SHANGHAI — Fashion means many things to many people, running the gamut from industry to inspiration, from lifestyle to luxury, and from status to subversion.
Few designers have explored fashion’s multiplicity of possibilities as the iconic yet iconoclastic Vivienne Westwood. Called both the “Mother of Punk” and the “Mother of Fashion,” Westwood has been pushing the boundaries and challenging the presumptions of fashion for 35 years.
Westwood’s three-decade career was explored recently in a retrospective at the Bund 18 Creative Center in Shanghai. The show, which closed earlier this month, marked the third stop of an exhibition first held in April 2004 at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum and then in Sydney, with pieces taken mostly from the V&A’s collection. After Shanghai, the retrospective will continue to Taiwan, Japan, Germany, New Zealand and the U.S.
The extensive exhibition showcases Westwood’s diversity of influences and the constant evolution of her styles. It also argues the importance of fashion as art, as lifestyle, as history and as social statement to Chinese audiences, who usually see fashion through lenses of conformity and status.
The retrospective opened on July 8 at the Creative Center, a 7,500-square-foot space on the third floor of the Bund 18 luxury retail and entertainment complex. It presented Westwood’s repertoire primarily chronologically, mostly in the form of garments on mannequins, but also with a few videos of interviews and runway shows, plus a few cases of background materials.
The show began with a small case presenting Westwood’s involvement in the Seventies with the then-emergent punk scene, in cooperation with her ex-husband and collaborator, Malcolm McLaren, who managed and helped establish the Sex Pistols. Only a few young Chinese, however, are musically sophisticated enough to recognize the Sex Pistols, or the famous “Anarchy” shirt and album cover Westwood designed for them.
The exhibition gave this period, and the subsequent bondage stylings of Westwood’s SEX shop, only a cursory overview before jumping into Pirates, her first runway collection in 1980. The V&A began acquiring Westwood designs when a former chief curator of the textiles and dress department bought a Pirates piece. From there, the show continued into the 1982 Nostalgia of Mud collection, and together, the two collections took up about a quarter of the exhibition space.
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The show then opened into a large central hall showcasing Westwood’s pinnacle in the late Eighties through the Nineties. One wall was dedicated to the most famous pieces from her Harris Tweed collection, and another running through to the next hall presented her diverse takes on suits, including her famous tribute to Christian Dior. Two large islands displayed Westwood’s signature Mini Crini and historically derived pieces. A case presenting Westwood’s whimsical jewelry, such as her knit tiaras, and the retro granny pants that inspire her lingerie provided a divider from the second large hall. It featured a wall mounted with an assortment of Westwood’s corsets, another island of historically inspired garments, and a row of cases containing her famously impractical shoes. These include the superelevated Ghillie platform shoes that Naomi Campbell fell off of, which is among the V&A’s most popular exhibits.
Visitors then continued past a wall of knit dresses, including the sparkly wedding dress and the Liberty Flowers dress. Then, a corridor displayed Westwood’s late-Nineties entrance into formalwear, including her tartan wedding outfits for herself and Carlo d’Amario, her current husband and collaborator, and the gorgeous Queen of Sheba dress with a gem-encrusted bodice and a long, feathered skirt. The exhibition concluded with a video from Westwood’s runway shows and a room of her recent couture. A boutique on the second floor also featured a few pieces from her 2005 collection.
According to Sylvia Lee, Bund 18’s communications director, the show, with an entry price of 50 yuan, or $6, attracted an average of 200 visitors per weekday and 300 or 350 people a day on the weekend — mostly students, designers and people working in the retail and luxury industries.
“A lot of them complain that there are no mirrors so they can see the backs of the pieces,” said Lee. “They say they wish they could take them apart” to examine Westwood’s cutting techniques.
Lee explained that 90 percent of the original V&A retrospective was in place in Shanghai, with a few pieces missing due to owners unwilling to ship them so far. The exhibition was organized by the British Council, which arranged the cooperation between the V&A and Bund 18 starting last October. Originally, Westwood planned to attend the Shanghai show’s opening, but canceled due to a scheduling conflict. However, she visited the city during its 1992 fashion week, and expressed in a press statement: “I always loved Shanghai, a city full of energy, color and lights.”
And the exhibition certainly seems to have helped Westwood’s business in the city. Sales at her brand’s sole outlet, a counter in the Jiuguang Department Store, have risen significantly since the show opened. More importantly, though, the exhibition has given Shanghai audiences a taste of the flip side of fashion, showing that even an international brand can be cutting edge. Global brands may be popular here, but many Chinese consumers view them as decidedly unhip and they often are mocked in edgier culture as the ostentatious conformity of the taste-impaired New Rich.