Vivienne Westwood brings back the bustle, 1994
Fashion in the 1990s is all about revivals and this season, it is the turn of the bottom to go back in time. In her autumn collection, On Liberty, Vivienne Westwood has brought back the bustle in the form of a padded cushion kept in place by a fabric tie, writes Lucinda Alford in the Observer Magazine on 18 September 1994, ‘or attached to a roll-on panty’. The cushion bustle is worn under clingy knitted dresses, or peeping out from the back of strategically cut skirts. The look is Betty Boop crossed with a pantomime dame, inspired by the 19th-century bustle. Hyper-femininity is the watchword.
Westwood decried women’s current soft spot for comfort dressing and baggy clothing, dismissing it as ‘sloppy mediocrity’
Continuing her worship of women through fashion, the high priestess of punk says her new silhouette ‘idealises women and their feminine shape. It does not make you look fat; by emphasising the waist it can make you look slim.’ Westwood decries women’s current soft spot for comfort dressing and baggy clothing, dismissing it as ‘sloppy mediocrity’.
Kate Moss hails Westwood as ‘brave’, adding, ‘I think she’s saying it’s OK to be a different shape.’ Westwood herself says that she wanted to design what she called ‘an extreme feminine shape’.
But will women turn the other cheek? Will they reject this avant-garde appendage that is such an obvious display of a primary sexual characteristic? Questions of vulnerability arise: ‘Women do not see their own bottoms, says Alford, ‘yet they are made to feel acutely aware of the effects they can have.’
Westwood’s padded bottom is part of the season’s full-on super-femme look; on the catwalk, every clichéd image of women is on show, from supervamps à la Helmut Newton to Barbie doll babes. But when women dress themselves, who are they dressing for? ‘Dressing sexually used to be viewed as a sign of availability; now it is as likely to be a statement designed to confront or challenge male values.’ Now, as ever, what women wear is open to misinterpretation, as is the fashion world’s current attempts to reclaim female sexuality.
‘When we cease to care about the way our codes of dress are interpreted, then women really will have discovered the art of power dressing.’
