Vivienne Westwood Gives Us the Power

Notes from BODY & SOUL, Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood SS27 at Paris Fashion Week

Not every day I get invited to a fashion show, but I can’t hide from them on Instagram, so my expectations were set by social media: a beautiful historic palace in Paris, a red carpet, snobbish people, and the usual fashion-world standards for models: young, skinny, tall, perfect skin and facial symmetry.

Instead, the show took place at Palais de la Femme, The Women’s Palace, a century-old social residence in Paris that has been supporting women and people in vulnerable situations since 1926. People were dressed in current and archival Vivienne Westwood collections, as if they were part of the show and not the audience. It felt like a warm-up show before the main act.

And then the models started walking.

Their ages, heights, shapes and weights were as fluid as their genders and race. And every one of them looked completely confident in their own skin. I could imagine seeing these same people walking down the street in the same clothes.

You know me. Not an emotional gal, but I sat there thinking, “God dammit. I was right all this time.” For 10 years I have been telling you: fashion is not reserved only for the young, beautiful and perfect. We, the ‘normal-looking’ people of the world, are not, and will not be, excluded from wearing extraordinary clothing.

The house of Vivienne Westwood, in the hands of Andreas Kronthaler, her husband and creative partner for so many years, just handed the rest of us the power of fashion again.

The power to use clothes as a celebration of who we are, rather than something we put on simply to cover our bodies.

LiLi The First is not a celebrity, so no, I wasn't sitting front row next to Heidi Klum. But I was in the second row. And even better, I was on a corner. Like a race car taking a turn, every model had to slow down right in front of me, so I could really look.

The overall styling was wild, theatrical and unapologetically Westwood. But when you separated the individual pieces from the extravaganza, the craftsmanship became even more impressive: the fabrics, the textures, the construction, the details.

Masterful.

The Vivienne Westwood Spring/Summer 2027 collection, BODY & SOUL, was presented during Paris Fashion Week. Andreas Kronthaler described Vivienne Westwood returning to him in the form of a robin, an image that appears throughout the collection. After an unbearably hot summer, he imagined clothes that barely touched the body: cotton, silk and tulle, mixed with vivid prints, flowers, checks and leopard.

Here it is.

Enjoy.