Sales from the auction will go to several charitable causes the designer supported throughout her life.
The combined live and online auctions for Vivienne Westwood’s personal collection raised £754,488 (over $950,000) last week.
According to Christie’s, the sales were to raise funds for the causes Westwood herself supported throughout her life. These include The Vivienne Foundation, Amnesty International, Médecins Sans Frontières, and Greenpeace.
READ ALSO: A Personal Tribute: Vivienne Westwood’s Own Wardrobe Featured At Paris Fashion Week
The live auction (Part I) took place on June 25 at the auction house’s London headquarters. Meanwhile, the online sale (Part II) ran from June 14 to 28.
The live event earned a total of £465,192 while its online counterpart raised an additional £289,296.
Top Lot
The live sale on June 25 consisted of 95 lots spanning four decades of the late designer’s life. The top lot was a set of ten digital prints titled “The Big Picture,” which Westwood designed as playing cards.
“Vivienne saw this whole collection of playing cards as a way of explaining her ideas about how we could change the world for the better,” her son Joe Corré explained.
“So the Clubs are about war and destruction; Hearts are about the love of culture and art; Diamonds are about the economy and trying to change the economic system; Spades are for people that are destroying our Mother the Earth. But they also all interconnect.”
“The ten prints alongside the other playing cards are the essence of Vivienne’s politics, philosophy, designs, and creativity and I think in her own words they were the best thing she’d ever done,” her granddaughter Cora Corré added.
The playing cards set, which includes a bespoke metal sculpture stand by British artist Joe Rush, realized a total of £37,800.
According to Rush, this was his last collaboration with Westwood and that they talked about donating the proceeds to Greenpeace before she passed. “What a superb person she was, fighting to the end and beyond,” he wrote in an Instagram post.
Significant Sales
Several dresses designed by Westwood also fetched impressive prices. The second top lot from the live auction was a corset gown of taupe silk taffeta from the Dressed to Scale collection circa Fall/Winter 1998.
The gown was initially estimated at £5,000 to £8,000. At the auction, it achieved a price of £32,760. The designer once wore it to a gala event at the V&A Museum in 1998.
Other top sellers include an ice blue satin, scoop-necked Cinderella dress (£25,200) and a cotton dress with a printed “propaganda” modesty panel and apron (£16,380).
At the online auction, the top-selling lot was a pink neon “Vivienne Westwood” sign. Measuring over two meters high, the piece was made by Kemp London, commissioned for the Christie’s pre-auction exhibition.
With a hammer price of £30,240, the auction house will be equally splitting the proceeds from the sign between the four organizations mentioned above. When the last day of the auction concluded, all the items from the collection were successfully sold.
Banner image via Instagram @theviviennefoundation.
