From Punk to Dame

  With some help from the Sex Pistols, British youths hungry for anarchy, and influences including Teddy Boy subculture and fetishists, Vivienne Westwood helped develop punk as a style, an ethos and a movement.
  The British designer, who died this week at 81, became one of the UK's most revered style icons. Bur before she dressed supermodels and constructed romantic corsets, she ripped up fashion's rule book for a new generation of disillusioned changemakers.
  The punk style for which Westwood became known in the 1970s was born out of her relationship with Malcolm McLaren, her partner at the time. Westwood said years later that she didn't want to be a designer but made clothes out of necessity in her teens and when she was asked by McLaren to outfit the new band he was managing, the Sex Pistols. [...]

  Westwood wanted to provoke young punks into political action, she said, and she believed her clothes represented her own radical views during the 1970s. Her designs were meant to “confront the status quo,” she said, and encourage others to do the same.

  The Dame's glaring influence on the industry today lives on in the countless designers she's impacted through her work. [...]
  Today, Westwood is revered for her ability to seamlessly combine timelines: Cinched bustiers and draped gowns à la 18th-century France are made modern with contemporary fabrics like denim. [...]
  This approach is still being adopted by designers, specifically the new guard thriving in the digital age. It-girl label Poster Girl is a prime example. [...]
  “Poster Girl could be described as quite punk, in a way – we always prefer to go against the grain and not follow a set of rules,” she writes, via e-mail. “Her rebellious nature is a huge inspiration to me.” [...] Poster Girl's Miranda – a modern interpretation of the teeny tiny, mid-2000s club dress – feels reminiscent of how Westwood was able to recontextualise and reinvent the corset in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

  At its core, Westwood's popularity some 50 years later has a lot to do with fashion's affinity for nostalgia. With millennials partaking in trends that they were too young to enjoy the first time around and Gen Z being introduced to the pop culture of the past through social media, everyone is looking to feel... something, no matter from what period.