Vivienne Westwood Worlds End pirate frock coat, reversible Squiggle print, front view

Vivienne Westwood in Japan: the Orb, the Armour Ring and NANA

A shield for one finger

The manga made the ring a character before it was a fashion. NANA follows two young women who share a name and a flat in Tokyo: Nana Komatsu, who falls in love easily, and Nana Osaki, who fronts a punk band. Yazawa drew her cast in real Westwood clothes and jewellery, down to the orb pendant lighter carried by the band's bassist, Shinichi Okazaki. Readers could match the panels to the shop windows. The story became two live-action films, released in Japan in 2005 and 2006, and a television anime that ran on Nippon Television from 2006 to 2007.

The house noticed, eventually. On 13 November 2025, for the manga's twenty-fifth anniversary, Westwood released a capsule made with the manga's American publisher under licence from its Japanese one. It carried leather chokers, armour rings, tartan corsets, Rocking Horse platforms and a re-release of the Giant Orb lighter, limited to 250 numbered pieces worldwide. A quarter of a century after the first chapter, the label finally answered its most faithful fan. Few brands have been explained to a nation by a comic. Westwood was, and the explanation stuck.

See also: what happened to Cool Japan, and Hysteric Glamour, Number (N)ine and Wacko Maria, Tokyo's own rock-print labels.

Five names at one address

Every Westwood story starts on one shopfront in Chelsea. In 1971 Westwood and Malcolm McLaren began selling 1950s records and memorabilia at the back of Paradise Garage, a former denim shop at 430 King's Road. They took over the whole unit and called it Let It Rock, after a Chuck Berry song, dressing it for the Teddy Boys and their velvet collars. Westwood had trained and worked as a primary school teacher. Within a year her interests had turned to bikers, zips and leather, and the shop became Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, under a skull and crossbones.

The slogans came next, printed on T-shirts she and McLaren designed, and they led to a prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959. The answer was to go further. In 1974 pink padded letters spelling SEX went over the door, and the stock turned to rubber, PVC and fetish wear sold, in the house's own phrase, as "rubberwear for the office". In December 1976 the shop was refitted as Seditionaries: Clothes for Heroes, with photographs of bombed Dresden on the walls and holes punched in the ceiling.

Seditionaries gave punk its uniform. The bondage trousers mixed army combat cloth, motorcycle leathers and fetish straps, with a zip running under the crotch, a removable flap at the seat and straps that hobbled the stride. Mohair jumpers were knitted loose so they seemed to unravel. The Sex Pistols, managed by McLaren, were dressed from the shop. In the autumn of 1980 the unit was refitted one last time, as Worlds End, and that is the name it still carries.

The refit gave the shop a sloping floor, like the tilted deck of a ship at sea, and walls in brilliant turquoise. Light bulbs were coated in copper shellac to throw an old, warm glow. In our reading, the back-lane shops of 1990s Harajuku borrowed the same idea: a shop built as a stage set. The chain ran from Chelsea to Tokyo in one generation.

See also: how Japan became the vintage capital, and the Fashionista Bible.

Pirates, savages and a neon Tokyo

The first catwalk show was a costume drama. In 1981 Westwood and McLaren showed the Pirate collection at Olympia in Hammersmith: puffed sleeves, ruffles, breeches, sashes and a looping line print the house calls the Squiggle, in gold, orange and yellow. It heralded the New Romantic look and fixed the Worlds End shop in the public mind as a ship. For Autumn-Winter 1982/83 she showed in Paris for the first time. The partnership did not last much longer. The couple stopped working together in 1984, McLaren went back to music, and Westwood's own career began in earnest.

Japan entered the work almost at once. Savage, for Spring-Summer 1982, used what the house's own chronology calls "flat cutting from Japan": garments built from flat, geometric pieces, as a kimono is. The next invitation came from Tokyo itself. Westwood was asked to show Hypnos, her Spring-Summer 1984 collection, at Hanae Mori's Best of Five, a set of global fashion awards that put her beside Calvin Klein, Claude Montana and Gianfranco Ferré. For Autumn-Winter 1984/85 she showed Clint Eastwood, with fluorescent Day-Glo patches inspired, in the house's words, by Tokyo's neon signs.

