Today we celebrate the life and legacy of Vivienne Westwood. Vivienne’s utterly breathtaking, urgent and ground-breaking work has been an inspiration to me for as long as I can remember. At the age of 10 I wrote to Vivienne with some of my designs and she invited me to meet her at her London studio. We spent an hour or so, one to one, and she advised me to look to history and nature for inspiration. Together we browsed a book of eighteenth century shirts and she sent me off to the Wallace Collection to choose one painting or artefact I’d save in a fire and build a project around it. She told me about her work in the rainforest and discussed the climate emergency. Vivienne’s politics and unwavering passion for democracy, wealth distribution and environmentalism set an example for us all. On a personal note, her acknowledgement and admiration of my work, became the validation that fuelled my early years as a designer and for that I will be forever grateful to her. Spending a week in her studio was a joy I’ll never forget. I grew to further understand and appreciate her work in my two years assisting @mrstevenphilip . Thanks to Steven’s encyclopaedic knowledge of all things Westwood, spending months together studying the cuts, fabrics and design details of archival garments, as well as show photographs and collection narratives, I began to understand the sheer magnitude of her genius. The world has lost a legend. RIP QUEEN VIV 🕊 . . #viviennewestwood #westwood #rip #ripviviennewestwood #andreaskronthaler #legend #icon #legacy #inspiration #cult #british #punk #malcolmmclaren #sex #thekingsroad #queenviv #mentor #letter #newsround #climatecrisis