Show you my wardrobe - Part eleven Quotes, Show you my wardrobe, Vivienne Westwood

Show you my wardrobe - Part eleven Quotes, Show you my wardrobe, Vivienne Westwood
I've found lots I haven't seen for years in my wardrobe. Some things have been hidden on hangers for ages. This was under two other things. I love my Vivienne Westwood corset although I can barely squeeze into it at the moment. It was a present from a friend after the show. I was mad on Westwood. I also had the shorts and the boots but they're long gone. I'd love a pair of those boots again. What's great about Vivienne's clothes is you can dress them up or down. I wore the corset to dressy places and out clubbing. Tearing around London clubs is probably the reason I no longer have the shorts or the boots.

The Putti print Corset is one of the rarest and most prized of the Westwood corsets. They first appeared in the 1990/91 Portrait and Dressing Up collections. It's cream elasticated panels have a boned front panel featuring a full colour separation print with metallic gold sections extending up to the wide shoulder straps.

Vivienne Westwood Boucher corset
For once it would be better if Tallulah my mannequin had boobs. It looks much better with them. It even makes mine look bigger and that's not easy.

I don't know which Boucher painting this one is from

It's heavily boned and surprisingly comfortable to wear

I love Vivienne. I could happily dress in her clothes every day.

I've put it with my vintage Butler and Wilson pearl and diamante choker. I used to wear chokers all the time.

I love the way Vivienne styled it with sheepskin and velvet so I've added a stole and a pair of black silk velvet trousers

Photograph courtesy of the V&A
Boucher Corset, 1991 - This one is very ornate

Vivienne Westwood was inspired by the paintings and furniture at the Wallace Collection. Talking about the influence on the collection Vivienne says:

"The first thing to say is that the Wallace Collection is the best school in the whole country. There is more to learn from there, in that small building, than anywhere.

There are two fantastic Bouchers as you come up the stairs, one is Apollo about to get into his chariot, surrounded by all the nymphs as he rises from the ocean. It's absolutely fantastic. Boucher is really sentimental, but you can't call him kitsch because he has such incredible facility. Playful but cynical somehow. He comes from an age that was very convenient for painters, all that mythology was part of a way of communicating in those days.

The most interesting part of the collection are the eighteenth century painting, furniture, clocks collected by the 3rd Marquis of Hertford in the middle of the nineteenth century when nobody wanted it and it was cheap. The kind of things the French revolutionaries threw out of the windows and burnt in the courtyards. My husband, Andreas, told me when he was studying the French Revolution at school that he cried not about the people having their heads chopped off but at the destruction of all the beautiful things. Nobody who lives in the world today could paint one flower on the service porcelain in that collection. All those crafts have gone. To look at a painting is to enter a world. I love that Eighteenth century version of the pagan world. It's an absolute delight."

Photograph courtesy of the Wallace Collection, London
Daphnis and Chloe, 1743-5
By François Boucher (1703-1770)

Isn't it fabulous? I wish people dressed like this all the time!

"You have a much better life if you wear impressive clothes"

Vivienne Westwood
(b. 1941)

I'm not sure that's true but I do think you have a lot more fun!

Have a wonderful evening xxx

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