Fashion auction in London

Westwood’s personal clothes under the hammer

Auction at Christie's with over 200 items of clothing by the famous fashion designer.(Bild: APA/AFP/BENJAMIN CREMEL)

An insight into Vivienne Westwood's personal closet: a year and a half after the British fashion designer's death, Christie's auction house is auctioning off more than 200 of her garments for charity.

Westwood was considered the queen of punk because of her eccentric style and was known for her political activism. "You have a more interesting life," Westwood once said, "if you wear impressive clothes."

The Englishwoman died in December 2022 at the age of 81. She revolutionized the fashion industry with her anarchist designs and campaigned against climate change, for example.

Adrian Hume-Sayer from Christie's told Deutsche Presse-Agentur in London that it is difficult to predict which garments from "Vivienne Westwood: The Personal Collection" will attract the most bids. "What I can say is that there will be surprises that we can't predict."

British eccentricity
However, two objects are technically so outstanding that they stand out: a light-colored corset dress with an estimated price of 5,000 to 8,000 pounds (equivalent to around 5,900 to 6,500 euros) and a gold-colored dress from the "World Wide Woman" collection with an estimated price of 7,000 to 10,000 pounds (around 8,300 to 11,800 euros).

Part of the collection will be auctioned in London next Tuesday, June 25, and another part online until June 28. The proceeds will go to the organizations Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders and the Vivienne Foundation. Several works of art in the style of a deck of cards, which Westwood designed as a manifesto to save the planet, will be auctioned off for the benefit of the environmental organization Greenpeace.

Westwood coined the image of British eccentricity. When she designed, her most important goal was to impress, said her husband, the Austrian designer Andreas Kronthaler, in a video about the auction. The suit she wore the most was a brown one with a crooked cut. "We called it the alcoholic suit." The cut was inspired by the idea that the tailor was drunk.

Auction pieces from Westwood's personal collection.(Bild: APA/AFP/BENJAMIN CREMEL)

"She was a genius"
Westwood cycled every day, said Kronthaler. When she went to the opera, she would transport her heels in a bicycle basket and then park them directly in front of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. "So that everyone could see it. And then she would take the high heels and put them on in the middle of the square." They would sometimes spend days reading in bed, and in the last few years they had mainly been preoccupied with the state of the world. She designed unisex clothing early on and tailoring was always the basis of every collection. "She was a genius."

There was always a message behind her designs that was more important than the clothes, Westwood's granddaughter Cora Corré explains in a video. "And I think her activism was always at the forefront." In 2015, for example, Westwood had herself driven in a tank to the private home of then British Prime Minister David Cameron to protest against gas extraction through fracking.

"Buy less, dress better"
The auction in London now provides an insight into Westwood's personal wardrobe. Westwood has always relied on historical references, said Hume-Sayer. For example, she reinterpreted the corset and drew inspiration from the Wallace Collection, an art collection in London.

Westwood's motto was that you should buy less and dress well ("buy less, dress up"). That's why she wore things over and over again or mended them. But she never looked ordinary. "Whatever she did, she threw herself into it," said Hume-Sayer. If there was one thing he learned while working on the auction, it was that Westwood was a true free thinker.