The show combined 17th century perceptions of the waist with a fantasy of people living in a forest or jungle, thrown on their inner resources and the environment for their survival – AND, of course, their clothes.
The objets trouvès nature of the likely forms of dress was enhanced by the fact many had been hand-painted by 41 children from Year 3 at the Portland School, in Nottingham; two of whom, Phoebe Ackroyd and Euan Bonser, both 7, were sitting in the front row with their teacher, 25-year-old Madeleine West, just a few seats away from the rapper Kanye West.
Strange, multi-coloured insects, birds, snakes, suns, moons and foliage were splashed in broad brush-strokes on oversized anoraks, gaucho-shirts, long, wrap-around skirts, trousers, loose jackets, kilts, blanket-capes and long wizard-like robes.
The models’ face-paint – whiskers, tattooes, green eyes, smudged lips – was also inspired by the children’s naïve paintings.
Mixed in were the eclectic signatures of a Westwood Gold Label collection: wide-shouldered velvet trouser suits; printed ‘work’ dresses hitched up over leggings and flat shoes with toes shaped like the blunt end of a hammer-head shark; jackets with Montagu-and-Capulet slashed sleeves; faux fur capes; and drop-waist dresses in lemon and beige silk and metallic taffetas, accessorized with corsets, wide belts with seed-pod and ‘head’ buckles and polished wood pendants.
Stilt walkers lent even more fantasy to the parade; one in a black-and-white, pinstripe jacket and 12-foot trousers; another in a hand-painted, green and lemon crinoline as vast as a circus marquee.
Vivienne Westwood autumn/winter 2008/2009 collection
Photographs by AP
Photograph by Getty
Photographs by EPA
