Cardi B puffed on a cigarette as she arrived at Vivienne Westwood’s Paris Fashion Week show on Saturday.
Attending the event the rapper, 31, saw Irina Shayk strut down the catwalk as she modelled the luxury brand’s Spring Summer 2025 collection.
Cardi wore a busty mini dress, in the designers signature corset style, with a fishnet bodysuit layered underneath.
She boosted her height with a pair of towering platform boots and accessorised with a small tartan handbag.
Meanwhile, Irina, 38, looked elegant in a plunging white double breasted blazer and matching wide leg trousers.
The model’s look was competed with a pair of silver flats and very subtle makeup look.
As Fashion queen Vivienne Westwood lay dying, she summoned fellow designer Jeff Banks to her bedside and made a monumental request: to secure her legacy by becoming a director of the company she had spent decades building up.
But less than two years after Dame Vivienne’s death, in July, Mr Banks was forced out of the business amid reports of bitter in-fighting and a boardroom coup that has left the empire in chaos, The Mail on Sunday revealed.
The former host of the BBC’s Clothes Show was ousted after disagreements over the direction of the fashion house and concerns that its founder’s legacy was under threat, insiders says.
‘It has made House of Gucci look like Play School,’ one well-placed source said in reference to the 2021 film about the vicious fight to control the Italian fashion brand.
On one side of the split dividing Vivienne Westwood Ltd lies Mr Banks, a friend of the late designer’s son Joe Corre. On the other is Carlo D’Amario, the company’s chief executive, and Andreas Kronthaler, Dame Vivienne’s third husband and the label’s creative director.
‘There’s a mismatch between the heritage of Vivienne Westwood, where it is now and where it is going,’ one insider said.
Dame Vivienne sH๏τ to fame by creating the Sєx Pistols’ punk image in the 1970s and went on to build up a £70 million business empire.
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But towards the end, the designer, who was made a dame in 2006, had grown frustrated with how the label was being run, sources claim, and was said to be working on a book venting her irritation.
She was said to be particularly concerned at a ‘toxicity’ within the business and that some of its designs were not creative enough.
‘It reached a point where Vivienne wanted to shut it down,’ one insider said.
‘She always believed in quality over quanтιтy. She would submit a load of designs and the complicated, creative stuff would be overlooked.
‘She and her designers would be distraught over all that time spent making beautiful creations that would never be made.’
Days before her death in December 2022, aged 81, she summoned her longtime friend Mr Banks to her hospital bedside.
‘I felt like Cardinal Wolsey going to see the monarch,’ he later said.
