Westwood shows in Paris, Vivienne goes on strike in London - Lifestyle

The pret-à-porter collection by

spring / summer designed by her husband Andreas Kronthaler is presented in Paris, but she, an irreducible 81-year-old rebel, not surprisingly the mother of punk, stays in London to join a social protest.

"When prices rise faster than wages, the cost of food, shelter and clothing can become devastating for many," says the political stylist par excellence. There is a growing number of people unable to find affordable homes. accessible, there are nurses supplementing their livelihoods with food banks, abandoned ambulances outside hospitals with patients in. Our newspapers are filled with despair and fear that grows in society, ordinary families scared of the future, who fail to afford a decent life.

In this context, unions across the UK are coordinating a day of strikes, right on the day of our show on October 1st, to demonstrate for a just distribution of wealth.

I decided to stay in London to support them. "From Paris instead, her husband comments:" This collection is my dream.

I didn't know how to explain it to Vivienne - he reveals - I just had to do it.

I left the house and thought I was in Paris and something in the sky made me realize how much I wanted to be there.

Super-Infinite - The Transformations of John Donne 'by Katherine Rundell, a wonderful writer, is the portrait of an exceptional man from the time of James I of England.

John Donne understood that when we get dressed we ask something from the world.

All the clothes speak: they say wish me,

Since the beginnings of Andreas Kronthaler x Vivienne Westwood I have worked with stocks of discarded fabrics.

Now the shelves are almost empty, what is left are rolls of mesh (the material normally used for corsetry).

The only fabrics used in the collection are brocades by Stephen Walters, perhaps the only remaining silk weaver in England, and a star-studded silk jacquard copied from a Worth suit.

"I always like to combine the new with the old - warns Andreas -. For this reason we also work with second hand pieces recycled from my personal wardrobe: old t-shirts and sweatshirts, tank tops and briefs. Playing with historical references, looking at the past, as Vivienne has always done, the final result is reminiscent of the Renaissance ".

An agender style on the platform,

heels and wedges of unthinkable heights, corsets and draperies for him too.

leather and vinyl.

After a first marriage with Derek Westwood, from whom she takes her surname, and from which Benjamin, their first child, was born, Vivienne falls in love with Malcom McLaren, future manager of the Sex Pistols, with whom, in 1967, she will have her second child , Joseph.

With McLaren, in 1971, she opened her first store, Let it Rock, at 430 King's Road.

Since the 1980s, the store has been called Worlds End, distinguished, in the sign, by a clock that runs backwards.

In the years of the Thatcher government (in April 1989 Vivienne appeared on the cover of Tatler magazine in the guise of the Iron Lady, creating a sensation).

The designer translated into aesthetics the most important subcultural movement in England and the young people of the time: punk,