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Lot Essay
When Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren first unveiled Pirates at the Pillar Hall, Olympia, London, in March 1981, they transformed the vocabulary of British fashion. Following the provocation of SEX and Seditionaries, this new work turned from confrontation to invention, proposing clothes not as rebellion against history but as a rewriting of it. The Pirate outfit—comprising striped cotton shirts, drop-front breeches, knotted sashes, and exaggerated cuffs—was bold, theatrical, androgenous and intellectually irreverent.
The Olympia show was an event of striking informality and energy. Presented in the marble-pillared hall usually reserved for trade exhibitions, it brought together a cross-section of London’s creative underground. In attendance were Boy George, Stephen Jones, Siouxsie Sioux, Steve Strange, and members of Spandau Ballet. The models, many from the Blitz club scene, strutted through the space with deliberate bravado—half actors, half buccaneers. The clothes themselves evoked the freedom of improvisation: loose-fitting shirts cut from ticking and printed cottons, breeches slung low on the hips, layers tied and twisted rather than tailored.
The collection emerged from World’s End, the newly reimagined boutique on the King’s Road. Its emblem—an arm brandishing a sword—captured the spirit of defiance that underpinned the designs. McLaren drew on the mythology of the eighteenth-century pirate as cultural outlaw, while Westwood approached the theme through construction and cut. Her pattern work was radical: seams displaced, symmetry abandoned, volumes exaggerated to create movement and ease. It was fashion conceived as play and performance, yet underpinned by technical brilliance.
Critical response was divided but impassioned. Some dismissed Pirates as anarchic costume-making; others immediately grasped its significance as a fresh form of self-expression. The Face described it as 'a new grammar of dress,' while Vogue heralded Westwood’s mastery of drape and scale. Its influence was swift—within months the Pirate silhouette had filtered through London’s clubs and music videos, immortalised by Adam Ant and McLaren's new band Bow Wow Wow, who translated the look into pop spectacle.
In March 1982, Westwood and McLaren took Pirates to Paris, presenting the collection at the Café de Paris with Models marched to McLaren’s soundtrack of sea shanties and reggae rhythms, the staging closer to theatre than couture. The show marked Westwood & McLaren’s Parisian debut, although they had been designers for many years before that, working the underground seam of street fashion in London. It showed Paris that Vivienne could take humble fabrics such as cotton and make them into iconic, complex ensembles that took fashion towards New Romanticism by being marauding, thieving Pirates taking what they wanted from fashion history.
Westwood, with McLaren, in one of their last collections together before the partnership dissolved in 1984, were the beginning of the British invasion of Paris fashion. However, she did not take root there, preferring to work in London on the fringes. She influenced so many – Galliano particularly and McQueen – and always seems to have been well ahead of her time.
The Olympia show was an event of striking informality and energy. Presented in the marble-pillared hall usually reserved for trade exhibitions, it brought together a cross-section of London’s creative underground. In attendance were Boy George, Stephen Jones, Siouxsie Sioux, Steve Strange, and members of Spandau Ballet. The models, many from the Blitz club scene, strutted through the space with deliberate bravado—half actors, half buccaneers. The clothes themselves evoked the freedom of improvisation: loose-fitting shirts cut from ticking and printed cottons, breeches slung low on the hips, layers tied and twisted rather than tailored.
The collection emerged from World’s End, the newly reimagined boutique on the King’s Road. Its emblem—an arm brandishing a sword—captured the spirit of defiance that underpinned the designs. McLaren drew on the mythology of the eighteenth-century pirate as cultural outlaw, while Westwood approached the theme through construction and cut. Her pattern work was radical: seams displaced, symmetry abandoned, volumes exaggerated to create movement and ease. It was fashion conceived as play and performance, yet underpinned by technical brilliance.
Critical response was divided but impassioned. Some dismissed Pirates as anarchic costume-making; others immediately grasped its significance as a fresh form of self-expression. The Face described it as 'a new grammar of dress,' while Vogue heralded Westwood’s mastery of drape and scale. Its influence was swift—within months the Pirate silhouette had filtered through London’s clubs and music videos, immortalised by Adam Ant and McLaren's new band Bow Wow Wow, who translated the look into pop spectacle.
In March 1982, Westwood and McLaren took Pirates to Paris, presenting the collection at the Café de Paris with Models marched to McLaren’s soundtrack of sea shanties and reggae rhythms, the staging closer to theatre than couture. The show marked Westwood & McLaren’s Parisian debut, although they had been designers for many years before that, working the underground seam of street fashion in London. It showed Paris that Vivienne could take humble fabrics such as cotton and make them into iconic, complex ensembles that took fashion towards New Romanticism by being marauding, thieving Pirates taking what they wanted from fashion history.
Westwood, with McLaren, in one of their last collections together before the partnership dissolved in 1984, were the beginning of the British invasion of Paris fashion. However, she did not take root there, preferring to work in London on the fringes. She influenced so many – Galliano particularly and McQueen – and always seems to have been well ahead of her time.