Allegra
Seymour

With the recent passing of fashion icon, Vivienne Westwood, this outfit came together as a real ode to her iconoclastic spirit and a representation of the legacy she has cast as Queen of British Fashion. For Westwood, punk wasn’t just an aesthetic - it was a political movement. She wanted her clothes to inspire change and disrupt the structures of society itself, taking the tweed and tartans of the upper class and repurposing them into daring silhouettes; cutting the crinolines free of Victorian dress and making them a statement of her own. For centuries horse racing has been a spectacle frequented by high-society and the bourgeoise. The ivory and lace adorned fan and Millinery reference historical Victorian dress. I then sourced this Vintage 1960s pencil skirt similar to the one Helena Bonham Carter wore to Westwood’s funeral, that also conjures up a vision of Great Britain’s wild rugged mountains, Scottish bagpipes and clan kilts that is synonymous with tartan and then paired it with a vintage velvet jacket which I sustainably reworked myself by destructively pouring bleach on the fabric to create a true form of ‘Westwood-esque’ individual expression. This up-cycling technique also is in favour of Westwood’s ideology to daringly encourage her customers to “Buy less. Choose well. Make it last” as she was a fraught fighter against climate change, capitalism, fracking, fascism, and war. Her fashion did not exist to conform to the historic image of high establishment dress, but to rip it to shreds. It’s certainly a representation of Westwood’s contribution to British Fashion which was officially recognised when she was appointed Dame of the British Empire by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 1992.