Vivienne Westwood
08-Apr-1941
United Kingdom
Designer
Considered the most consistent and emerging fashion designer in the world, Vivienne Westwood rose to fame in the late 1970s when her initial design helped shape the look of punk rock metal. At the age of 17, the Westwood family moved to Harrow in the Middlesex countryside, where the future fashion icon found work at a local factory and eventually enrolled in a teacher training school.
In 1971, McLaren opened a retail store at 430 Kings Road in London and began filling it with Westwood designs. Combined with the idea of Westwood's unusual style, it is an expression of consistency and resilience that shows a certain level of fearlessness about him and his work.
In 1962 Westwood married Derek Westwood and had a son. The couple divorced three years later. After a while he got engaged to the Sex Pistols manager Malcolm Mclaren and had another son. In 1992, ten years after Westwood and McLaren split, Westwood remarried, to his assistant, Andreas Kronthaler, 25 years his junior. Today, Konthaler is his creative partner. The couple lives in South London.
For more than 30 years, even after he had long gained wealth and fame, Westwood lived in that tiny London suburb, paying just $ 400 a month at home and riding his bike to his studio in Battersea.