While the audience waited for Vivienne Westwood's show, a countdown of the world's most toxic animals played on the sound system. "Reality bites," the voice-over cheerfully concluded. Westwood would agree. Her obsession is ecocide, death of the planet through man-made environmental catastrophe. So the most toxic animal of all is man.
Perhaps that's why her collection placed such an emphatic emphasis on the hyper-shapely female: hips and breasts, and bias-cut swags of fabric to highlight the same. (The single male model in the show was offered up almost as a figure of fun.) Westwood has an extraordinary reservoir of ideas to draw from. And, as this collection paraded down the catwalk, many of those ideas were made manifest, particularly those lubricious off-the-shoulder swags. There were smears of historicism, like the highwayman's coat encrusted with lace at the cuffs and hems, or more recently, the tailored suits with the 1940s shoulders. Familiar stuff, and therein lies the rub. Yes, these were Westwood's own proposals decades ago—children, she is a goddess in the annals of fashion—so it is absolutely right that she reuses and recycles. But, ardent political message aside, it simply isn't very interesting to revisit season on season.
