Vivienne Westwood did the most old-fashioned things – she made clothes for real women's bodies | Morwenna Ferrier

The first time I saw a Vivienne Westwood dress in the wild was while shopping for my best friend's wedding almost 10 years ago. She told me she wanted something black, not white, something on sale, something she could wear after the wedding and – turning to me in the middle of Regent Street in London, added: “something that will stretch because I am six weeks pregnant”. So we went to the Vivienne Westwood store on Conduit Street in London, and left half an hour later with a black silk sleeveless pencil dress loose, with a draped neckline and a gathered waist with lots of give.She wore it successfully, five weeks later and 11 weeks pregnant, to her wedding.

Vivienne Westwood, who died on Thursday night, could cram more contradictions into a single collection than most designers could in a lifetime.But in her clothes, she did the one thing designers can't – or rather won't. – do. That is, do fancy stuff for real s people with real bodies, making her the mother of all fashion contradictions.

Probably most famous for her transgressive marriage of punk and fashion in the late 70s - for dressing the Sex Pistols in rips and Adam and the Ants in Elizabethan blouses - it wasn't until the late 80s and 90s that Westwood began making bespoke clothing by dissecting pieces existing ones, inadvertently altering the high-end landscape. women's clothing.

It was part of the Westwood shtick, of course. If the trends went one way, they went another. But at the time, between the broad-shouldered soft power of New York's fashion superstars such as Donna Karan and the flourishing "heroine chic" within its subcultures, the aesthetics of the 1990s de Westwood was an outlier, exaggerating the female form rather than reducing it. Eighteenth-century inspired dresses were not outrageous because they showed the panties of their wearer, but because they understood what fashion for women with breasts and buttocks was not - which was to fashion.

"All my clothes are really sexy, about meeting the body and making it attractive and powerful," she said at the 2004 launch of his V&A retrospective. "I aim to make people important." Her fans undoubtedly included famous and powerful women, including artist Tracey Emin, actress Christina Hendricks (who also ran a Vivienne Westwood campaign in 2011) and shape-shifter Kim Kardashian. Celebrities, yes, but also women with...