March 6, 2022 |
It’s not every day you get to sit on a table beside Vivienne Westwood at a Vivienne Westwood show. The great Dame of British fashion clapped, cheered and snacked on a pastry as she watched Andreas Kronthaler’s latest collection for the house play out on stage. Her partner, both in work and in life, chose the La Nouvelle Eve cabaret bar for an extravagant tribute to the theatre. “It’s there where everything is possible,” he said of his love for live performance. “We need space where people express themselves freely without censorship. If you lose that, you don’t have culture.”
His protagonists, antagonists, love interests and understudies came in a procession of bonkers costumes which included liquidy dresses for guys, as well as tracksuits in jester-like silhouettes, hoodies that fell into capes, a bride’s veil laden with fuzzy red polka dots and neck scarfs worn as mini skirts. One particular look, made from mismatched feather boas, was as camp as Christmas. (Funnily enough, Vivienne actually dressed a lot of the pieces in old deccies she had lying around the house.)
As usual, Kronthaler took his bow with his beloved wife, who yanked her grandaughter Cora Corré up for a victory lap, too. It made for joyous viewing, and like all good West End plays, had the crowd beaming as they headed back into the — painfully dull-in-comparison — outside world.
Photography courtesy of Vivienne Westwood.