The story of Hanae Mori, the butterfly of Paris, runs beside this one: a Japanese couturier in Paris inviting a London punk to Tokyo. Spring-Summer 1985 brought Mini-Crini, a short crinoline worn with the Rocking Horse shoe, a black ballerina pump on a curved wooden platform that rocks up at the toe. The house's notes for the season record a wish to kill the big masculine shoulder of the 1980s. She did it with a hip and a hem.

A reversible Worlds End pirate frock coat, Squiggle on one face, shows the vocabulary on a single garment: a wide turned-back collar, cuffs that fold to show the other face, white buttons, and a woven Worlds End label marked Born in England at the neck. Its reverse is a napped blue-grey cloth. The tailoring of the period, from Worlds End to the late MAN line, waits on our designer jackets shelf.

See also: Kenzo Takada's Tokyo cut in Paris, and Japanese maximalism.

A crown jewel with a ring of Saturn

The orb began on a jumper for a prince. In 1985 Westwood planned a knitted jumper she imagined Prince Charles might wear on his days off, covered in the insignia a British prince might own: griffins, a coat of arms, the thistle, the leek, the shamrock, a chain, the crown and the orb of the crown jewels. To make it look forward rather than back, she added a satellite ring around the orb, like the ring of Saturn, and the phrase Deep Sky, borrowed from astronomy magazines her son had lent her. Carlo D'Amario, later her managing director, saw the drawing and told her the ringed orb should be her logo.

The house dates the logo to 1986 and gives it one meaning: taking tradition into the future. Its first public outing came in the Harris Tweed collection for Autumn-Winter 1987/88, as embroidery and buttons. That collection drew on a second orb. Since 1911 the trademark of Harris Tweed, the hand-woven cloth of the Outer Hebrides, has been a royal orb, and Westwood's mark sat close enough to it to cause friction in the islands. The cloth's governing body, writing after her death, called her a friend of the industry and noted that the two marks had since worked together to their mutual benefit.

The girl was perhaps fourteen, with a plaited bun, a Harris Tweed jacket and ballet shoes in her bag. Westwood ordered nine eight-metre pieces of the cloth for the show, wrote the order by hand and sent swatches back to the mill with instructions to make them "more hairy". The orb that came out of that season now sits on almost every piece the house makes. In Japan it is the first thing a collector checks.

The orb lighter 048, a retrospective edition of 150 with its stand and chain, turns the logo into a desk sculpture: sphere, orbit ring and cross finial cast in dark metal with a softened, aged tone. The orb also went on the wrist early, with the Putti and Orb watches drawn for Swatch in 1992 and 1993, told in our guide to Vivienne Westwood watches.

See also: the Chrome Hearts silver guide, for a second house that turned an emblem into jewellery.

Armour, tartan and an invented clan

The ring on Nana Osaki's finger has older roots than the manga. Time Machine, for Autumn-Winter 1988/89, named after the novella by H.G. Wells, was the first collection to draw on the Wallace Collection in London, a house museum famous for its arms and armour. Civilizade, for Spring-Summer 1989, followed with armoured jackets, rugby jerseys and harlequins. Armour stayed in the vocabulary for decades: Renaissance armour was translated into knitwear for Autumn-Winter 2009/10, and tweed was cut "as armour" for Spring-Summer 2012.

The Westwood armour ring in black and silver tone, size XL carries the idea onto the hand: four plates on hinged links, each numbered underneath, the orb and cross on the top plate and the house name raised on the band. Ours is marked XL, which covers Japanese ring sizes 14 to 17; our ring size chart for US, UK, EU and Japan converts that before a reader commits. The rest of the orb jewellery, pendants, chokers and pearls, sits on our costume jewellery shelf.

The recognition came in the same years. The British Fashion Council named Westwood Fashion Designer of the Year in 1990 and again in 1991, and in December 1990 she opened a boutique in Davies Street, Mayfair. For Anglomania, Autumn-Winter 1993/94, she drew her own tartan and invented a clan to go with it, MacAndreas, after her husband. A Scottish weaving house recognised the clan officially, a process the house says usually takes two centuries.

