Vivienne Westwood, fashion designer and style icon, dies at 81 - CNN

British manner decorator and benignant icon Vivienne Westwood has died aged 81. She passed distant peacefully, surrounded by her family, astatine her location successful London connected Thursday, according to an authoritative connection from her eponymous company.

To the media, she was "the precocious priestess of punk" and the "Queen of Extreme." To the manner satellite she was a beloved quality who energized and pushed the boundaries of the manufacture until her death.

She twirled sans culottes for photographers aft receiving her Order of the British Empire from the Queen successful 1992. In April 1989, she made the beforehand screen of Tatler magazine, dressed successful an Aquascutum suit she said was intended for Margaret Thatcher.

Westwood, frankly, didn't springiness a hoot. As the oldest of ingénues with periodically orange-tinted hairsbreadth and alabaster complexion, she roseate disgracefully to the revered presumption of British nationalist treasure.  

"I person an in-built perversity," Westwood's reported to person said, per Jon Savage's seminal "England's Dreaming: The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock," "a benignant of in-built timepiece which ever reacts against thing orthodox."

She was calved Vivienne Isabel Swire successful Derbyshire, England connected April 8, 1941. Her parent worked arsenic a weaver astatine section fabric mills; her begetter came from a household of shoemakers. She began making apparel for herself arsenic a teenager.

After a word astatine Harrow Art School, she worked arsenic a superior schoolhouse teacher, and joined a mill worker, Derek Westwood, successful 1962.

But everything changed erstwhile she near her husband, and met Malcolm McLaren successful 1965.

"I felt arsenic if determination were truthful galore doors to open, and helium had the cardinal to each of them," she told Newsweek successful 2004.

It's intolerable to ideate 1970s Britain without their originative partnership. McLaren managed the Sex Pistols and from a store connected London's King's Road, Westwood helped make a ocular grammar for the punk movement.

The store changed names — Let It Rock; Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die; Sex; Seditionaries — but you couldn't flight its interaction connected the street.

"It changed the mode radical looked," Westwood told Time mag successful 2012. "I was messianic astir punk, seeing if 1 could enactment a spoke successful the strategy successful immoderate way."

Her apparel ranged from fetishistic bondage cogwheel to monolithic level shoes and slogan T-shirts. Seditionaries famously sold a t- garment showing the Queen with a information pin done the royal lip.

Westwood yet moved on. In 1981, astatine 40, Westwood launched her archetypal catwalk postulation with McLaren. The sex neutral apparel evoked the aureate property of piracy, highwaymen, dandies and buccaneers. Westwood studied aged tailoring techniques and subverted them, an attack aboriginal imitated by different British designers similar John Galliano and Alexander McQueen.

Over the people of the decade, Westwood drew inspiration eclectically from Keith Haring, "Blade Runner" and the French Foreign Legion.

She introduced the mini-crini (combining the tutu and Victorian crinoline), flesh-colored tights with modesty fig leaves and signature corsetry worn arsenic outerwear; she designed frocks for women with breasts and hips (ask Nigella Lawson oregon Marion Cotillard, who some wore Westwood to melodramatic affect); she would experimentation with Harris tweed and tartan.

John Fairchild, past the all-powerful exertion of Women's Wear Daily, conferred his blessing successful 1989. In his view, she was 1 of the six astir influential designers of the 20th century, on with Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, Giorgio Armani, Christian Lacroix and Emanuel Ungaro. Westwood was the lone woman, the lone Brit, and the lone decorator connected his database who was not already a multi-million-dollar brand. (In 1989, she was inactive surviving successful an ex-council level successful South London and was "virtually bankrupt," according to Jane Mulvagh's 1998 biography, "Vivienne Westwood: An Unfashionable Life.")

Style writer Peter York summed her up successful a 1990 documentary: "All the things that substance her, and each the obsessions she builds her enactment astir are typically British: The full happening astir people and sex, the peculiar obsession with the Queen. You couldn't make those anyplace else."

In 1992, Westwood joined an Austrian plan student, Andreas Kronthaler, 25 years her junior. They worked arsenic co-designers, earlier helium took implicit her ready-to-wear enactment successful 2016. In a connection released with the announcement of her decease Kronthaler said, "I volition proceed with Vivienne successful my heart. We person been moving until the extremity and she has fixed maine plentifulness of things to get connected with. Thank you darling."

Westwood was an outspoken advocator for the planet, often promoting prime implicit quantity erstwhile it came to manner consumption. For her Fall-Winter 2019/20 amusement astatine London Fashion Week, Westwood sent models, actors, and activists down the runway with governmental signs — 1 of which work "What's bully for the satellite is bully for the economy."

The Vivienne Foundation, a not-for-profit company, founded by Westwood, her sons & granddaughter successful precocious 2022, volition officially motorboat adjacent year. According to her spokespeople it volition "honour, support and proceed the bequest of Vivienne's life, plan and activism."