Vivienne Westwood

Vivienne Westwood taught at a primary school until 1971. That year she and Malcolm McLaren set up shop at 430 King’s Road in London. The shop kept changing its name: Let It Rock, then Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die, then Sex in 1974 and Seditionaries in 1976.

This is where the punk look took shape. The Sex Pistols, managed by McLaren, wore her clothes. Bondage trousers crossed with straps, mohair jumpers knitted so loosely you could see through them, T-shirts slashed and written on by hand: these became punk staples. She described punk as a way of “seeing if one could put a spoke in the system”.

Pirate, in 1981, was her first catwalk show. After that she went back in time. She studied garments in museum collections and borrowed from paintings by Watteau and Boucher. In 1985 the mini-crini crossed a Victorian crinoline with a miniskirt. In 1987 her Harris Tweed collection brought the Scottish cloth back into fashion and put corsets on the outside.

Start with the cut rather than the print: exaggerated volumes, drapes, an old garment shortened or moved somewhere new. She campaigned against nuclear weapons and for climate action, and was made a Dame in 2006. She died in London on 29 December 2022, aged 81.