Fashion: Making a statement with Vivienne Westwood

Mar 13 2008 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

Laura Davis takes a look at Dame Vivienne’s latest styles for the new season

Left: Gold Label dress, £495; pearl choker, £160. Right: Red Label jacket, £325; skirt, £185; shirt, £200; purple bag, £130

THE grande dame of fashion’s influences are always as quirky as her designs.

Nabokov’s ambiguous teenage heroine, Lolita, is among the motivations for Vivienne Westwood’s Red Label this season – she imagines her to have squeezed figure-hugging tailored suits, oversized cotton cardigans and wrapped summery dresses into her tiny suitcase as she travelled around France.

Left: Anglomania top, £150; skirt, £200; belt, £85; Roman three- strap shoes, £250; red picnic bag, £145. Right: Red Label dress, £530; red Brighton bag, £425; shoes, £295

There is a touch of 17th- century Versailles in there, too, along with a reworking of classic Gold Label styles.

Anglomania, meanwhile, takes its inspiration from 18th-century underwear, with white, natural and skin tones mixed with a boudoir print in pink, powder blue and brown.

The Gold Label is all about making a political statement, a comment on the Government’s proposal to hold people in jail without trial for 56 days.

Gold Label dress, £600; beaded pirate bag, £250; necklace, £200; gold low three-strap shoe, £245

Add an imagined love affair between Marilyn Monroe and an English lord, as well as a few 17th-century women wrapped in taffeta, and you have what Westwood herself describes as “tribal, tough and rock ’n’ roll”.

* THE Philharmonic Dining Rooms, one of Liverpool’s most celebrated pubs, is the location for this week’s fashion shoot. Designed by Walter Aubrey Thomas for the Cains brewery, it opened in 1898, featuring stunning Art Nouveau interiors and the famous marble gents’ toilets.

Now part of the city’s heritage, it was even frequented by The Beatles, with John Lennon once complaining the price of fame was “not being able to go to the Phil for a drink”.

Red Label jacket, £325; skirt, £185; shirt, £200; court shoe, £260; purple bag, £130

Notes

Location: Philharmonic Dining Rooms, 36, Hope Street, Liverpool

Model: Natalie Shingler, of Boss Model Management, www.bossmodels.co.uk, tel: 0161 834 3403

Photographer: Tracey O’Neill

Hair: Jenny Halliwell, at Toni & Guy, 28 Whitechapel, Liverpool, tel: 0844 4450076

Make-up: Lottie Davies, of MAC, Metquarter, Whitechapel, Liverpool, tel: 0870 192 5052

Stockist: Vivienne Westwood, Cavern Walks, 8, Mathew Street, Liverpool, www.hervia.com, tel: 0151 227 2700

lauradavis@dailypost.co.uk