This spring, The Bowes Museum, home to one of the UK’s largest fashion collections, will stage a major retrospective devoted to Vivienne Westwood (1941–2022).
Spanning the early 1980s through to the 2000s, Vivienne Westwood: Rebel – Storyteller – Visionary revisits the output of Britain’s most confrontational and imaginative designer, tracing an influence that continues to this day in contemporary fashion. More than 40 collections will be shown alongside individual garments, accessories, jewellery, and ephemera drawn from Peter Smithson’s collection. These will be complemented by rarely seen pieces from private lenders and key loans from Manchester Art Gallery and Fashion Museum Bath.
In the main exhibition space, a bold curatorial scheme inspired by traditional salon hangs will see corsets and T-shirts sharing wall space with panelling, mirrors and paintings from The Bowes Museum’s own collection. Westwood’s designs will unfold chronologically, moving from her landmark mid-1980s silhouettes to the protest-led T-shirts of the early 2000s. Along the way, the exhibition charts the evolution of the Vivienne Westwood label through the Worlds End period, the Westwood years and the later Kronthaler era.
Defining moments include the introduction of the now iconic orb, her British Fashion Designer of the Year awards in 1990 and 1991, her marriage to Andreas Kronthaler (b. 1966), and the restructuring of the business into Gold and Red labels—each signalling shifts in both design philosophy and production. A committed student of historical fashion, Westwood visited The Bowes Museum in 2006, a connection reflected throughout the exhibition. More than 80 objects from the museum’s own collection will be placed alongside her work, highlighting shared visual languages and sources. Gilded mirror frames echo the theatrical proscenium from which models emerged during the Voyage to Cythera (A/W 1989/90) show, while looks from Portrait (A/W 1990/91)—rooted in eighteenth-century painting—will be shown in dialogue with Pierre Jacques Cazes’s La Naissance de Vénus – The Triumph of Venus, its putti motifs mirrored in Westwood’s designs.
Vicky Sturrs, Director of Programmes and Collections at The Bowes Museum, said: “Vivienne Westwood: Rebel – Storyteller – Visionary celebrates one of the boldest figures in British fashion and marks an important moment for the museum as we continue to foreground challenging, original voices. Although she moved to London at 17, Vivienne never shed her Northern identity, and that defiant spirit still resonates strongly here. She opened Fine & Fashionable: Lace from the Blackborne Collection at The Bowes Museum twenty years ago; now her own work returns, set against the art and ideas that shaped it. As the North continues to produce remarkable emerging designers, we hope this exhibition encourages them to see fashion as both skilled making and cultural intervention.”
Associate Curator and collector Peter Smithson said, “Vivienne’s way of designing and constructing clothes was utterly singular. Storytelling runs through her work like a golden thread, fuelled by an insatiable curiosity about history and culture. Every look suggested a character or moment; nothing was incidental. She spent her life ignoring trends, collapsing the boundaries between fashion and art, and managing to shock and delight in equal measure. Drawing on a lifetime of collecting, it’s a privilege to share so many of these pieces and to honour Vivienne’s legacy through them.”
The exhibition will be supported by an extensive public programme, including hands-on workshops exploring Westwood’s techniques, talks by Peter Smithson offering more profound insight into the collection, and further events designed to open up the themes of Vivienne Westwood: Rebel – Storyteller – Visionary. The exhibition has been developed in collaboration with The Bowes Museum, Associate Curator Peter Smithson, private collectors, Manchester Art Gallery and Fashion Museum Bath. It is not an institutional partnership with the Vivienne Westwood brand.
Vivienne Westwood: Rebel – Storyteller – Visionary 28 March – 6 September 2026 Bowes Museum, Durham