APPLIED ART : COSTUME

Boucher corset

Westwood, Vivienne (Primary maker)
Westwood, Vivienne ([designer / maker])

1990
1990

England
England

colour : gold. design : bodice in the form of an C18th corset, with c/f panel having a coloured print of a Boucher painting of lovers, the rest of corset is stretch gold lame with shoulder straps of thickly applied gold on brown. Label 'Vivienne/Westwood/MadE in England' with globe and crown trademark, yellow on red 'Reflections' 2013 Label text: In the early 1980s Vivienne Westwood began to study archive costume collections and to use features of historic costume in her work. Her 'Mini-Crini' collection was influenced by crinolines of the 1800s. In this outfit she has produced an almost exact copy of a typical corset from the 1700s. The 'Boucher' print and the velvet and gold leggings successfully combine to display the opulence of a past time, while using contemporary fabrics. From exhibition text 'Grand Designers' In the early 1980s, Vivienne Westwood began to study archive costume collections and subsequently used features of historical costume in her work. In 1986, she launched her 'mini-crini' collection which was influenced by nineteenth-century crinolines. In 1987, she reinvented the use of Harris tweed by designing jackets with armiyr-type features. Her passion for history be seen in this corset, which uses a class eighteenth-century boned-corset shape in soft and pliable nylon. She was created a dame in 2006. From exhibition label, early 2000s 'Boucher' corset of man-made fibres with a print of a Boucher painting on the front, 'Boule' leggings of printed velvet, 1990 Vivienne Westwood (1941-) Bought as the Ulster Museum International Designer Outfit for Autumn Winter 1990. Vivienne Westwood is England's most consistently innovative, original and influential designer. Time and again, her new designs are initially seen as outrageous, then are copied by other designers, often in watered-down form, and finally become fully accepted as basic elements of contemprary fashionable dress. The above outfit is a case in point. The corset, based on the exact shape of an 18th century corset, has inspired countless similar bodices in the course of the last decade.

manmade polyamide, polyester, lycra

BELUM.T3352

National Museums NI