Vivienne Westwood

The corset's return to fashion in the late 1980s owed a great deal to Vivienne Westwood (1941-2022), the British designer who moved from punk clothing on the King's Road to collections built on historical underwear. Born in Hollingworth, Cheshire, on 8 April 1941, she trained as a primary school teacher before going into fashion with Malcolm McLaren in London in the early 1970s.

Rubber at 430 King's Road

Westwood and McLaren ran a single shop at 430 King's Road under a series of names. It opened as Let It Rock in 1971, became Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die in 1972, and in 1974 reopened as SEX. That incarnation is the one that touches lingerie history: it sold skirts and dresses made of rubber and T-shirts printed with pornographic images, borrowing directly from fetish wear. McLaren went on to manage the Sex Pistols, who wore the shop's clothes. In 1976 it became Seditionaries, and in 1980 Worlds End, the name it still carries.

From Pirate to the mini-crini

Her first catwalk collection, Pirate, came in 1981. Through the 1980s she turned to the costume collections of museums for her raw material, taking neck ruffs, corsets, bustles, breeches and paniers and recutting them for the present. The mini-crini, which she developed between 1985 and 1987, crossed the Victorian crinoline, a garment associated with restriction, with the short skirt of the 1960s. The Harris Tweed collection of 1987 to 1988 carried the same historical method into British tailoring.

Vivienne Westwood and the corset revival

The corset was the most important of those borrowings for this museum. Westwood made corsets to be seen, as the top half of an outfit rather than a hidden foundation, and her use of them is credited with feeding the push-up bust trend that ran from the late 1980s through the 1990s. Paintings by Watteau, van Dyck and Boucher were used on several pieces, including printed corsets, which set eighteenth-century imagery on a garment of the same period. Her work ran parallel to Jean Paul Gaultier's corset bustiers, popularized by Madonna, and the two designers together made the corset a fashion garment again.

Platforms at the V&A

Her shows produced some of the best-remembered runway images of the period. In her fall 1993 show Naomi Campbell fell on the catwalk in foot-high platform shoes, which were later displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Westwood was appointed OBE in 1992 and Dame Commander in 2006 for services to British fashion.

Agent Provocateur, 1994

The family link to lingerie runs through her son with McLaren, Joseph Corre, born in 1967. In 1994 he and Serena Rees founded Agent Provocateur on Broadwick Street in Soho, with Corre as designer. The brand sold the provocative, visible underwear that the King's Road shop had sold as fetish clothing twenty years earlier, now as luxury lingerie.

Westwood died in Clapham, London, on 29 December 2022, aged 81. Earlier versions of this entry claimed she was the first designer to send corsets over business clothes and repeated activism anecdotes and a closing slogan; none of it concerned lingerie or could be matched to the sources consulted, and it has been removed.

Last updated October 7, 2026