Editor’s Notice: That includes the nice, the dangerous and the ugly, ‘Look of the Week’ is an everyday sequence devoted to unpacking probably the most talked about outfit of the final seven days
CNN
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It started with a bellowing horn. Then out got here singer Sam Smith, trudging onto the catwalk carrying a tartan scarf shrugged over a v-neck jumper and a useful codpiece-turned-fanny-pack. On their head, one other ream of tartan was twisted with black tulle that, from a distance, resembled a flowing mass of darkish knotted hair. Trouserless, Smith’s look was completed off with a pair of towering, tartan platform boots and a gnarled picket strolling employees.
Had been we watching an novice rendition of Mel Gibson’s “Braveheart”? Apparently not. The discombobulating outfit was, in actual fact, the opening look of Vivienne Westwood’s Fall-Winter 2024 present in Paris — a group that has proved divisive on-line.
Designed by Andreas Kronthaler, the late Westwood’s co-collaborator since 1990 and husband since 1992, this season felt like a departure from a extra common model of the model. In reality, many components of a standard Westwood present have been there — the excessive platform shoe, the reference to 18th and nineteenth century costume, an irreverent glimpse of a butt cheek, even the codpieces appeared to be a nod to the model’s historical past pioneering of underwear as outerwear within the Eighties. However the execution was jumbled and confused, a sentiment that was neatly — and maybe sadly — summarized in Smith’s outfit.
Vivienne Westwood, who died in December 2022, has lengthy been acknowledged as a vanguard of the style trade — pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable, even at instances what was wearable, and utilizing her platform to amplify discussions on local weather change and over-consumption. Her designs have influenced vogue’s greats from Alexander McQueen to John Galliano, and the label has even loved a latest revival amongst Gen Z (so common is the Vivienne Westwood 1990 “orb choker,” there are actually a whole lot of counterfeits out there on Temu, AliExpress and Etsy).
Realizing that many really feel passionately concerning the model, significantly after Westwood’s dying, the present on Saturday appeared to the touch a nerve. “Vivienne Westwood can be handing over her grave watching Sam Smith on this stand up,” wrote one disgruntled fan on X. “I can not imagine this can be a Vivienne Westwood present,” chimed one other. Whereas many on-line lamented how Kronthaler’s newest season has “defiled” and “tainted” Westwood’s vogue status.
In actuality, Kronthaler has performed an necessary function in constructing Westwood’s legacy. From the time Kate Moss walked the runway in little greater than a captain’s hat consuming a chocolate ice cream, Kronthaler was there, and his imaginative and prescient is inextricable from the DNA of Westwood.
However maybe the label works greatest when the garish is balanced with the glamorous. The punk designer has all the time been, as Vogue wrote, “confrontationally subversive” however she was additionally a tailor who understood the ability of proportion, silhouette, form. For each outsized t-shirt Westwood despatched down the runway scrawled in Sharpie pen, there have been 10 actually transcendent appears banked in her arsenal.
There was the opulent, crystal-encrusted corset costume Linda Evangelista wore for the Fall-Winter 1995 present, the chiseled bodice enchantingly offset by the gentle, ombré ostrich feather skirt. Or the regal satin ball robes and smooth, attractive skirt fits of Spring-Summer season 1998, two sides of the identical Westwood archetype that would one way or the other fortunately coexist on one runway. Kronthaler has proved he can do that, too. Simply take the closing look of Fall-Winter 2020 (his debut solo assortment). Bella Hadid is reimagined as a Renaissance princess in translucent white lace, puff-sleeves, a pink satin corset and a brown leather-based belt with an identical sword and sheath.
In any case, there are such a lot of variations of what “Vivienne Westwood” means — the model has existed for over 50 years. To at least one particular person, true Westwood means draped clothes and exaggerated corsetry. To a different, it’s ripped stockings, naked butts and bikini bottoms.
When a vogue home outlives its founder, scrutiny is usually magnified by nostalgia. However the furore is unlikely to part Kronthaler. “I after all seen this wave — this phenomenon,” he told the Financial Times in 2022, when requested concerning the renewed curiosity within the Westwood model. “However I’m ducking underneath it, attempting to not get too engaged. I don’t need to make a parody — transforming, redoing it.”
“And it’s not my nature both, trying again,” he mentioned.