged at Pillar Hall in Olympia London, caused a sensation. The clothes were rich, colourful and romantic, in contrast to the black urban-guerrilla attire of [Westwood’s renamed boutique] Seditionaries’ punks: saffron yellow, tomato orange and cobalt blue, with a graphic squiggly pattern that evoked rope, undulating waves and African-Dutch wax textiles. Decorated tasselled scarves, softly buckled boots and asymmetric bloused tunics with full sleeves, worn under bicorne hats and over petti-drawers based on 18th-century underwear.

There was humour, too. Westwood designed a T-shirt with a tube connecting the breasts, which she called the ‘Inter-titty’ top. The show’s press release stated: “These clothes are made to go hunting and fishing in, climbing trees and running through the wilderness—cassette pack on your back, loincloth between your legs, gold braids in your hair, a modern-day pirate.”

Just as McLaren connected the clothes of [Westwood’s shops] SEX and Seditionaries to the Sex Pistols, he now linked Pirate to his new venture, the [1980s new-wave band] Bow Wow Wow. More widely, the idea of the collection connected to the burgeoning New Romantic movement in London club culture. But Westwood and McLaren’s shift to romance came at an opportune moment: three months after Pirate debuted, Diana Spencer married Prince Charles in a wildly romantic taffeta ballgown to a global audience of 750 million. At the same time, the pirate clothes were suddenly offered for sale by mainstream retailers, including Bloomingdale’s, Henri Bendel and Macy’s in the US and Joseph in London. They also debuted in British Vogue. Spontaneously exuberant and enormous in its impact, this show truly began Westwood’s career as a fashion force.

Vivienne Westwood Catwalk: The Complete Collections by Alexander Fury (Thames & Hudson) is out June 24, 2021