'I became fascinated with collecting Vivienne Westwood - and now I am selling it all at Tennants Auctioneers in Yorkshire’

Susan is a serious collector of Vivienne Westwood. At least, she was. She lets me peek into the spare bedroom of her lovely old cottage in Monk Fryston, near Selby. It is packed with clothes, even though most of her Westwood collection – around 300 pieces – has been taken away to go under the hammer next month at Tennants in Leyburn.

A key lot is the 'Voyage to Cythera Collection Two-Piece Harlequin Mini-Crini A/W 1989, which she bought more than 20 years ago from someone who had worked in the Westwood studio. This might be the actual one worn by Westwood muse Sarah Stocksbridge on the catwalk, as it has no labels.

“Only a handful of those were made,” Susan says. “There’s one in America, the V&A have one, I’ve got one.” The guide price is £8-£12,000. “But who knows. You know what auctions are like? If two people want it …”

Born in 1956, Susan grew up in Leeds. “I was always interested in fashion,” she says. “My teenage years and twenties were in the Seventies and the Eighties, when fashions were out there. I used to get Honey Magazine and 19 Magazine and then later on there was Cosmopolitan, and it was all about fashion.

“I have always been a bit of a fashionista, and just enjoyed it.”

After university at Leeds and then Manchester, she joined the NHS and became a clinical physiologist in cardio-respiratory, later working for 20 years for a pharmaceutical company. “I’ve always been a collector and a hoarder,” she says. “I love textiles, any kind of textile, the sumptuousness, the colours and the weaves, and the history of textiles.

“I have always been interested in social history, why things are, and how did we get here? What’s the political or social thinking of the day that led us to producing a fashion item?”

When she moved to her current house in 1994, she suddenly had storage space, and began to collect antique costume fashion. The first piece, an Edwardian smoking jacket, was bought in Harrogate in 1991. She began shopping, at specialist sales and online.

“If it was the fabric that attracted me, the colour, whatever, I’d buy things randomly,” she says. “My earliest pieces go back to the 1780s with some Spitalfields silk dresses.

“I then decided that I ought to put them into chronological order, into the decades of the 19th and the 20th centuries, and I thought, the Seventies, what’s iconic? You’ve got punk rock – that’s 50 years ago. That was at the time of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. There was a lot of social unrest, the three-day week and all the strikes. That is how the punk movement arose, as a rebellion.

“There were the famous posters that the Sex Pistols put up of the Queen wearing a safety pin through her nose. It was that rebellion and shock. That was Malcolm Mclaren and Vivienne Westwood, they just did stuff on their kitchen table - they’d buy some T-shirts from the market and customise them. But then they came up with the idea of the muslin strait jackets, which are quite iconic. The idea of that was bondage, the bondage of the common people to the system.”

Then, in 2004, Susan went to the Vivienne Westwood exhibition at the V&A. “I was blown away by it, it was fabulous, and just decided to start creating my own little collection. I wasn’t buying every week but I’ve got over 300 pieces so clearly I did go mad. I am obsessive about things.

“She always referred her designs into research of historic context, so she would, a bit like me, go to an art exhibition, for example, the Wallace collection in London, and look at the paintings, the carvings, the marquetry work on the furniture, and be inspired by that.”

Now there is no space left in Susan’s house. “My husband died nine years ago,” she says. “I used to go to lots of antique fairs and flea markets, but when he died, life changes, doesn’t it?”

It was time for the collection to go, and so she contacted Sarah White, specialist in charge of the Fashion, Costume & Textiles Department at Tennants. “I’ve known Sarah for a few years,” Susan says. “She was just stunned at the amount of stuff that there was.”

Sarah takes up the story. “I was expecting about 50 or 60 items and she turned up in her car and it was full to the brim,” she says.

“She just loves them. Some of them she’s worn. A third of the collection is probably showpiece items and two-thirds are very wearable, and more modern items.

“It’s a real joy. Not many people will collect on the scale – 300 items is a lot.

“I love the fact that everything has got a tweak. Dresses and jackets, often the shoulder seams are asymmetric. She just tweaks and plays with everything to have a little bit of fun with them.

“She was the longest working fashion designer that we have had. Her first collection wasn’t until she was in her early 40s, so she was a comparatively late starter - she was amazing and just kept producing and producing.”

Estimates range from below £100 to the mini crini £8-£12,000. There is a display in the Tennants Garden Rooms and in the Harrogate office windows, and on the website, for which staff and their family and friends modelled.

Susan says she no longer collects anything (although she does have five dogs and 100 chickens). She is excited about the sale, and hopes it will make more than she has spent on the collection.

“It’s going, and it’s gone and that’s the end for me,” she says. “It’s not about the money. I had it to spend at the time. I spent it. Other people might have gone to Spain for two weeks.

“I’ll still have the books and I’ll lovingly look through them and think, oh yes, I used to have that.”

Vivienne Westwood: Five Decades at the Cutting Edge takes place on August 15, 2025. Preview: Tuesday, August 12. Viewing times: Wednesday, August 13, and Thursday, August 14, 10am to 3pm. Venue: Tennants Auctioneers, Leyburn, North Yorkshire, DL8 5LU, www.tennants.co.uk