The exhibition, Vivienne Westwood: A Life In Fashion, is on display until January at ArtisTree in Tailkoo Place, Island East.

"Queen Viv is in Hong Kong!" The message spread among the city's fashion pack like wild fire. And on Nov 28, Vivienne Westwood, the flame-haired doyenne of British fashion turned up at ArtisTree, a brand-new cultural space inside Taikoo Place on Island East.

"People expect certain things from me," she said during the press conference right before the show's opening. And those certain things certainly include the guileless remarks and beguiling designs she's famous for.

Eyebrows were raised last Friday when the lady declared that her Boudoir perfume is "the best perfume in the world", and that her current and third husband, Andreas Kronthaler, 25 years her junior, sits among "the pantheons of all gods" in the world of fashion.

"He is absolutely wonderful because he loves fashion and he loves Vivienne," she said, arousing a empathetic sigh from the press that had gathered in the hope of getting a glimpse of the widely-reported eccentricities of her personality.

But there's very little on show. Instead of wearing her hair in the signature tangled spike, she let it down slightly over her shoulder. And that dress - despite all the cuts and slashes that revealed the flesh-colored underlining - was first and foremost an elegant piece, a sharp contrast to the scarlet suspenders that she's so fond of wearing.

It seems that the 67-year-old had decided to let her clothes do the talking.

Organized by Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, the exhibition first opened to the public at the museum in 2004, before embarking on a world tour that features three Chinese cities on its route. The show made a stop in Shanghai in mid-2005. After Hong Kong, it will travel to Beijing, where the curtain will fall on the largest retrospective ever dedicated to the empress dowager of British fashion.

Most of the 150-or-so designs featured were selected from Westwood's personal archive, a process that made her realize that "I've forgotten most of the things I did". The rest, including over 70 objects directly or indirectly related to the designer's work, came from the V&A.

"There are thousands of ideas there," the designer said, referring to the exhibition divided into two parts and 26 thematic sections.

Her idea-driven career started in the early 1970s, when the primary-school-teacher-turned-dress maker opened her first shop at 430 Kings Rd in London. Together with her then-husband, Malcolm McLaren, manager of the punk band Sex Pistols, the young Westwood incited a revolution on the street that made up the visual part of the Punk Movement.

Designs from that era are on view at the exhibition, including the infamous machosadistic "bondage gear" that members of the Sex Pistols wore in their first gig, and the "tits dress", the name of which constitutes profanity.

The following decades saw the designer embracing the entire spectrum of fashion, from the radical and provocative, to the beautifully conceived and rigorously executed. "Looking at her designs makes it evident that she has an inexhaustible fund of ideas," said Mark Jones, Director of the V&A who's in Hong Kong for the show's opening. It's fair to say that Westwood's enduring fascination with the court dresses of the seventeenth and eighteenth century - with their couture construction and generous volume - suits perfectly her penchant for drama and dramatized romance.

During a guided tour she gave to the press, the designer drew attention to some corsets grouped together as "the foundation garments of my design".

"That was a big moment in fashion," she said. "They are foundation garments, because if you want to make those dresses, you have to have a corset underneath (for support). Technically, you put lots of things on the corset.

Using stretch fabrics and modern tailoring - "a zip here, a few bows there" - Westwood reinvented corsets for modern women. "They are a-few-sizes-fits-all. You don't need a maid to get you into it," she said. In other words, corsets for uncorseted minds.

Once an art teacher, the designer made a conscious effort to meld art with fashion. Taking advantage of the latest technology, Westwood took a design from French baroque furniture and printed it in gold ink onto stretchy black velvet. She even recreated on cloth the natural crack of the furniture's lacquered surface. The total effect is understated elegance, rare among Westwood's designs.

Elsewhere, the designer ploughed deep into her fecund imaginative land, as well as the Scottish highland. Her playful use of tartan exchanged the moldy aristocracy and the bookish glamour associated with the checked pattern for a dalliance with tradition, never meant to be serious.

"All my clothes have a built-in story, and real English feelings," the designer said. She was referring to clothes that came under the section "Cut, Slash and Pull", to which her outfit on that particular day belonged.

"In the 17th century, every garment was covered with cuts; it was total craze. So I decided to cut denim," she said, pointing to the hand-cut gashes and frayed edges.

A white cotton gown received similar treatment. "The collection was inspired by soldiers in battle - the enemies had come, the lady got up in the night and her lover went out to fight," she said. "Fashion historicism", as it is called by critics, but the feeling is raw, and the romance is unmitigated.

There were certainly wicked winks: ladybugs and snails crawled up an otherwise demure-looking dress, adding squirmy charm and a sense of irreverence. More irreverence came in the form of flesh-toned tights with a glimmering fig leaf at the front. Westwood infamously wore it in 1989, before eight million television viewers.

According to her, the outrageous ensemble was based on the fashion of around 1800, when men wore tight, flesh-colored breeches in a conscious emulation of classical statutory.

Indeed, the designer has a panache for subverting traditional ideas. Her history-referencing designs, including the Mini-Crini collection inspired by the rigid Victorian crinoline, are sometimes described as "innocently sexy", if not "kitsch". But you don't have to be well versed in fashion to understand the fun and irony.

The designer, who once claimed that "because a lot of designers copied me, they have to say I'm good", was equally unabashed when introducing her Dior-inspired "Metropolitan Jacket". "I don't mind at all telling people that I copied it, because I believe in copying if you can," she said. "There is nothing better."

But even the French courier would have marveled at the sophisticated tailoring that gave the Westwood suits their intriguing proportion.

"The most challenging part (of fashion design) is the right use of fabric - the way you do construction with a basic fabric. To get that right is terribly difficult," she said, referring to the folds, tucks and pleats that add dimension and dynamics to her clothes.

The designer has found her solution in the long tradition of English tailoring. For someone who first learned her trick by dissecting existing pieces, Westwood seemed to have put together what she had torn apart - in an ingenious and infinitely fascinating way.

And it is by revolutionizing the fundamentals of dress-making that Westwood, the idiosyncratic fashion provocateur, joined her peers to become fashion's stewardess.

Asked about her own legacy, the designer, who considers fashion "a form of personal propaganda", said: "You have a much better life if you wear impressive clothes. I help make people look important".

(HK Edition 12/05/2008 page4)