London - Though Vivienne Westwood billed this season as her top line taking on a "more exotic and adventurous spirit," the Red Label collection she showed Thursday, Sept. 18, was the most commercial she's shown in years.
Before 1,500 fans, the biggest fashion audience of the London season, Westwood served up a fluid, femininely saucily series of clothes, far removed with the dominant trends in London, prehistoricism and revamped Eighties futurism.
If anything, Westwood's soft, "flou" ruffled trimmed looks recalled Fifties Britain when a newly sexily audacious woman was finally beginning to feel free to flaunt it while she had it. And flaunt it they did in this show, which featured one model in a gold pants striding bare-chested down the massive anthracite colored catwalk in Earl's Court.
What was coolest about this collection is that where Westwood's clothes can drift into over-ripe historicism, this was a collection that seemed fresh, contemporary and very easy to wear. Using a fabric choice that emphasized weightlessness – silk satins, washed cottons and printed viscose – and cutting her silhouette close to the body.
Though the collection underlined a new sexy approach - Vivienne even sent out conical bras - the mood had a certain nostalgia for a more innocent, playful Britain.
Westwood put a manifesto in her program, entitled to "Active Resistance to Propaganda," calling on people to become more cultivated and, "not be victims of our own cleverness."
But anyone who thinks that Vivienne is some poor agitprop leftie, her business, let's recall, is a substantial commercial success. This reigning duchess of UK fashion now boasts 120 boutiques worldwide, over a dozen of them in China, a hit fragrance business and annual sales of 180 million euros, or $255 million.
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