After Dinner Speakers: Vivienne Westwood, Ralph Halpern, Steve Nallon

As the dramatic doyenne of the fashion world, Vivienne Westwood is England's true queen mother. A mixture of elegance, audacity, humour, and Margaret Thatcher on acid, she shocks, rocks, and continues in her sixties to seduce the fashion world. Fiercely anti-establishment, anti-hippy, and brilliantly creative, Westwood is truly the first punk rocker. Together with her partner, Malcolm McLaren, Westwood helped to invent the look, ideals, spirit, and icons of punk culture. From her shop on King's Street in London, she transformed angry, disenfranchised youths like Johnny Rotten into generational voices. The Sex Pistols owed much of their image to McLaren and Westwood. Her confrontational designs were informed by a fascination with punk, bondage, and fetishism. Using rubber, zippers, studs, buckles, leather, and other unconventional materials, Westwood's designs promoted an aggressive sexuality. In the 1980s, Westwood broke off her relationship with McLaren and continued to evolve. Just as her "Bondage" collection had influenced punk culture and created the look for bands such as the Sex Pistols and the Clash, her new lines, "Pirate" and "New Romantics" influenced a new generation of performers from Bow Wow Wow to Adam Ant. Though mainstream designers scoffed at her work or rejected her ideas outright, her concepts soon found their way -- in watered-down form, of course -- into the mainstream. In 1984, when shoulder-padded women's power suits began to appear in stores, Westwood's clothing became oddly reminiscent of the 1950s. Her models displayed perfectly rounded hourglass figures and flaunted crinolines. In defiance of the contemporary fashion, Westwood created designs that emphasized a provocative, girlish beauty mixed with a bit of naughtiness. Westwood experimented with a range of possibilities, from Victorian ball gowns to Scottish kilts. Over the years, her models morphed from pirates to peasants. Her clothes hold a certain intellectual and historical fascination, encompassing the rural landscapes of seventeenth-century France, the rolling hills of northern Scotland, the hard-blowing winds of far-off pirate ships, or the grossly luxurious ornaments reminiscent of Marie-Antoinette's Trianon. The textiles, cuts, and clothes recall the past and transcend the present. Vivienne Westwood is the Alice in Wonderland of the fashion world and her habits are as fantastical as any dream sequence could be. Even the fearsome John Fairchild, legendary editor of Women's Wear Daily and undisputed dictator of the fashion industry, hails Westwood as "a designer's designer." She is considered one of the most important fashion figures of the twentieth century along with Armani, Lagerfeld, Saint Laurent, and Ungaro.