Dame Vivienne Westwood, the trailblazing British fashion designer who brought punk and politics to the rarefied world of high fashion, has died on December 29, aged 81. She passed away peacefully and surrounded by her family in Clapham, South London, a representative for Westwood confirmed.

Before the bustles, bustiers, and bottom paddings, the tartan and tailoring, Vivienne Isabel Swire was born on April 8, 1941, in the village of Tintwistle, Cheshire, to a sausage factory worker father Gordon and greengrocer’s assistant mother Dora. She attended Glossop Grammar School before moving to the London suburb of Harrow in 1957, where her parents ran a post office. Westwood then took a silversmithing course for a term at Harrow Art School (now the University of Westminster), but feeling daunted by the art world, she enrolled at secretarial college instead and later trained as a teacher. At a dance in 1961, she met Derek Westwood, a Hoover factory apprentice, and married him—wearing her own design—in 1962. They had a son together, Benjamin Westwood, born in 1963, but split up when he was three.