The Vivienne Foundation’s collaboration with Byronesque has 2 missions. To save the world by raising revenue and partnering with organisations that are aligned with their four pillars of change, and, to weed out fakes pretending to be authentic designs from any Vivienne Westwood era; thereby offering Byronesque customers peace of mind.

We don’t authenticate the items we sell in the Vivienne Foundation concession. Joe Corré and archivists who worked with Vivienne for decades do. The only people we trust to appraise vintage Vivienne Westwood from any era, with any integrity.

The Times article, reporting on Young Kim’s allegations that we are selling fakes, failed to include any of the information provided in a letter written by Joe in response to the allegations, and that was provided to The Times. The imbalanced article fails to share Joe’s knowledgeable explanation as to why Young Kim’s claims are misguided.

As Joe points out, we have partnered with the Vivienne Foundation, not the Malcolm McLaren estate, and reference to Malcolm is included in the product descriptions we provide for every McLaren related item.

So, this weeks’ letter from the editor is a letter from Joe Corré.

You can also read about the appraisal process here, while we film an in depth interview with Joe about how Vivienne made their punk collections, and why appraising her archives isn’t an exact science.

We stand by The Vivienne Foundation, and we hope you will too.