Comely Handbag ,New Romantics and the Avant- Garde
New Romantics and the Avant- Garde
COMELY HANDBAG
The avant-garde in fashion design rejects traditional categories and crosses boundaries between art, politics, history and gender. Vivienne Westwood’s aesthetic of historical revivalism took its inspiration from a synthesis of ideas drawn from such diverse sources as English seventeenth-and eighteenth-century tailoring and African prints.
Westwood’s first fashion collection under her own name in 1981 was called Clothes fro Heroes. This plundering of other cultures surfaced in further collections: Aztec and Mexican patterns and motifs provided inspiration for the Savage collection 1981, and Appalachian folk culture in the Buffalo collection of 1982, sold from the London shop Nostalgia of Mud.
This practice ultimately presaged the “pirating” of ideas by the followers of the New Romantic movement, when students from Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design in London elevated dressing up into a thriving fashion culture.
The London club scene was witness to these extravagant sartorial excesses and fuelled the impetus of ever-more extreme modes of dress, including the costumes of the cross-dressing singer of Culture Club, Boy George, and woven and stretch knits from Body map, a company set up by Stevie Stewart and David Holah in 1982.
Following a period as an independent designer he was asked to become the principal designer at French fashion house Givenchy in 1995 before receiving the prestigious accolade of heading the House of Dior.