Nestled within the formal estate grounds of the Danson Park Estate in Bexleyheath, Kent, is the splendidly restored Danson House. Built between 1762 and 1766 this Georgian villa is the creation of John Boyd, the former owner and his architect, Robert Taylor. Boyd was a successful businessman whose wealth was founded on holdings – mainly sugar plantations – on the island of St. Christopher (now St. Kitts) in the Caribbean. The symmetrical building plan Taylor used for Danson House is modelled after proportions recommended by the ancient Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius. The façade is classically inspired; it is decorated with Corinthian columns and an entablature similar to the one used for the Pantheon at Rome, and it is topped with an elegant pediment. The area above the door is decorated with a female head in profile and swags of oak leaves, signifying hospitality, strength, liberty and honour. The villa was meant to convey Boyd’s taste and status. Overall, it exemplifies the then popular Palladian style; Taylor was influenced by the revival of Italian Renaissance villas seen in the area of Vincenza. The villa was intended as a visual testament to Boyd’s artistic taste and social status.

Today Danson House hosts numerous events, including exhibitions that resonate with the eighteenth-century origins of the building. From 1 April to 31 October 2015 Danson House presented the exhibition Vivienne Westwood: Cut from the Past. The installation drew on loans from the Victoria and Albert museum and private collections around the UK. Modest in size, the show highlighted garments mainly from Westwood’s collections of the 1990s, which drew heavily on eighteenth-century designs and motifs. There was no accompanying exhibition catalogue, but panels provided in-depth information about the history and production of each garment, as well as details regarding the designer’s inspirations. Glass display cases provided physical barriers between the clothes and the visitors. The Georgians expressed their lifestyle and values through their dress and through their architecture; the expensive garments matched the scenery of Danson House perfectly, evoking luxury, opulence, wealth and prosperity.

The opening pieces of the display documented the history of Westwood’s career, providing a contextual lens through which to approach each garment. On show were clothes from her 1970s punk phase, including her iconic ‘God Save the Queen’ top carrying an image of the Queen with a safety pin stuck through her lips. This was coupled with bondage trousers with a kilt-style front panel. This type of clothing directly rejected the flared trousers and the flowery, flowing skirts and dresses that characterized hippie culture. Instead, Westwood drew on alternative fetish fashions: rubber, PVC, dog collars, razors blades and chains. The clothing Westwood created during this period was at the heart of the punk scene, and her shop on the King’s Road Seditionaries helped define the rebellious, punk movement – even if the price of her clothing meant it was inaccessible to the average punk.

Also on display in this room were a silk jacket, felt hat, corset, waistcoat, breeches and nylon skirt from three collections dating from 1982, 1985 and 1991: Mini Crini; Cut, Slash and Pull and Buffalo Girls. The structured effect increases from one show to the next. High, padded shoulders, precisely tailored lines, tight corsets and nipped waistlines were intended to reshape the body and create an increasingly fitted look. The bowler-type hat on display was modelled after the types worn by Peruvian women. Since the eighteenth century, the shape of one’s hat has always been a marker of distinction, and the exhibition notes that the designer and rapper Pharrell Williams chose this particular hat as part of his signature style. These garments marked a new turning point in Westwood’s career in which historical and cross-cultural influences became more prevalent.

The impact of eighteenth-century aristocratic dress on Westwood’s clothing became more evident in the next room. The dress on display was very clearly inspired by the French eighteenth-century ‘le sac’ gown, which gets its name from the distinct train at the back that fell loose from the shoulders. The train resulted from the arrangement of fabric into box pleats that hung from the back neckline. Such box pleats became known as Watteau pleats as the eighteenth-century French artist Antoine Watteau often portrayed women in and out of doors, in real and imaginary settings, wearing this type of sack-back dress. At the front of the gown was a decorative stomacher. These dresses were worn without the need for petticoats. During the eighteenth century the gown was considered elegant, casual wear, as opposed to the more formal hoop dress worn at court, and its full, loose shape often helped conceal clandestine pregnancies. Westwood’s dress is not a straight reconstruction; rather, she reinterprets the original style to create an asymmetrical evening dress with a polonaise pouf on one side and strapless left shoulder. Blood-red bows decorate the bodice. It is worn with one white, deerskin glove. Westwood employed deliberate creasing and sharply curved seams, thus creating a new and stunning silhouette. The gown is cut out of sea green and red silk taffeta. In 1996 the model Linda Evangelista wore it on the catwalk as part of the grand finale for Westwood’s Les Femmes collection.

