VIVIENNE WESTWOOD AW26/27 PUTS TARTAN ON EIGHT INCH BOOTS

Vivienne Westwood's Autumn Winter 2026/27 collection went up online and across the brand's boutiques this week, billed by the house itself as reimagined silhouettes and classic tailoring. Three weeks earlier, Cynthia Erivo had already made the argument in public. She walked into Variety's Power of Women London event at The Chancery Rosewood on June 3, 2026, in a blue and brown tartan jacket and skirt from the same collection, standing on platform boots roughly 3.5 inches thick with a block heel that reached close to 8 inches. That is what reimagined silhouettes means here, not a rebrand of tartan but a structural rewrite of how much a garment is allowed to exaggerate before it stops reading as tailoring.

The Boots Under That Tartan Ran Close To Eight Inches

Erivo's platform boots were built around a roughly 3.5 inch platform sole under a wide block heel that pushed total height near 8 inches, the kind of proportion that turns footwear into structural support for the rest of the look rather than a finishing accessory. Vivienne Westwood has built its name on exactly that kind of exaggeration since 1993, when Naomi Campbell fell on the runway in a pair of blue mock croc Super Elevated Ghillie platforms during the Anglomania show, a moment that made the house's platform heel internationally famous overnight. Andreas Kronthaler, who has designed the house's collections since Westwood's death, kept that same instinct for AW26/27. A boot this tall changes how a jacket has to be cut above it, since the wearer's proportions shift the moment the shoe goes on, which is part of why the tailoring reads as reimagined instead of simply new.

Kronthaler Built The Jacket On A Diagonal

Erivo's jacket carried an asymmetrical draped lapel with a plunging neckline, two front buttons, and slightly puffed shoulders that eased into loose sleeves finished with buttoned cuffs. The skirt continued the same logic below the waist, with ruching that gathered diagonally across the legs to create a high low hem rather than a flat one. That diagonal is the throughline. Classic tailoring usually locks a garment to a straight vertical line, lapel over button over hem. Kronthaler cuts that line on an angle instead, the same instinct behind Rei Kawakubo's deconstructed suiting for Comme des Garcons Homme Plus, where zippers turned trousers into ruffled skirts mid garment. Kronthaler's version is harder to draft and harder to size consistently than a straight seam, and it is the detail that separates the AW26/27 line from tartan pieces at other houses that stop at the print.

Two Other AW26 Runways Chose Restraint Instead

Rei Kawakubo's Comme des Garcons AW26 ran 16 monochromatic black looks in silk, velvet and jacquard before six Pepto Bismol pink pieces broke the sequence, an AW26 season built on color restraint and repetition. Yohji Yamamoto's Fall 2026 menswear went the other direction with flattened aluminum cans worked into literal armor across 45 looks. Kronthaler's AW26/27 sits between those two instincts, keeping a recognizable tartan and a recognizable jacket silhouette while pushing the proportions and the platform height past what either of those other houses attempted this season. Tartan is the easiest fabric in fashion to make safe. Kronthaler is using it to do the opposite.

The Caption Points To Boutiques, Not Just The Red Carpet

Vivienne Westwood's own announcement for AW26/27 is explicit that the collection is available online and across its boutiques now, not staged as a runway exclusive waiting for a press cycle. That matters because Erivo's red carpet moment and the retail drop landed close together, which means a shopper who saw the tartan jacket on a red carpet feed can walk into a boutique and find the same silhouette on a rail within weeks rather than a season later. Westwood's house has always sold the runway look, not a diluted retail version of it, and AW26/27 keeps that promise intact down to the diagonal ruching.

Kronthaler's AW26/27 collection is the rare case where the red carpet moment and the retail drop tell the same story instead of two different ones. Cynthia Erivo's tartan jacket and 8 inch boots at The Chancery Rosewood on June 3 were not a stylist's one off pull, they are the same reimagined silhouettes now hanging in Vivienne Westwood's boutiques. Buy the jacket if the diagonal ruching and asymmetrical lapel read as wearable to you; skip it if tartan only works in a straight vertical cut, because this season does not offer that version.