We like to think we can bend every rule. And yet, when it’s time to truly choose, we behave as though certain walls are immovable. The case of jewellery is perhaps the most obvious – and it neatly proves the point made at the start of this piece.
We’re hemmed in by rules written by others, in other eras, with no regard for the singular personality each of us carries. Vivienne Westwood, with her final collection of designer jewellery, gives us the tools to lay siege to those rules, to break them, and then take a triumphant lap – even on our own.
A collection running into the hundreds – most pieces marked by the iconic orb – with choices that feel unusual yet never forced. There’s a design language that’s readable at first glance. The deeper layers are reserved for those who’ll hold a piece, wear it, and let it live with them.
Amulets for the Modern World
We are in front of genuine amulets. They are offering a kind of magic we desperately need and we can’t do without. It’s the freedom to wear what we please. It’s the freedom to ignore outdated conventions and consign them to the darker centuries.
We’re not trying to grant fashion some sort of redemptive power, it remains the realm of the ephemeral. But we do want to celebrate a collection of more than 300 pieces that speak, narrate, and even complete our own personal discourse.
And we can reach to these amulets for whenever we need a small spell of protection, or an affirmation of freedom.
Heritage for the future
Heritage is usually treated as something to guard, something to preserve, hidden away from prying eyes. Vivienne Westwood’s latest women’s jewellery collection aims for more: it invites us to use heritage as if it were knowledge.
Knowledge of what? Of the stern, overbuilt walls defending standards and rules that make it impossible to fall in love with a piece of jewellery simply because it dares to be different.
That’s exactly what you’ll find in this collection: notes that stand outside the choir without ever sounding off-key. Metaphorical weapons for a well-aimed assault on the lazy fashion wall, those standards set decades ago that were ageing even then, let alone now.
This is heritage turned inside out: not something that traps you in defence, but a set of ideas and patterns for attack.
A kind of emotional cartography runs through the collection: each piece becomes a point on the map, a marker of where we’ve been and where we might choose to go.
Nothing is casual or predictable in the use of unexpected materials, in the lines, or in the recurrence of the orb: it’s a visual lexicon that speaks of rebellion, yes, but rebellion with structure, a challenge delivered with a certain grace. It’s the quintessential Westwood notion that you can shout an idea, but only if there’s an actual idea behind the shouting.
More than 300 pieces are waiting in this new collection. To be chosen or perhaps to choose you.