In the same room were displayed the silk and polyester trimmed Boucher corset and a matching shawl from Westwood’s 1990 Portrait Collection, named after Old Master art works that inspired her. During the eighteenth century, the corset was a prominent article in the fashionable woman’s appearance, emphasizing her breasts. On the front bodice is a printed image of Francois Boucher’s voyeuristic painting Daphnis and Chloe or Shepherd Watching a Sleeping Shepherdess, 1743, now in the Wallace Collection, London. The story is a rhetorical romance that combines erotic, classical literature with pastoral sentimentality. Like the story of Daphnis and Chloe’s love, fashion is a pursuit involving longing and desire; it has no end. The sensuous Chloe sleeps peacefully in the sun while Daphnis, leaning over her body, gazes insatiably at her pale, bare breasts. The colours of the picture are light, and the atmosphere is poetic. Unsurprisingly, John Boyd was an avid art collector and many of the paintings he accumulated for Danson House portray similar pastoral scenes. He regularly commissioned works for his home by French artists, such as Charles Pavillon and Claude Joseph Vernet. Within Westwood’s appropriation of the pastoral, she explores new techniques by embellishing the corset straps and the border of the shawl with gold motifs printed in gold ink. The sides of the corset are made of gold lycra fabric. These details emulate the sort of gold frame often used to display a painting like Daphnis and Chloe. With continued wear, they are meant to produce a crackle effect, evoking the texture characteristic of the Old Master paintings on display around Danson House.

Other creations from Westwood’s Portrait collection reveal that besides paintings, she explored other artistic mediums from the past for inspiration. The information panel accompanying her Boulle print dress remarks on the influence of eighteenth-century French cabinetmaker Andre Charles Boulle whose engravings of furniture designs inspired Westwood. Boulle designed furniture and produced the engravings. For her Boulle dress, Westwood incorporated the same decorative motifs that the artist used for his furniture: seashells, mythological figures, garlands, urns and putti. She stamped Boulle’s patterns onto magenta-coloured foil and transferred them onto a stretch, navy blue velvet material.  The juxtaposition of foil and velvet produces a shimmery, gilded effect similar to the aforementioned crackle technique in evoking the textural experience of art. The dress is fancy, tight-fitting and sexy.  Displayed on a mannequin in the Danson house salon, the dress echoes the room’s decorative scheme, feminizing the décor by associating it with the female form. The hand-blockprinted wallpaper based on ornamental drawings published by Jean Baptiste Pillement in 1773 carries similar designs as those seen on the dress, including garlands, putti and urns. The gilded ceilings are elaborately carved with seashells and a blue painted frieze. The door cases and cornices incorporate columns with a slender Corinthian order, usually regarded as the most elegant of all the architectural orders. The harmonious pairing of dress and interior decoration blurs boundaries between the two art forms, encouraging the visitor to think about architecture as dress and vice and versa. It further conveys Westwood’s clear references to a particular moment in time and to her love of sumptuous Rococo design.

During the eighteenth century clothes, like architecture, were weapons in the battle of appearances, and can provide links to the construction of social identities and to the production and uses of culture. Westwood’s clothing is innovative and original, and Cut from the Past offered a chance to rediscover the pioneering nature of Westwood’s output. She is a fashion designer who plays with history, so the arrangement of garments around Danson House provided a fitting and at times ironic background to the show. The exhibition showed how Westwood bridges the distance – and the difference – between the clothes of the eighteenth century and what we wear now.

Vivienne Westwood: Cut from the Past was at Danson House, Bexleyheath, from 1st April to 31st October 2015.