MILAN MILANO ITALY | VIA MONTENAPOLEONE PEOPLE & EVENTS | PEOPLE & EVENTS IN VIA MONTENAPOLEONE

In April of 2004, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London opened the retrospective dedicated to the career of Vivienne Westwood, of the most influential designers of the last 30 years. The exhibition is the biggest tribute that the museum has ever dedicated to a designer and features outfits chosen directly from the V&A’s private collection and from the archive personal archive of the British designer.
The Italian stage of the exhibition represents the climax of a four-year tour of the main cities of Europe, America, Asia and Australia.
This international exhibition is coming to Milan, to a prestigious venue such as that of the Palazzo Reale (which is hosting the works of a fashion designer for the first time) to recount Vivienne Westwood’s strong bond with Italy: the designer has always sought to promote Italian-made clothes by having her collections produced here.
Vivienne Westwood (born in 1941) is an icon and iconoclast at the same time. In the Seventies she revolutionised the fashion world by creating the punk movement, at the same time becoming one of the most influential designers of our time. For her fashion is a “child I have raised and never abandoned”. Famous above all for her tendency to go against convention and against the system, the designer has at the same time a great respect for the past, from which she constantly draws inspiration for her creations; historic costume details such as corsets and crinoline make a comeback in her collections, given a modern and innovative twist to become cult objects. Another essential characteristic of Vivienne Westwood’s work is the use of typically British fabrics such as tartan and tweed to create charming parodies of the style of the British monarchy and upper-classes. Unconcerned by how provocative or outrageous the results might be, her approach has always been functional. Vivienne is driven by a constant curiosity to discover something new, and her work reflects a systematic exploration of the structure of historic costume.
The designer’s influence on the fashion world has been tremendous, her career sweeping from street wear to haute couture to “ready to wear” clothing; from the outfits which she herself designed for the Sex Pistols in the Seventies, to corsets and eveningwear characteristic of the Eighties and Nineties the new modelling techniques and interest in the socio-political issues of the last few years. Her work runs from one extreme of the fashion world to another, from London street culture to the highly elegant collections created for the catwalks of Paris, London and Milan. The same can be said of the personal evolution of Westwood herself, who from designer and owner of a clothing shop and creator of trends with subversive tendencies has become one of the most respected and avant-garde designers.
Curator of the London exhibition, Claire Wilcox, says about Westwood “Strongly influential and always ahead of her time, Vivienne Westwood embodies a particular type of “Britishness”, combining anti-conformism and a sense of tradition...”
The exhibition includes sections dedicated to modelling techniques, tartan, accessories and the famous blue “mock–croc” platform shoes which Naomi Campbell was wearing when she fell on the catwalk in 1993. Videos and clips from some of the most famous catwalk shows are shown throughout the exhibition to give an even-more complete picture of the life and career of Vivienne Westwood.
The designer’s contribution to the world of fashion was rewarded with the honour of “British Designer of the Year” in 1990, and again in 1991. In 1998 the strength of her business at global level was recognised with the “Queen’s Award for Export”, while in 2003 she was nominated “Export Designer of the Year”, and won the “UK Fashion Export Award for Design”. Her place in the history of the British clothing and culture was definitively established when in 2006 she became the first British designer to receive the honour of D.B.E. from Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II in recognition of her exceptional contribution to the world of fashion.

credits
PALAZZO REALE
Piazza Duomo, 12
20121 Milano
Tel. +39 02 54919

VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM
Cromwell Road
London SW7 2RL
vanda@vam.ac.uk

ARTHEMISIA
Corso Matteotti, 2
61100 Pesaro
pesaro@arthemisia.it