It’s been a busy few weeks for the Vivienne Westwood team. At the beginning of the month, the brand staged a runway spectacular in Mumbai, featuring an entirely local cast and many of the label’s trademark draped and deconstructed silhouettes reinterpreted in traditional Indian fabrics. Last week, they were in Barcelona for the city’s popular bridal fashion week with their first-ever standalone bridal show. “It’s just a very beautiful and important part of the life of our house,” Andrea Kronthaler told Vogue of the decision to stage the show. “It became bigger and bigger and bigger, so we got more organized.” Westwood’s bridal business is booming: the brand recently switched its store on Davies Street in London over to become a one-stop-shop for wedding looks, and converted a dedicated floor in their Milan boutique to bridal. There will be more expansions to follow.
Between juggling all these various projects—the more directional line, Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood, showed in Paris last month, making for three runway shows in the space of six weeks—the release of the lookbook for the brand’s main line may have felt like an afterthought. Instead, it offers a tightly focused window into the strategic way the brand is thinking about the way it serves its (highly loyal) clientele. While the designs here rarely stray from the signatures that keep those customers returning—plaids, corseted tops, asymmetric draping, and Harris tweed aplenty, to name just a few—there were a few gentle twists on the formula. Most notable were the pieces that nodded to sportswear, a category that has grown exponentially for the brand in the wake of a buzzy collaboration with the London skate brand Palace last year. (Especially appealing this season was a draped hooded jacket in an iridescent technical fabric first used by the brand in the ’80s, as well as a series of wonky separates in a treated denim.)
In recent years, the main line has also served as a forum for Westwood’s design team to resuscitate and reimagine styles from some of the house’s most iconic collections, with the help of an extensive in-house archive to help guide the research. Yet while there were a handful of nods to decades past here—the diagonal slashes on poplin and taffeta which looked back to the spring 1991 Cut, Slash, and Pull collection, say; or a logo playing on the Hollywood sign first conceived for the opening of a Los Angeles boutique in 2011—overall, the emphasis was on the new.
Specifically, the focus was on the “new” happenings within the walls of the Westwood ateliers in southwest London. Any parallels you might spot with the collection Kronthaler showed in Paris last month—the exaggerated length of the ties swinging all the way down to models’ ankles, quilted velvet fencing jackets, or that recurring black-and-yellow tartan—were very much intentional, with the main line design director noting that the various teams within the Westwood building are less siloed than ever, and are making efforts to synergize the design language across the different ranges.
After the passing of Westwood herself in 2022, questions naturally arose about the direction the house would take: Would they double down on Kronthaler’s more rebellious design instincts, or lean into the brand’s well-established commercial side? Casting an eye over the collections released this year so far, it’s clear they’ve found a happy medium by taking a more reactive, organic approach—offering more outré pieces for a more adventurous customer, new riffs on brand staples for everyone else, and now, an ever-growing array of gowns for brides seeking an alternative to the frou-frou clichés of a classic wedding day look. Today, within the house that Westwood built, there’s a little something for everyone.
