"We based the look on rock 'n roll right from the beginning"
About this Quote
A throwaway line that’s actually a mission statement: Westwood frames “the look” as something built, not discovered, and she locates its DNA in rock ’n roll before anyone gets to sanitize it into mere nostalgia. The phrasing matters. “Based” is almost modest, like she’s talking about architecture, but it’s a quiet flex: she’s claiming origin-story authority over an aesthetic that later got packaged as trend. And “right from the beginning” is a boundary line in the sand. It’s her reminding the fashion world that punk wasn’t a mood board; it was a provocation with receipts.
The intent is less about name-checking a genre than about staking allegiance to a cultural engine: volume, attitude, sex, boredom, dissent. Rock ’n roll is shorthand for a refusal of polite taste, a way of wearing friction on the body. Westwood’s designs didn’t borrow edge as decoration; they treated style as argument. This is why the quote still bites: it exposes how fashion often launders rebellion into “influence,” while Westwood insists it was structural.
Context sharpens the subtext. Westwood’s early work with Malcolm McLaren and the SEX boutique didn’t just clothe a scene; it helped script one. Saying the look was rock ’n roll “from the beginning” also rejects the idea that she later “matured” into seriousness. For Westwood, seriousness was always there, disguised as noise: politics in safety pins, history remixed into sabotage, the runway as a stage where culture gets heckled back.
The intent is less about name-checking a genre than about staking allegiance to a cultural engine: volume, attitude, sex, boredom, dissent. Rock ’n roll is shorthand for a refusal of polite taste, a way of wearing friction on the body. Westwood’s designs didn’t borrow edge as decoration; they treated style as argument. This is why the quote still bites: it exposes how fashion often launders rebellion into “influence,” while Westwood insists it was structural.
Context sharpens the subtext. Westwood’s early work with Malcolm McLaren and the SEX boutique didn’t just clothe a scene; it helped script one. Saying the look was rock ’n roll “from the beginning” also rejects the idea that she later “matured” into seriousness. For Westwood, seriousness was always there, disguised as noise: politics in safety pins, history remixed into sabotage, the runway as a stage where culture gets heckled back.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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