Vivienne Westwood is a great admirer of the Queen. No, honestly. It was a misguided folly of the times, says the godmother of punk, that led her to stick safety pins through Her Majesty’s nose on T-shirts designed for the Sex Pistols during the silver jubilee in 1977.
The former scourge of the Establishment has expressed regret, too, at the memory of her visit to Buckingham Palace in 1992, when she twirled for the cameras to celebrate her OBE and revealed she was not wearing any knickers. A genuine oversight, she insisted.
At the age of 64 the brazen fashion designer now wants to save the monarchy, declaring that it was a mistake of the 20th century “to think that because some traditional things should be done away with, you have to throw them all out”.
Just as well, since the new year honours list has put Westwood on notice to revisit the palace for her investiture as a dame of the British Empire. Almost single-handedly she reinvented the female form, dragging sex out of the closet to give women the glamour and confidence often denied to them by the tyrannies of fashion. “Fashion is about sex,” she declared bluntly.
In the flesh Westwood is as disconcerting as her designs. Beneath a shock of stiff, hennaed hair, her porcelain skin and delicate wrists make her seem a frail figure from a Toulouse-Lautrec painting, an impression at odds with layers of riotous clothing that reminded one uncharitable interviewer of a small girl emerging from the bedroom, “proudly wearing all her clothes at once and expecting a round of applause”.
Her polite and ladylike voice betrays a Derbyshire accent as thick as a dry-stone wall. The self-taught daughter of a sausage maker has come a long way since she dispensed sedition and sexual fetish gear to a generation of pimpled rebels from the emporium she ran with Malcolm McLaren, the Sex Pistols’ manager, in London’s King’s Road more than 30 years ago.
Some views seem borrowed from the lofty circles she once despised. “I would describe myself as an elitist — if there was an elite to belong to,” she once observed. She is also a self-proclaimed intellectual: “I think nobody could understand the world we are living in if they don’t read the essays of (Bertrand) Russell and (TH) Huxley.” She despairs of our lowbrow culture: “I don’t think we have any culture, not really.”
To cap it all, she has declared that the punk era was not much fun, that she is not too keen on the 20th century and that she disdains consumerism. This heretical mix of pretension and hypocrisy has prompted mockery of her folie de grandeur, but such criticism misses the point.
Westwood is an awesome figure in the fashion world. She has been rated one of the six most important designers of the 20th century by Women’s Wear Daily, and is credited with changing public opinion about what is acceptable for women to wear. She was the first British designer ever to be honoured by an enormous retrospective exhibition at the Victoria and Albert museum in 2004.
Shrewdness tempers her eccentricities. Her greatest skill is the reinterpretation of historical dress with a playful idea of Britishness. She liberated the corset from a symbol of repression to one of power and sexual freedom. Her curvaceous designs make women feel sexy and adult rather than the hapless prey of the big brands. “Above all, I am proud that I’ve always made real clothes,” she says.
Westwood’s days of challenging fashion’s rules may be behind her, but she remains a force to be reckoned with as a prolific designer and head of a business empire. Masterminded from her Battersea headquarters in southwest London, this stretches from her flagship shop in Conduit Street, London, to stores in Manchester and Leeds. She has launched a perfume, Boudoir, and has tie-ins with firms that market her designs. Her platform shoes and bold juxtapositions of traditionalism are still copied avidly by high street stores.
It has not been a seamless run, for she has skirted bankruptcy more than once. Eleven years ago she hit a bad patch. She had just married her third (and current) husband, Andreas Kronthaler, a man 25 years her junior whom she met when she was teaching in Vienna to pay the bills. The business was struggling, and she recalls him saying to her: “I can see you’re not happy. Either do the job and enjoy it, or go off and do something else.” Since then, she’s had a ball.
She brought Kronthaler to England, contemptuous of the sniggers over her toy boy infatuation and talk of a mother-son relationship. “We were attracted to each other like magnets,” she told The Sunday Times in 2004. He proved to be an imaginative interpreter of Westwood’s work and now designs most of her menswear, leaving the women’s clothes to his wife. They live in south London with Alexandra, their fox terrier and inspiration for Westwood’s marketed dogwear.
She was born on April 8, 1941, in Glossop, Derbyshire, the daughter of George Swire, who worked at the local Wall’s factory and came from a line of cobblers, and Dora, a greengrocer’s assistant. It was an entrepreneurial family, “always looking for ways to make extra money, even if it was just breeding dogs”, instilling in her a need to make money for self-esteem. Otherwise, she reasoned, “I’d just be a stupid northern girl surrounded by people who can make money”.
By her account, she was a clever, popular child, a leader with a nose for mischief. When she was 16 the family moved to better prospects in Harrow, Middlesex, where her parents ran a sub-post office. She attended Harrow School of Art, but left after a term for a teacher-training college, where she met and married Derek Westwood, an airline steward. They had a baby, Ben, who now does glamour photography (“a euphemism for porn photography”, Westwood once elaborated).
She was teaching at a primary school three years later when she met her Svengali, Malcolm Edwards (aka Malcolm McLaren). “I thought Malcolm was some sort of oracle,” she said. “I considered myself very stupid, which I was, terribly, with no culture.” In exchange for his liberation of her mind, she liberated him of his virginity, despite not really fancying him at that stage. Their son, Joe, owns Agent Provocateur, the saucy lingerie chain.
In 1971 the couple opened their first shop, Let it Rock, at the end of the King’s Road, where it metamorphosed over the years into Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die, Sex and then Seditionaries.
The classic badge of punk, a spiky hairstyle, came about by accident. McLaren, who had refashioned Westwood from a blonde dollybird to a short-haired brunette in school dresses, urged her to have a crew cut, but her hair was too fine. “So I bleached it, and that made it stand on end and it interested me to let it keep on growing. So the crew cut became the punk rock hairstyle.”
Punks’ obligatory zips, bondage gear, safety pins, razor blades, bicycle chains and spiked dog collars had a more bizarre origin. “Even before the Sex Pistols, it was (McLaren’s) idea that England was the home of the flasher and we had to confront it. We were going to be flashers.” When the Sex Pistols wore the shop’s clobber on their early outings in 1976, punk was born and Westwood became its seamstress.
The thrill of being a flasher didn’t last. “I wasn’t happy in those days. I didn’t find punk very exciting, and I certainly wasn’t happy in my relationship with Malcolm. After we split, I realised how far I had moved away from him.”
With McLaren, it was all pointless polemics, she believed. She needed ideas. “And that’s when the richness of fashion began to overwhelm me.” Her brilliantly original Pirate collection in 1981 established her stature as an exuberant originator who, by creating a new language for clothes, paved the way for designers such as John Galliano and Alexander McQueen to reinterpret fashion.
Three months ago Westwood joined forces with Liberty, the British civil rights group, to launch T-shirts and babywear bearing the slogan “I am not a terrorist, please don’t arrest me”. Nice to know that the grand dame of fashion has not sold out completely to the Establishment.
