Daily Inspiration Quote by Vivienne Westwood

Elegance, in Vivienne Westwood's world, is never a neutral suit and a stiff upper lip. It is a provocation. By insisting that a man cannot be elegant without "a touch of femininity", she flips the old fashion rulebook where masculinity is treated as the default setting and femininity as the contaminant. Westwood makes the "contamination" the ingredient that completes the look.

The intent is partly aesthetic, partly ideological. Westwood came up through punk, a scene that used clothing to short-circuit polite social codes: safety pins, tartan, bondage references, deliberate bad taste turned into style. From that lineage, "elegant" isn't about obedience to tradition; it's about control, taste, and performance. Femininity here reads as softness, ornament, vulnerability, even a willingness to be looked at - qualities menswear has historically policed as weak. Westwood argues they're actually what separates elegance from mere correctness. A man in perfectly tailored clothes can still look armored. A "touch of femininity" implies permeability: the ability to wear beauty without apology.

The subtext is a critique of gender panic. If masculinity collapses when it borrows a detail coded feminine - a drape, a heel, a flourish, a gesture - then masculinity was never strong, only defended. Westwood, who loved historical silhouettes and corsetry as much as she loved tearing them apart, frames elegance as an art of mixing: power with display, severity with sensuality. It's also a reminder that gender has always been part costume, and the best dressers know it.