Pick up a memento from an extraordinary career. Chris Carter reports
These days, it seems to be fashion designers themselves, rather than the fashions they designed, that are in the spotlight. The V&A Museum in London brought its sold-out exhibition on the life of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel to a close last month – one that followed on from its retrospective of Christian Dior in 2019, which had also sold out. Then, as Alexander Fury points out in the Financial Times, there is the “recent flush of fashion designer biopics and [television] series [that] have focused attention like never before on the look, not of fashion, but its creators”.
Next up is Vivienne Westwood, who died aged 81 in 2022. Christie’s in London has announced “the [live] sale of the personal wardrobe of the revolutionary British fashion designer” on 25 June, alongside an online auction which will run from 14-28 June. Before both take place, “Vivienne Westwood: The Personal Collection” will be the subject of a free public exhibition at Christie’s King Street offices.
The main sale is constructed around Westwood’s autumn/winter collections of 1983-1984, 1998-1999 and 2005-2006, each representing “a significant moment” in her career. The earliest, the “Witches” collection, was inspired by witchcraft and the graphic code of magic symbols used by artist Keith Haring. It features “swirling silhouettes, enormous peaked-shoulders and layered knitwear” that had been presented in Paris “to critical acclaim”, says the auction house. The second, the “Dressed to Scale” collection, “played with scale to create a sense of displacement in her collections, in a technique akin to Surrealism and the ways in which a familiar scene is transmogrified”. Here, the “taffeta ball gown with the span of a
