Vivienne Westwood Combines Men's and Women's Shows at London Fashion Week

For the first time, Vivienne Westwood presented at London Fashion Week Men’s. The showing brings ample attention to the four-day event, which, much like New York City’s newly established week, shows considerably less big name designers than its Milanese and Parisian counterparts.

Westwood’s collection saw an expected blending of male and female models, as well as traditional mens and womenswear. Female models consistently walk in the designer’s menswear shows, though the same cannot be said of the inverse. The grab bag of gendered silhouettes and cross-dressing styling has been with the brand since the beginning. Westwood tells Vogue, “My very first shows were all mixed. Really, they were. Pirates, Buffalo Girls…men and women together. Although, in this show some of the men are wearing dresses, which isn’t something they did much of before.”

Dresses and skirts on men have become staples of Westwood’s recent menswear collections. For Fall 2017, the center point of this was a black tulle dress paired with combat boots on a long-haired male model. The rest of the clothes draw on a playful child-like aesthetic: patchwork sweaters, knitted pants, hodgepodge crowns, finger puppets, and facial line drawings. The styling feels irreverent, like a toddler playing dress up for the first time and busting into the coloring box. One look is a serious contender for any fashionable adult trick-or-treater to be Max from Where the Wild Things Are.