“Please don’t write that I’m eccentric,” says Vivienne Westwood, who is dressed in a holey black dress with what looks like bits of flesh-colored tights woven in and out of it, a pair of scruffy old trainers and a knitted hat pulled over her hair, which is the color of clementines. She has drawn her eyebrows on in red pencil. “It’s always, ‘aah, this eccentric woman.’ I’ve heard that story so many times.” She pauses and looks out of the window of her office. “I suppose I don’t mind, I have to take it as a compliment in an age of conformity.”
Westwood’s office, in a building in Battersea, south London, which seems to have hundreds of young people busying themselves in corners, is crammed with papers, ideas and sketches pinned on walls, and rails crammed with clothes. She shows me a gold bodysuit she is working on for a ballet performance next week by dancers from the Royal Ballet, alongside a fashion show of her fall/winter collection, in aid of the NSPCC (the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children). “It will have a dragon snaking its way around it,” she says. It looks worryingly unfinished, given that it needs to be ready in four days, but Westwood doesn’t look concerned.
The idea for the dance, she says, came from a book about alchemy, and what follows is a 10-minute monologue about the subject, delivered in an accent so soft and Alan Bennett-esque that it makes you think of tea and crumpets. “I won’t go into any more details,” she says, finally, then: “Yes I will actually, because it’s really great. I won’t be a minute. So, the dance. I took one of these metaphors from an alchemical book. The male is horrible — he is absolutely beautiful, a sensation, but he’s totally cold and he doesn’t care about anything. The female is incredibly ugly but she’s attracted to him. Eventually, they lock together and they can’t separate and it’s a sort of strange love affair. They become one substance. Anyway, that’s the end of it. It’s incredible how it works, I love the choreography.”
Another speech follows — and I’m not sure how we got on to this — about how she doesn’t think science is the answer to everything because it doesn’t take account of human nature and what makes us happy. She says: “Sorry if I take rather a long time to explain things,” then: “Hang on a minute,” when I interrupt. She steamrollers over me, talking slightly faster and louder, sometimes putting her head in her hands, as if nothing will stop her getting her point out. She has a lot to say. On the destruction of the planet: “We have to save the rainforest or else we’ve got no chance. Can you imagine the warlords, and the rape and pillage, and the mass migrations and the hunger? The human race has looked never before on the apocalypse and I do believe that is what we’re facing.”
On politics: “I’m [UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s] worst enemy. I hate that man. I hate his cowardice, the fact that he just acquiesced in everything the horrible, disgusting [former UK prime minister Tony] Blair wanted to do. [Conservative Party leader] Cameron doesn’t seem to have much to say, and the Liberal Democrats are following the government ideas. They are all old-fashioned thinkers.”
You could probably choose any subject and Westwood, a voracious reader, would have something to say on it. But because we have a strict time limit, it’s a bit of a battle because Westwood wants to talk about art and ideas and, boringly for her, I’d rather talk about the punk years and why she didn’t wear knickers when she went to collect her Order of the British Empire medal (if she’s wearing a dress, she never does, apparently).
“I’m not interested in talking about little anecdotes about things that have happened to me,” she says, not unkindly. I suppose her past has been gone over so much that it is threadbare. Westwood grew up in the Pennine village of Tintwistle, where her father worked in the Wall’s sausage factory and her mother was an assistant at the local greengrocers. After art college, Vivienne Swire married Derek Westwood, a factory apprentice, and their son Ben was born. The marriage didn’t last, and when Westwood met Malcolm McLaren, she fell pregnant with her second son, Joe, almost immediately.
They opened a shop together on Kings Road and in the four decades she has been designing fashion, Westwood had a phenomenal influence on the way we dress. As well as the safety pins and rips and zips and bondage trousers of the punk look, her 1979 collection, Pirates, became the template for the New Romantic movement. For years she and her clothes were ridiculed, but she has arrived at national treasure status.
