LONDON FASHION WEEK AUTUMN WINTER 2022: VIVIENNE WESTWOOD

by Cecile Paul · February 21, 2022

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VIVIENNE WESTWOOD Dishes Up Tigers and Evil Eyes in an Artist’s Junkyard with the Clear Message, “Buy Less, Choose Well, Make It Last.”

All Image and Video Credit: Vivienne Westwood

A digitally printed artwork dress and bag

So, straight from the 2001 archives comes Vivienne Westwood’s Wild Beauty again, the latter echoing “the feeling of this (2022) collection” too, according to the company’s press release. Especially as this is the Year of the Tiger, the tiger of course being the Chinese symbol of “strength, courage and exorcising evil”. The call of the wild has certainly been a thing this season, in London alone we’ve seen Wild West-inspired pieces at Temperley London and swans at Simone Rocha. And Vivienne Westwood is celebrating the most exotic of all the big cats this season.

But the inimitable grande dame of London fashion didn’t stop at tigers … she (herself) looked to Matisse and his paintings of the eyes of beautiful women (as well as at her own eyes) and hand-painted her own version of the evil eye talisman, a universal symbol of protection. These eyes popped up all over suits and skirts and bags.

Dame Viv and her designers allegedly also drew inspiration from Peter Bruegel’s painting ‘The Fight Between Carnival and Lent’ (1559), which, according to the press release “is the human condition, teeming with life, painted during the Little Ice Age around the time Henry VIII roasted game on the frozen Thames. According to the theory, people were eating mouldy corn which is the same fungus used in LSD. They became obsessed with hell and witches.”

We were looking for the surreal inspiration of Bruegel’s painting in this collection, and we most certainly found semblances of it – not just in the colour scheme of the pieces but also in the frenzied activity. The video presentation flips between scenes in a painterly studio and a furniture junkyard, with models hugging male torso sculptures and darting from behind paintings on teetering stilettos before flopping into antique sofas, petting their dogs. It’s not quite the ‘Chaos’ as depicted on some of the garments, but there’s certainly copious examples of the rather eccentric, if not mad, ‘human condition!’.

The usual Vivienne Westwood elements were most definitely present in the offering: the plaid, tartan and tweed, the balconette bustieres and printed denim, the logoed textiles and orb motifs, the platform shoes and cowboy boots. But the stamp of the tiger (stripes in every guise – from black-and-white to black-and-gold and black-and-orange on suits, bags and dresses), the eye motif (looking back at us from the surfaces of a great many ensembles) and the artist-inspired colour palette and mesmerizing prints make this Autumn Winter 2022 collection pretty special.

Pieces that stood out for us were the ‘liquorice allsorts’ stripy suits, the dresses and bags with their digitally reproduced artworks (animal prints in the composition, of course!), the crouching tiger handbags and duffels, the trench coats with their exaggerated shoulders and the red-and-white logoed suits. And of course we wouldn’t say no to anything with that iconic orb embellished on it!

Savour the chaos of Vivienne Westwood’s ‘atelier’ show at: