Women Designers

Twenty First Century Women Designers: Vivienne Westwood and Coco Chanel

Twenty First Century Women Designers: Vivienne Westwood and Coco Chanel

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to enlighten and explore the two most renewed designers in the world of fashion and innovation. There has been significant growth in the fashion industry around the globe. However, there are several personalities that are responsible for innovation and growth of the fashion industry around the globe. Vivienne Westwood and Coco Chanel are one of the most successful women designers that had an impact on the global fashion industry. Vivienne Westwood and Coco Chanel are responsible for the drastic change in the fashion industry. These women provide new and contemporary ideas in the field of fashion and design. However, both these women encountered their inspiration from diverse experience of their lives.

Vivienne Westwood is a British fashion designer known for her punk fashions of the 1970s and her subsequent avant-garde collections. Born in Glossop, Derbyshire, she worked as a primary-school teacher for a number of years before turning to fashion with designs for jewellery, which she sold in a London street market. In 1971, by which time her three-year marriage to Derek Westwood had ended, Westwood began designing clothes with the encouragement of her lover, the entrepreneur Malcolm McLaren, who became manager of the punk group the Sex Pistols.

The same year Westwood and McLaren opened Let It Rock, a shop in Chelsea selling 1950s-style clothes. By 1974 the shop had been renamed Sex and sold predominantly leather and rubber clothes inspired by bondage and body fetishes. Soon Westwood began to draw on the anarchic style of punk - ripped fabrics, safety pins, garish colours, and unusual combinations of fabrics. She brought deliberate design and commercial form to what had been an improvised street style expressing anti-establishment feelings. Her Chelsea shop changed its name to Seditionaries in 1977 and to World's End in the 1980s.

On the other hand Coco Chanel is a French couturier who originated the slim low-waisted style that dominated women's fashion in the 1920s and who launched the famous range of perfumes that bears her name. Chanel, whose nickname derives from 'cocotte', was born in Deauville and, orphaned at an early age, worked with her sister in a milliner's shop. By 1912 Chanel had opened her own shop in Deauville and, with its success, in 1914 established her fashion house in the Rue Cambon in Paris (Davis, 1995).

Vivienne Westwood vs. Coco Chanel

Westwood's collections of the early 1980s - Savage (1981), Pirate and Buffalo (1982), Punkature (1982), Witches (1983), and Hypnos (1983) - helped shape the 'New Romantics' look. In 1991 Westwood began offering a made-to-order bridal service, which included a dress in her own tartan (called MacAndreas), which is now displayed alongside the collection of traditional tartans in the Lochcarron Museum in Scotland. Her Café Society collection (1994), inspired by the Parisian fashions of the late 1890s and early 1900s, included dresses with bustles (Agins, 1999, ...