Dame Vivienne Westwood - the godmother of punk

She was the anarchic idealist who stormed the battlements of the status quo and transformed Britain.

She was a would-be revolutionary, fired by a hatred of corruption and global injustice, who despaired at the indolent passivity of youth.

Vivienne Westwood gave birth to punk, conquered high-fashion and built a global empire. She invented New Romantics, sent Naomi Campbell down the catwalk wearing a traffic cone and turned up to meet the Queen having left her underwear behind.

For Westwood, fashion was a weapon. Of course, she thought, clothes made people sexy. But the point was to shake things up, to destroy miserable conformity and make a better world.

Vivienne Isabel Swire was born on 8 April 1941 in the Derbyshire village of Tintwhistle, the oldest of 3 children.

Her working class parents were good with their hands. They encouraged her to make things, which she did with enthusiasm. But they were deeply puzzled by their daughter's addiction to reading, once paying her to destroy her library card.

She had an enviable self-confidence, believing herself an exceptional craftswoman. At grammar school in Glossop, she saw herself " a kind of champion." "Honestly", she said, "at the age of five, I could have made a pair of shoes."

The family moved to North London in 1958. Vivienne dabbled in sliver-smithing at the local school of Art but quit after a single term. Self-confident she may have been, but she failed to see how a working-class girl could make a living like that.

She qualified as a primary school teacher, then married Derek Westwood - handsome Hoover factory apprentice by day and flamboyant Mod by night. Westwood made her own wedding dress and jewellery. A year later, she gave birth to their son.

Then, a chance meeting changed everything. Her brother, Gordon, brought a nineteen year-old, fellow art student round to her flat in Harrow. He had red hair and a face whitened with talcum powder. His name was Malcolm McLaren: self-declared genius and godfather of punk.

So began one of Britain's great creative partnerships. They moved into a tiny flat in Clapham, had a child and launched a cultural revolution that shook, and sometimes frightened, the world.

McLaren was impossible. His mother was a prostitute so he'd been brought up by an odd-ball grandmother, who lived by the motto "to be bad is to be good and to be good is just boring".

He was a peacock: intent on blinding small people with his brilliance, affronting an older generation he detested and belittling everyone but himself - especially Vivienne.

He took 6 days to visit her in hospital after the birth of their son, refused to be called 'Dad' and threatened to cart the child to Bernardo's when asked to pitch in. Westwood retreated to a caravan in Wales; hunting for wild vegetables while he ran riot in London and married another art student.

But attraction overcame everything. Her childhood had been happy, but a cultural desert. Creatively, McLaren was an awakening; introducing her to art, music and helping her transform "from dolly bird into a chic, confident dresser." Westwood rekindled the partnership, blossomed artistically and simply ignored the abuse.

Then came the Sex Pistols, snarling at the 1970s. McLaren embraced them as an angry pot-shot at the hippy movement he hated. Westwood opened a shop on the Kings Road, conjuring the look the Pistols made famous. A bewildered world gasped and named it Punk.

She called the shop, 'Let It Rock', then changed the name to 'Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die'. Finally, it was re-branded simply as 'SEX' - the huge pink sign above the door meant only the brave went in.

Inside, the staff were intimidating. There was Chrissie Hynde, Toyah Wilcox and, most terrifying of all, 'Jordan': a woman who actually received an Arts Council grant to be her indomitable, fetish-wearing self.

The clothes, of course, were like nothing else. They were radical and individualistic, sticking two-fingers up at rival street-fashions like flower-power, Teddy Boy and Mod.

It was as much anthropology as style. Bondage trousers and swastika jackets were, she explained, "Sex translated into fashion becoming fetish." It was, she declared, "the very embodiment of youth's assumption of immortality."

Her parents hated Malcolm and were deeply shocked; but they gave her the money to get started and loyally offered practical help while "our Vivienne" filled the racks with studs, chains and nipple zips.

