She has found inspiration in the furniture of Andre Charles Boulle in her Portrait collection A/W 1990, creating elegant dresses in black velvet over-printed in gold. Westwood created a silk evening dress based on the eighteenth century artist François Boucher's portraits of Louis XV's mistress, Madame de Pompadour, for her Anglophilia collection, recreating the crumpled silk taffeta. Despite her exactitude, Westwood's creations are never historical facsimiles; 'I take something from the past that has a sort of vitality that has never been exploited - like the crinoline - and get very intense. In the end you do something original because you overlay your own ideas.'
