You can only wonder what the teenage punks who idolised the Sex Pistols - a band catapulted to fame by Vivienne Westwood's former collaborator Malcolm McLaren and styled in some of her earliest work from Sex and Seditionaries - for their anarchic spirit would have made of the A/W 15 Westwood show. The Pistols once stuck two fingers up at the royal family - they famously equated the Queen with a 'fascist regime' and got Jamie Reid to cover her face in ransom note letters for their album sleeve. But today Westwood had nothing but love for the royals, well one in particular; Prince Charles. She'd dubbed him a 'visionary' on her show-notes-cum-manifesto, singling out his work in organic farming. 'If Prince Charles had ruled the world according to his priorities during the last 30 years, we would be alright and we would be tackling Climate Change,' she announced firmly (maybe she was having a dig at the Queen after all).
It wasn't just Charles' progressive attitude when it comes to manure and compost that had got her excited. Her A/W 15 collection riffed on his style and broader motifs of the British royal family - see all that checked tailoring and those sweatshirts, joggers and bags covered in English banknotes. Still despite giving a royal a seal of approval, it wasn't all politeness and formality on the runway. Westwood loves to shock; she did so most successfully with trousers cut to look like they were completely unbuttoned, revealing another pair underneath. At first glance it looked like the model was preparing to flash. For the committed Westwood shopper there's safer things to shop. Those great brogues will fly.
Westwood's causes can seem to sit in opposition to fashion as an industry. Her obsession with saving the planet and educating shoppers to consume carefully and more slowly goes against the way the rest of the pack fetishise trends and newness. But for A/W 15 Westwood was oddly in step with the rest of the fashion world. Gender bending, a topic that has taken fashion by storm and was explored successfully by the ultimate taste-maker Miuccia Prada just a few hours after Westwood's show, was on her mind. She'd cast Elliot Sailor, a female model who often sports men’s garb, to open the show to toy with the androgynous nature of tailoring. Later she sent a boy out in a beige knit dress. What would Prince Charles make of that?
In the end, the real British royal institution we should be celebrating isn't Charles, or anyone else from the rest of his family, but Westwood herself. Brilliantly talented, totally eccentric and widely adored, she is a true Queen.