Westwood's rubber negligee, spiky hair, stilettos and pornographic T-shirt literally stopped traffic. She was having a ball, feeling like a "princess from another planet."

Later, McLaren would boast he was a "con man", a Svengali who twisted popular culture into nothing more than a convenient marketing gimmick. For Westwood, the movement was more profound; seeing it as as counter-cultural youth insurgency against the corruption of the old world order.

Punk, she earnestly believed, was more than fashion. The movement was political; the aim was revolution. When they young showed no inclination to stop spitting and build barricades, Westwood was bitterly disappointed.

She fell out with Johnny Rotten: both claiming to have inspired the idea and title of Anarchy In The UK. But what frustrated her was that the spiky-haired had missed the message.

The clothes and music were supposed to channel rage and bring about change. But the young simply ignored global injustice, stuck safety-pins in their nose and moshed to the music. The couple, themselves, were charged with sedition but the revolution never happened. Westwood felt let-down, became disillusioned and, eventually, drifted on.

So they took their subversive ideas and stormed the catwalks of London and Paris. Working alone on a little sewing-machine in her front room, Westwood put the pieces together using her own body as a template. She happened to be the perfect size 10.

Intellectually inspired by a Canadian art historian, Gary Ness, she researched the history of fashion, reworked it with vengeance and dared the world of haute-couture to reject her. She put models in Harris Tweed, fine knitting, 'mini-crinis' and corsets that pushed their busts almost up to the chin.

The public sniggered. Westwood threatened to walk out of one BBC interview when the audience kept laughing. It didn't help that Russell Harty, a fellow guest, described one girl as a "walking chip shop." The Pistols sneered too, accusing her of abandoning punk and making "posh frocks for Ascot".

It wasn't easy; at times she came close to bankruptcy. But the fashion world loved her. Alongside McLaren, she put on legendary collections with names like Pirate, Savages and Nostalgia of Mud. And when he pushed off, she continued solo: kick-starting New Romanticism with designs that parodied the establishment. The establishment lapped it up.

In the end, she made a fortune. One show in Paris was over in the time it takes to hard boil an egg, but featured clothes worth more than a million pounds. When Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw wanted a wedding dress, she turned to Westwood. The woman who ran a shop on the Kings Road had become a major global brand.

In 1989, the hugely influential Women's Wear Daily rated her one of the six best designers of the twentieth century; the only woman, alongside Armani, Lagerfeld and Saint Laurent. "As far as I was concerned," she said, "it was a statement of fact." When Naomi Campbell fell off her 9-inch purple platforms on the catwalk, the shoes simply flew off the shelves.

This did not mean she had given up on revolution. Deeply political, Westwood's art had a purpose. She dressed models as punked-up debutantes, thumbing her nose at the ruling classes. Her clothes subverted the fashions that had historically subjected woman. She made T-shirts emblazoned with profane political slogans, selling them at a price.

Westwood loathed Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher with a passion and threw herself into a life-long crusade to promote individual liberty, rid the world of nuclear weapons and combat the threat of climate change.

She supported Aids Research, PETA and Oxfam, gave hundreds of thousands to the Green Party and became a regular visitor to Julian Assange. She even parked a white tank outside David Cameron's house in a protest against fracking.

Given the OBE in 1992, Westwood turned up without knickers. She gave photographers a twirl and the shock of their lives. If Her Majesty was not amused, she didn't show it and Westwood was back at the Palace a few years later. The legendary rebel became a Dame.

She married again, this time to an Austrian fashion student half her age. Andreas Kronthaler was calm and supportive: indeed everything that McLaren was not. The formed a new creative partnership, for years still working from the Spartan, ex-council flat.

Westwood's favourite quotation was from Aldous Huxley: "Orthodoxy", he said, "is the grave of intelligence". The shop she opened on the Kings Road still operates. It's now called Worlds End, selling archive designs and slogan T-shirts, in memory of an icon determined to wage war against conformity.

The godmother of punk, empress of global fashion and Dame of the British Empire certainly did that.