He’s the man who brought Banksy to Glastonbury, so naturally Stormzy was going to own it at Vogue World: London. After walking the Theatre Royal Drury Lane red carpet in Ferragamo by young tastemaker Maximilian Davis, the rapper put his weight behind one of the fashion capital’s foremost shapeshifters: the late Vivienne Westwood, and her successor: Andreas Kronthaler.
Performing alongside Sophie Okonedo in act three of Vogue’s ode to the arts, Stormzy wore a custom Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood suit crafted from rich brown fine wool with exposed antique gold silk shirt sleeves, inspired by the Regency-style Dury Lane interiors. Westwood’s signature orb – a mash-up of British royal iconography and the rings of Saturn to evoke the significance of the past while driving the future forward – detailed the grime trailblazer’s lapel, just like the one he wore at her funeral in February.
Read more: Vogue World London 2023 Red Carpet
“It’s important to know the past, it’s an anchor and it gives you power,” Kronthaler told Vogue of the core principles at the heart of the house, which informed the “elegant and masculine” look for Stormzy, “a modern day Shakespeare”, who treated theatre goers to a version of “Crown” from his second album, Heavy is the Head. The direct nod to the Bard’s Henry IV, in which the titular character says “uneasy lies the head that wears the crown”, not only felt apt on a night celebrating the power of British poetry, but brought the values shared by designer and lyricist to the fore.
While Westwood’s punk lobbying extended beyond the catwalk to anti-fracking protests, stripping off for PETA in support of vegetarianism and launching her Climate Revolution campaign in typically bold fashion at the 2012 London Paralympics, Stormzy’s music is a platform for his beliefs around education, equal rights and the justice system. This is, after all, the man who used his performance at the 2018 BRIT Awards to air his thoughts on the British government’s inadequate response to the Grenfell Tower disaster. His Merky Foundation, including the publishing imprint #MerkyBooks and the Stormzy Scholarship, is forging viable creative paths for a new generation of Black British voices.
The Union Jack motif emblazoned across Stormzy’s stab-proof Banksy vest at Glastonbury is one also intertwined with Westwood’s anarchic reappropriations of historical insignia, such as with her autumn/winter 2002 Anglophilia collection. The woman who always wore her agenda on her sleeve draped herself in the British flag a handful of times, but perhaps most memorably upon taking a bow on the spring 2006 runway while wearing an “I am not a terrorist, please don’t arrest me” T-shirt. Created in 2005 in opposition to the government’s proposed anti-terror legislation, Westwood, like the rapper some 14 years later at Worthy Farm, employed the Union Jack as an emblem of a divided country.
So yes, Stormzy’s Vogue World: London suit is a cracking piece of tailoring, but it is also a metaphor for strength. “The art lover is a freedom fighter,” said Kronthaler ahead of the West End show, which saw Stormzy kitted out in a new kind of armor among peers who, as the designer put it, believe that “the arts are fundamental to the human race”.
