Vivienne Westwood EU

COURT CORSET DRESS

Vivienne Westwood Gold Label Spring-Summer 2012 ‘War & Peace’ Collection

This corset dress features hand-embroidery on lace, with a layer of beige tulle beneath. Appearing in the Vivienne Westwood Spring-Summer 2012 collection, the piece adheres to Westwood’s vision that all fashion comes from the past -and from a translation from the past to the present, which is also a projection into a future-possible world. Vivienne mentions in her collection notes, ‘The corsets we chose to oversize are from the England of Charles II; those beauties who, in their portraits, dressed themselves in the sheets and satin covers pulled from the bed’. Here the corset no longer defines the body but is rather worn oversized as a jacket or dress, the line of the corset framing the shoulders.

‘It mirrors the freedom expressed in the original ‘Portrait’ corset. The corset Westwood and Kronthaler referenced here was worn well into the 18th century at the court of Versailles as high formal court clothing -and was considered cumbersome, painful and restrictive’—Alexander Fury