Cimate Change Warriors

 

Hey everyone!

I wanted to feature one of my favourite duos to ever walk the earth and that is the incomparable Naomi Campbell and one of my personal idols Vivienne Westwood. Now when I was a kid I used to be bombarded with the queens in London all flock to the Westwood and parade around in some of the most gorgeous avant-garde pieces she did during the early 2000’s, this is when I was like 12/13 sneaking onto myspace so a while back now. But that was my exposure of Westwood and I was always fascinated as to what drew so many alternatives, perhaps punk people to her work.

I later discovered a lot more about her history and how she started her boutique as a sort of politicised evolution of the hippy movement she experienced, and a lot of the fetish clothes that they started out with was about telling people they could do everything that we were being told not to be as a rebuttal to the corruption going on in our culture, from rich people benefiting from the suffering of the regular person.

I began to really fall in love with her story and I began to collect vintage versions of her clothes, I wanted to support her but do the opposite of what I saw the London queens doing so where they were giving the gaudy prints and the bold colors, I have literally a small shed full of her monochrome pieces. I have every type of black, draped dress she has done in the retail ranges, some couture, and a few corsets. I had a pink leather waistcoat I bought in Tokyo with amber buttons that I could never fit into but I’m gutted as I’d be able to today, and then a major amount of weird and wonderful things that I wouldn’t even know how to categories. I just love all the clothes and I recently did an interview with Pink News and they were talking out of sync with our convo about the makeup stuff, that they were doing an article on gender non conforming designs in fashion and I was like duhh Westwood has been doing that her entire career.

She is a pioneer in many ways and I’ve just been fascinated with how much she has been uncompromising in her campaign work. I wanted to feature this convo and also another video from one of my icons, Mr Pete Bruns talks about her more articulately than I could type. Check it out here.

 
Joseph HarwoodGrowth