“It’s the dogma of the last century that you throw away the past,” Vivienne Westwood said once. “It’s like telling a scientist to throw his laboratory away. If you throw it away, you get rid of all the technique. You have to go back to the past.” The legendary designer’s first “Pirate” fashion show at Olympia in 1981 predated the official London Fashion Week – launched formally in 1984 in collaboration with the British Fashion Council, which was formed the year before – but Westwood witnessed and inspired the rise of scrappy south east London upstarts John Galliano and Alexander McQueen, Katharine Hamnett’s confrontation of Margaret Thatcher with her “58% Don’t Want Pershing” T-shirt, the birth of the NEWGEN funding initiative and Fashion East’s own riotous talent incubator, the mass exodus of designers to New York and Paris (including Westwood herself), and their grand return as they fell for the raw romance of a city that won’t give up all over again.
London Fashion Week is a hotbed for newness – from McQueen’s dramatic robot-designed Shalom Harlow dress in 1999 to Christopher Bailey’s see-now, buy-now strategy in 2016 – but also throw’s one hell of a party. Think: Prince performing at Matthew Williamson’s spring/summer 2008 homecoming, and Grace Jones sashaying on top of a limousine for Philip Treacy that same year. It’s impossible to keep track of all the truly brilliant and bonkers spectacles – from Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell walking in Stella McCartney’s graduate CSM show to the live construction of Hussein Chalayan’s coffee table dress in 2001 and the Noughties phenomenon that was Henry Holland’s pornographic, poetic tees. Here, in celebration of LFW’s 40th anniversary year, some fabulous snippets that you might have missed the first time around, and that certainly deserve, as Westwood might have said, another moment in the sun.