The same Anglomania show produced the most replayed fall in fashion. The model Naomi Campbell went over on the runway in Paris in a pair of blue mock-croc Super Elevated Gillie platforms with heels of 28 centimetres. The photographs went round the world, and the shoes went to a London museum. The museum's own unboxing of that pair is below.

A curator opens the archive box holding the 1993 Super Elevated Gillie shoes and reads their construction: punched blue leather, silk ribbon laces and the tall platform sole. Look closer: the ribbon laces, not the heel, show how the shoe was meant to stay on.

The Mac Andy tartan long wallet with its silver-tone orb shows the tartan habit in leather goods: powder blue, rose, olive and cream crossed with fine yellow lines, closed by a single orb. Wallets and purses from the house and its neighbours fill our designer wallets shelf.

See also: Rei Kawakubo's Comme des Garçons.

Four labels under one roof

By the late 1990s Westwood was not one label but four, and each tells a collector something different. In 1993 the women's collections divided into Gold Label, the couture-minded line shown in Paris, and a second, ready-to-wear line. MAN followed in Milan in January 1996. Anglomania arrived in 1998 as a younger diffusion line built from the archive: SEX, Pirate, Mini-Crini and the bondage pieces, re-cut for a new customer. Red Label, by the house's own dating, launched in 1999, combining Savile Row tailoring with French couture.

In 2016 the house cut the tree back. Gold Label became Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood, shown in Paris for Autumn-Winter 2016, and the global Red Label and MAN were folded into the mainline. Japan was the exception: the licensed Japanese RED LABEL and MAN carried on. In March 2025 a Japan-only unisex line, RED+MAN, joined them. The London house simplified itself, and Japan kept the branches.

Westwood married Kronthaler, a former student she met while teaching in Vienna in 1988; the house gives 1993 for the wedding. Production ran through long partnerships, including an Italian manufacturer that held the Red Label and MAN ready-to-wear licence from 1989 and renewed it in 2013 through Spring-Summer 2019. In our reading, that Italian thread explains the "made in Italy" labels on some of the pieces that reach Tokyo.

See also: Nigo's A Bathing Ape, a Tokyo house that also learned to run many lines at once.

The second house: Japan's licence

Japan's Westwood is a licensed house with its own history. From 1994 a Japanese trading house became the brand's master licensee, handling direct imports and the domestic licences. One of its staff, looking back in the company's own textile bulletin in May 2023, remembered the start: high-school girls in Harajuku wearing Westwood socks with the logo, then a huge boom, then a fall in sales to a fifth of the peak. The business was rebuilt by adding clothing licences to the accessory licences, and by building an online shop.

The clothing came from Kobe. Orrizzonti, a Kobe apparel house that had split from a larger group in 1991, sold Westwood imports and, from September 2002, held a licence to produce Westwood collections for Japan and China, including pieces adapted for local taste. The master licensee later bought a controlling stake in Orrizzonti. At the time of the deal, trade press counted ten Japanese companies making fifteen kinds of licensed Westwood goods around the imported core.

In the trade press's current brand file, the women's imports sit with one Tokyo distributor, the men's imports with another, and a long list of sub-licensees make the small things: watches, handkerchiefs, eyewear, leather goods, lighters, socks and hosiery, umbrellas, gloves and belts. That list explains the Westwood a collector meets in Japan. A wallet, a lighter or a pair of socks may be a Japanese licensed object designed to a London brief, not an import. Neither is lesser; they are different objects, and the label says which.

See also: Japanese condition ranks explained, the grading that travels with every licensed piece.

Rooms in Tokyo

Westwood's first licensed boutique outside Britain opened in Tokyo, by the house's own account. The flagships followed: a womenswear flagship in Aoyama in March 2003, a menswear flagship on Omotesando in October 2008, and a boutique in Ginza Six in April 2017, built to the same concept as the Paris store. In between, for Autumn-Winter 2002/03, a Westwood collaboration with Comme des Garçons launched in Japan and Milan through Rei Kawakubo's Cosa Coma Comme shops. London punk and Aoyama's avant-garde shared a rail in Tokyo.

