Let's start with the store, number 44 Conduit Street, which on a weekday afternoon is full of Japanese teenagers, giggling into the sales racks. There are puffball skirts and drag-queeny shoes and shirts that, unless you knew they were by Vivienne Westwood, might look to an observer as if you couldn't do your buttons up; there are the beautifully cut jackets and sculpted bustiers. Towards the back of the store are the latest versions of Westwood's notorious protest T-shirts, which are protesting at this point -- and without apparent irony -- against consumerism. (They are £60 each, down from £95.) I Am Expensiv [sic] reads the slogan on one; and Who The Fuck Needs Art; and NINSDOL, which Westwood tells me stands for Nationalist Idolatry, Non-Stop Distraction and Organized Lying. "It's an invented name," she says. "It means have you had your universal tranquilizer today? Have you had your pill?"
Her studio is several kilometers away in Battersea, south London, where on the ground floor legions of staff cut and stitch for the new collection. Upstairs, Westwood smokes in her office in a blue silk smock. She is 66 and doesn't look it -- doesn't look any age, in fact, and never has; it is one of her talents to be always slightly out of context. Whenever she is photographed, Westwood seems either to be flashing her crotch or pulling a face, and from this one imagines her to be difficult, to be clinging still to the legacy of punk and the notion that rudeness is the same as subversion. But there is no sign of that today. Instead, she is peering and delicate, her white skin like the underside of a crab against her livid orange hair. "Referring to my husband," she says, in a typically structured sentence, "he designs as much as I do. As a matter of fact, he designed this dress; I didn't do this dress, it's him." Her voice is like Alan Bennett's.
The husband, Andreas, is 25 years her junior and works as a designer in the studio. (We will meet him presently.) If it were up to Westwood, she would abandon fashion for the moment and devote herself to the problem of what she calls "propaganda" and "the drug of consumerism." This is her new thing. She has written a manifesto, which she hopes to present at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival later this month, to provoke a discussion on the nature of culture and the arts; specifically, to expose the sham efforts of people such as her good friend, Tracey Emin. "I thought she and Tracey were friends," one of her bemused colleagues says to me later, "but she never stops going on about how bad her art is." Westwood can't help herself. The broad message of her piece is: the philistines are upon us! And, yes, it has caused upset in her friendship group. "Definitely. Let's just leave it at that." She sighs. "My biggest criticism is how can people be so easily satisfied? Even people with talent." She sends up conceptual art as "a symphony composed on the remaining three keys of a broken piano, combined with the random throwing of marbles at a urinal."
Westwood's convictions are so earnest, so oblivious to the possibility of ridicule, as to be strangely heroic. They also make her vulnerable. The "loony" tag that once attached itself to her in an admiring way has long since become mocking. "The tabloids like me for it," she says of her willingness to say what she thinks. "But people who write features in posh papers sometimes say, 'Who does she think she is? After all, she just designs dresses.'" She gives a small smile.
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