Vivienne Westwood's fashion show

The great priestess of punk, the subversive and anti-conformist movement, Vivienne Westwood (born in 1941) began her career as a teacher, an institutional job if ever there was one. She did this until 1971 until her second husband, Malcolm McLaren decided to open a clothes boutique in London where she sold her first creations. McLaren was an rock group agent, for groups like the New York Dolls, precursors to a style that mixed sexual provocation with rejection of bourgeois values. He decided to import it to the United Kingdom and his shop would become more than a simple business, one of the punk laboratories of London.

His brand, which evolved over the years, carried nihilist and anti-establishment messages: "Let it Rock, "Too fast to live, too young to die", "Sex", or "World's End". Politicised, Vivienne Westwood was influenced by situationists and found herself with the Sex-Pistols who she clothed, publicists of her clothes as well as her ideas. Slashed T-shirts, dog collars and pinned leather became classics of her wardrobe, to which she then added Victorian corsets, dizzying platforms and tartan miniskirts, in a rebellious affront to British clothing conventions. That didn't stop her from being elected three times as the British Stylist of the year in 1990, 1991 and in 2001, influencing a number of fashion designers like Jean-Paul Gaultier.