The museum came to Tokyo too. Vivienne Westwood: 35 Years in Fashion, the Japanese leg of the retrospective first shown in London in 2004, opened at the Mori Arts Center Gallery on the 52nd floor of Roppongi Hills Mori Tower on 23 November 2005 and ran to 15 January 2006. It showed more than 500 pieces, among them 150 costumes from the London museum and from Westwood's own collection, with film of interviews and shows. A review at the time noticed the irony of seeing punk at the top of a high-speed lift. The clothes held up anyway.

The house's following in Japan was no secret in Europe. Her 1990s Paris shows attracted Italian backers who could see that her women, dressed as heroes rather than goddesses, already had an audience in Japan. Our luxury archive shelf holds Westwood beside the Paris and Milan houses that taught Tokyo to dress up.

See also: Supreme in Japan and its six doors.

Reading the label

A Westwood piece states its line, its country and often its season on one small woven label. Read it before the cloth. The table below is a practical key, drawn from the pieces we have handled and from the house's own record of its lines.

Japanese RED LABEL numbers do not match European ones. Our RED LABEL polo dress in dusty pink piqué, made in Japan is a good example: neck label 00, recorded on its page as an M, 97.5 cm long, 40 cm across the shoulder, an embroidered red orb on the pocket. Measure a favourite garment flat and compare it with our size guide for tops and jackets before choosing.

Condition follows the Japanese ranks used on every piece we show. Worlds End and early Gold Label cloth can carry age in honest ways, a softened nap or a faded print, and the condition notes say where. In our reading, the orb itself is a useful check of care: a crisp ring and cross on a plaque suggests a piece that lived in a drawer, not a pocket.

See also: our authenticity guarantee.

Where the record differs

Westwood's history was written fast, by many hands, and some of its dates disagree. Where two accounts differ, we print both.

A correction to the common story: Westwood was born near the village of Hollingworth, in Cheshire. A widely repeated birthplace, a neighbouring village in Derbyshire, was corrected in a major London obituary in March 2026.

The house Japan kept

London made Westwood twice: once at 430 King's Road, where punk got its clothes, and once in the Paris salons, where she cut corsets and tweed into armour. Japan made her a third time. It invited her to show in the early 1980s, licensed her in 1994, drew her into a manga in 2000, hung her retrospective on the 52nd floor in 2005, and kept her MAN and RED LABEL lines alive after London closed them. The orb lighter that a bassist carries in a comic came back in 2025 as a numbered edition of 250: in our reading, a small grail with a ring of Saturn on top. The Westwood a collector holds today was most likely cut, sized and loved in Japan.

That is our reading.

Answered plainly

What is the Vivienne Westwood orb?

A royal orb, a sphere topped by a cross, circled by a ring like Saturn's. The house has used it since 1986 to mean "taking tradition into the future", and it first appeared on clothes in the Harris Tweed collection of Autumn-Winter 1987/88.

What is the difference between RED LABEL and MAN?

RED LABEL is womenswear and MAN is menswear. Both were global lines until 2016-17; in Japan both continue as licensed lines designed by the London team, and many of the Japanese pieces we see are labelled made in Japan.

Why is Westwood so loved in Japan?

Japan met her early, at a Tokyo show of her Spring-Summer 1984 collection, and saw her everywhere after a master licence from 1994. Ai Yazawa's manga NANA, from 2000, then dressed its punk heroine in Westwood, armour ring included.

How do I size a Japanese RED LABEL or MAN piece?

Read the measurements, not the number. Japanese RED LABEL sizes run from 00 to 3 and run small; MAN runs from 44 to 50. Compare with a garment you own, measured flat.

Is an orb lighter or armour ring made in Japan less authentic?

No. Many Westwood accessories sold in Japan are made by Japanese licensees to the house's designs. They are genuine Westwood objects of a particular origin, and the stamp or box says which.

Further reading

References

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