Westwood had the rebel streak from her earliest years. Raised in a working class background, she dropped out of art school and became a teacher, figuring there was no way for her to make a living as an artist. After an early marriage that resulted in one child (and gave her the last name “Westwood”), she met McLaren, with whom she would launch a London clothing store that went through several names and themes—Teddy Boy, rockabilly—before the pair landed on the ingeniously straightforward “SEX.” The store became both a clubhouse and an incubator for London’s punk movement. The Sex Pistols—which McLaren founded after visiting New York and discovering raw, thumb-in-your-eye bands like Television and The Ramones—were named to help advertise the store. The commercial hawk eye Westwood and McLaren always had on their endeavors complicates the common complaint that punk was somehow corrupted by attempts to capitalize on its appeal, and which have dogged the genre from the time McLaren created the Sex Pistols to the 2013 Met Museum Costume Institute exhibition honoring punk’s contributions to fashion.

SEX marked the first project where Westwood would show her ability as, if not a soothsayer, then a woman consistently ahead of her time. Her instinct that fashion could be political, even a platform for social change and outrage, presaged the mindset of what’s now called streetwear, where fashion is not a subculture—as it was in the ateliers of Paris couturiers who still ruled fashion when Westwood emerged—but a facet of popular culture itself. She and McLaren, her co-designer, were also early champions of the graphic T-shirt,putting queer illustrator Jim French’s lascivious “Two Cowboys” on a thin, ragged-edge jersey T-shirt, anda woman’s account of rape in neat cursive on a similarly filmy cotton tee. The store sold fetish wear like harnesses and patent-leather shoes to sex workers and aspiring musicians, creating a feedback loop of influence, as they dared musicians to adapt their wares and the musicians dared them to take their clothes even further. One of their most fantastical creations wasa twill cotton shirt covered in straps that suggested a parachute or a straightjacket, and featured a portrait of Karl Marx. It became an unlikely phenomenon: designers from Martin Margiela to Rei Kawakubo to Shayne Oliver to Rick Owens have made homages to the piece.

In the 1980s, Westwood migrated to fashion’s mainstream, though this shift had the effect of making her more influential, rather than a sellout. In class-paranoid England, she took uniforms of the well-off, from the buckled pumps and waistcoats worn by bewigged men in the 18th century, to the wasp-waisted gowns and corsets that dotted 19th century ballrooms, and made them into something ludicrous they were cool. (Her partnership with McLaren ended in the middle of this decade.) In 1985, she introduced a tiny but comically circumferential miniskirt she called the “mini crini,” adding the bushy layers of crinoline (hence the “crini”) that propped up women’s lengthy ballgowns in past centuries under the sexy puniness of the miniskirt. Those skirts, even today, look like a parody of our expectations of propriety and sexiness, and how those two qualities are rarely expected to meet. They were widely copied (and de-politicized) by more popular designers, most notably Christopher Lacroix. By the end of that decade, the poufy miniskirt was seen as an emblem of the silliness of the decade’s capitalist excesses, an evolution that surely made Westwood raise her eyebrows with glee.