Vivienne Westwood and Rap's Love For Punk

Graphic by Harry Sutton

By: Harry Sutton

Through bold and brazen designs, Vivienne Westwood made an immutable mark on the fashion world, embodying London’s rebellious spirit of the 1970s. The sensation evoked in her style has inspired the insubordinate and iconoclastic youth for generations since her rise to fame. Working alongside Malcolm McLaren, manager of the Sex Pistols, Westwood turned an unabashedly nonconformist punk style into a venerated staple in high fashion. While her boutiques were associated with the anarchistic British punk revolution of the ‘70s, her influence perennially affects pop culture. Aside from her self-assured rebelliousness, Westwood’s work has managed to resonate with newer generations as it often advocated for originality, authentic expression, and social change. 

In the years leading to her passing, Westwood designed looks for some of the world’s grandest stars like Harry Styles, Dua Lipa, Zendaya, and more, but a curious offset of her work is a major impact on the rap world. 

Fashion and hip-hop have a heavily intertwined relationship, with recent decades of rap being focused on displaying lavishness through designer brand name drops and flashy diamond jewelry. Rappers like Doja Cat, Cardi B, and Pharrell Williams (namely the Smokey the Bear hat from his “because I’m happy” era) have all donned Westwood designs. 

A particularly captivating example of Westwood’s influence on rap is her inspiration of the rap world’s newest generation of punk revivalists: the spearhead, Playboi Carti, and others like Lil Uzi Vert. 

Carti’s early work, such as his 2017 self-titled debut album, is standard swaggerful Soundcloud rap and doesn’t sound like punk music at all. However, Westwood’s influence was still apparent at the time. The album’s cover art is a photo of Carti wearing a “Destroy” graphic t-shirt from Seditionaries, a boutique that Westwood and McLaren started in the ‘70s. Carti’s sound has evolved over the years, most recently releasing the rap album from hell: “Whole Lotta Red.” 

For WLR, Carti’s persona transformed into an entirely contrarian figure who breaks the mold of a conventional rapper these days. Carti cultivated a terrifying yet enthralling vampire alter ego around “Whole Lotta Red,” which augments his reputation as the rap game’s punk messiah. Flying the flag of anarchical spirit, he even dropped this demonic album on Christmas. The album art for “Whole Lotta Red” is a recreation of a 1977 cover of Slash Magazine, an L.A. punk skating publication. Carti also has an unreleased song from the WLR recording sessions, literally titled “Vivienne Westwood.” 

Carti isn’t the only rapper whose music and persona emulates the recusant punk mindset. JPEGMAFIA, Rico Nasty, Denzel Curry, and slowthai are just some of the rappers who create impudent and experimental moshpit music that often contains social and political messages. These artists choose to play with what rap music can sound like and what a rapper can look like, never allowing themselves to be restrained by norms. No, they don’t sound anything like the Sex Pistols, but punk is more than a genre of music, it’s a mentality.