It has been a busy few weeks for the Vivienne Westwood team. At the start of the month, the brand organized a catwalk spectacular in Mumbai, with a completely local cast and much of the trademark of the label draped and deconstructed silhouettes that are re -interpreted in traditional Indian fabrics. Last week they were in Barcelona for the popular Bridal Fashion Week of the city with their very first independent bridal show. “It’s just a very beautiful and important part of the life of our house,” Andrea Kronthaler Vogue told about the decision to organize the show. “It became bigger and bigger and bigger, so we were organized more.” Westwood’s Bridal Business is Booming: The brand has recently switched its store at Davies Street in London to become a one-stop shop for wedding looks, and has a special floor in their Milan boutique converted into Bridal. There will be more extensions to follow.
Between the juggling of all these different projects – the more directive line, Andreas Kronthaler showed Vivienne Westwood last month in Paris, which caused three catwalk shows in the room of six weeks – the release of the lookbook for the main line of the brand may have felt a side issue. Instead, it offers a sleek window in the strategic way in which the brand thinks about how it serves its (very loyal) clientele. While the designs here rarely stray from the signatures that those customers return – placed, corseted tops, asymmetrical draping and Harris Tweed in abundance, to name just a few – there were a few soft turns on the formula. The most striking were the pieces that nodded to Sportswear, a category that has grown exponentially for the brand in the aftermath of a buzzy collaboration with the London Skate Brand Palace last year. (Especially attractive this season was a draped hooded jacket in an iridescent technical substance used for the first time by the brand in the 1980s, as well as a series of crazy divorces in a denim treated.)
In recent years, the main line has also served as a forum for the Westwood design team to resuscitate and rehabilitate the styles of some of the most iconic collections of the house, with the help of an extensive internal archive to help guide the research. But although there were a handful of nodding here for decades – the diagonal oblique stripes on Poplin and Taffeta who looked back to the spring 1991 Cut, Slash and Pull Collection, say, say; Or a logo that played on the Hollywood board conceived for the first time conceived for the opening of a boutique in Los Angeles in 2011 – moreover, the emphasis was on the new.