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Daily Inspiration Quote by Vivienne Westwood

"I am attracted to people who make this effort in knowing what suits them - they are individual and stylish"

About this Quote

Westwood isn’t praising “style” as a shopping outcome; she’s praising the labor behind it. “Make this effort” turns taste into a verb, not a vibe. The line carries her lifelong punk suspicion of passivity: if you’re dressed by algorithms, trends, or luxury signaling, you’re not expressing yourself, you’re being processed. Attraction, here, is almost political. She’s drawn to people who do the unglamorous work of looking at their own bodies, histories, and contradictions and then choosing what to amplify.

The phrase “knowing what suits them” is deceptively sharp. It’s not about flattering your figure so much as understanding your selfhood - what you can carry, what you can defend, what you can wear without apologizing. Westwood built a career staging that tension: corsetry as both constraint and weapon, tailoring that borrows aristocratic codes to mock them, punk that raids tradition instead of pretending it doesn’t exist. So “suits” is a pun with teeth: the suit as uniform, class marker, and something you can remake.

“Individual and stylish” lands as the reward, but also the test. Individuality isn’t declared; it’s demonstrated through discernment. In a culture where “personal style” is often shorthand for having the right brands, Westwood points to a more inconvenient truth: real style looks like effort because it is effort. It asks for taste, yes, but also self-knowledge and a willingness to stand slightly out of step - the exact posture her work demanded, and her audience aspired to.

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Vivienne Westwood: Style as Self-Knowledge
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About the Author

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Vivienne Westwood (April 8, 1941 - December 29, 2022) was a Designer from England.

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