For Vivienne Westwood, jewellery was never just decoration. A protest, a provocation, it sparked emotion and marked time. In the words of the current creative director, Andreas Kronthaler, “Jewellery is powerful, and it can be loaded with meaning. It marks life, and it gives importance to it.” From her brand’s celestial Orb logo – “itself is a jewel, symbolising the world with its past, its present and through adding the Saturn ring, its future,” according to Kronthaler – to its safety-pin brooches and bondage-chain chokers, each piece tells a story of rebellion and romance. Now, Thames & Hudson is honouring that legacy with a new book simply titled Vivienne Westwood & Jewellery, and its release is set for November 6.
Split into ten thematic chapters – Origins, Pearls, Pagan, Memento Mori, Do It Yourself, and more – the book unfolds like an encyclopaedia of her universe, chronicling the evolution of her vision through punk, paganism and pretty jewels. Each section delves into a different facet of the house’s design language: from baroque pearl strands removed from their aristocratic context and redefined as a statement of edge, to pagan talismans made from wooden sculptures, lucky coins, chestnuts and bells, to the infamous safety-pins that once scandalised polite society.
“Safety-pins piercing faces. Pearl chokers and droplet earrings borrowed from Elizabethan portraits. Bondage chains and sado-masochistic buckled cuffs and dog-collars. Crowns and medallions and bejewelled regal orbs. The jewellery vocabulary of Vivienne Westwood is as distinct and immediately recognisable as that of her clothing,” writes fashion journalist and 10 Magazine contributor Alexander Fury who has penned the introduction.
The foreword, written by Kronthaler, who dedicates the tome to “jewellery lovers”, reflects tenderly on Westwood’s lifelong fascination with the ornamented body – a fascination that blurred the line between beauty and defiance. Jewellery, he writes, was a form of communication, a way to mark identity and be seen. It is, as he puts it, “very British and very Vivienne.”
The pages are peppered with nearly 200 photographs of Westwood’s jewellery in all its opulent, anarchic glory, captured by acclaimed still-life photographer Philippe Lacombe. His images move from stark, sculptural compositions to rich, layered tableaux that frame the pieces like museum artefacts, particularly within the Wonderland chapter. There are also pictures pulled from archived catwalks and portraits of Vivienne Westwood herself.
This is jewellery that refuses silence, wrapped up in a book that jingles and jangles with history – punk and pastoral, regal and raw, stitched into the wider mythology of Vivienne herself. Each clasp, chain and charm is a footnote in her legacy and of her larger fight against conformity.
The release of Vivienne Westwood & Jewellery coincides with the international exhibition of the same name, which debuted at Te Papa, the National Museum of New Zealand, before travelling to Shanghai and across the globe. The show mirrors the book’s spirit – an immersive collage of sounds, film, catwalk looks and glimmering treasures – a fitting tribute to one of the women who turned jewellery into art, and art into an enduring kind of magic.
Photography courtesy of Thames & Hudson.