I recently interviewed her oldest son, Ben, who is a pornographer. He has recently been campaigning against the government’s plan to criminalize the possession of extreme pornography. What does she make of his career choice? “It’s such a cliche, that pinup styling,” she says. “I think it’s boring because of that. Otherwise, I think it’s fine. But I think he should make the women look more glamorous, more interesting. But then it probably wouldn’t be porn if the women looked too strong.”
Maybe it offends her feminist principles, I suggest. “Oh no, I’m anti-feminist,” she says. “They don’t see the wood for the trees and everything has to be viewed from this feminist point of view. I know women have suffered and I think it’s great that people stand up for women’s rights but the problem with feminists is that they somehow consider women to be superior beings. And in the end, they just want to be men anyway. They want to do men’s work.” I try to ask her what she means by “men’s work” but she steamrollers on. “[Feminists] certainly underestimate the power women [have had] in influencing their children, or men.”
I was hoping to see Westwood’s third husband, Andreas Kronthaler, but he isn’t in the studio. Westwood met him when she was teaching a class in Vienna and he was one of her students and they married in 1992. “It’s amazing, it’s incredible,” she says of their relationship. “I feel so sure about it. He’s so supportive and we’re just so interested in each other. He’s an amazing person.”
Does he mind being in her shadow? “No, not at all. He’s not in my shadow anyway. He’s a very bossy person actually. He prefers to let me do the public things. He has an original point of view, he’s extremely interesting. What is good about him is that he likes to go out. He goes to the pub across the road and he just loves to look at people. So when he goes down the club, or is watching TV, I can get on with my reading.”
Kronthaler is 25 years her junior and she has often spoken of how he goes off on holiday without her (“I hate to travel”). It is perhaps mean to even suggest it, but does she ever worry he will leave her? “No, I don’t. But it’s difficult to say that and one doesn’t want to sound complacent. I know he’s committed to me. We support each other, intellectually and in all kinds of ways.”
Is it important for her to be in love? “No, it wasn’t. One of the greatest periods of my life was when I was without a man, sexually or any real way, for about 10 years. Except that wasn’t really true because I was very close to my friend Gary Ness, who is dead. He was a homosexual but I was very attracted to him. I was not looking for a man at all, and if you want to find a man, maybe don’t look for one and you might get one.”
Last year, Westwood launched her 22-page manifesto to rescue mankind from mediocrity, called Active Resistance. It has a cast of 20 characters who pop up throughout it, including Alice from Alice in Wonderland and Pinocchio. It is, you gather, quite bonkers, but marvelously so, didactic, snobbish and thoroughly subjective. She hates modern art, for instance. What does her friend Tracey Emin think about this? She gives a little laugh. “I feel very guilty because it’s very one-sided. She loves my clothes and I ...” she pauses. “Andy Warhol, Tracey Emin — I couldn’t give tuppence for it. She says, ‘Have you changed your mind about modern art yet?’ and I say, no. But we’re very good friends.”
The main enemy, she says, is nonstop distraction, by which she means television, the cinema, the Internet, adverts, the press and fashion magazines. “If people are not thinking then we really don’t have any future,” she says. “We live in this terrible, terrible danger because everyone is not thinking.” We remedy this, as far as I can tell, from reading lots of books and appreciating art and culture. “My manifesto is saying, essentially, every time you learn something, you see something you understand, you are helping to change the world and you are a freedom fighter. Even if it just means looking a word up in the dictionary you didn’t know before.”
One of the messages of her last collection was “don’t buy clothes” and she rails against consumerism, strange for a fashion designer who produces several collections a year, for an industry that is nothing if not about consumers. “You might think that’s really disingenuous of me, but I’m serious,” she says. “I’m not here to defend [being a fashion designer], it’s something I do.
“I didn’t want to do it in the first place, I wanted to read books, but I knew I was good at it. But don’t consume crap, make a choice.”
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