Sunday Images / Thirty Years On! A Private View of Public Schools by Mark Draisey / VIDEO: 1980s photographs go behind the scenes at Britain's most elite boarding ...

The British public school system has, for centuries, been the envy of the civilized world. Not only for its high standards of education, but also for its unyielding propensity for producing Empire builders and leaders in the fields of politics, science, economics, sport and the arts. Over the course of centuries, public schools have accumulated a bewildering array of quirky traditions. With the possible exception of the Church, no institutions so fervently hold onto their rituals, customs and costumes as the public schools, be it the Tudor uniforms of Christ's Hospital and the straw hats of Harrow, or the Eton Wall Game and Wincoll football. This, combined with often magnificent buildings set in the most beautiful of British countryside, means that they are remarkably visually interesting. In the late 1980s, photographer Mark Draisey was given privileged access to these usually closed and private worlds, to produce a stunning record of life inside institutions that were, as a rule, out of bounds to the majority of the population. This collection was taken at a time just prior to major changes in the boarding house conditions and the general modernisation of facilities at many of the schools, brought about by a more competitive market, plus the introduction of girls into these once male dominated institutions. This supremely evocative collection is a unique insight into the life within twenty-five of Britain's leading boy's public schools just before they changed forever. Images of austere dormitories and bleak bathrooms, beagling on the moors and Sunday Chapel, cadet training and early morning rowing, will remind thousands of Spartan but more certain times when tradition and eccentricity mingled with educational excellence to produce generations of boys destined to succeed.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Thirty-Years-Private-Public-Schools/0857042114

Mark Draisey was born in 1962 and grew up in South West London attending schools in both the private and state system. His fascination for British public schools began whilst he was studying illustration and photography at Brighton Polytechnic, and began this project in his final year as part of his degree. He now works as a successful illustrator and caricaturist for all aspects of the media from his home in Bath.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2767712/A-time-tradition-eccentricity-mingled-educational-excellence-Life-closed-doors-nation-s-boarding-schools-1980s-revealed-charming-photographs.html

A Private View of Public Schools: Photographs by Mark Draisey

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturepicturegalleries/11118773/A-Private-View-of-Public-Schools-Photographs-by-Mark-Draisey.html?frame=3049732

Above, Eton: The Oppidan Wall, or team, who play against College in the St. Andrew's Day Wall Game. The Eton Wall Game has been played here since at least 1766 and is unique to the school as it can only be played alongside the brick wall on College Field. Its rules are numerous and complex and are really only ever understood by those who play it.

Boys relaxing on a summer afternoon in 'Half Housey' dress, Christ's Hospital

Above, Eton: Rowers, or wet bobs, in their traditional Stand Naval uniforms worn for the 

procession of boats on the Fourth of June

The Ampleforth Beagles were run by Ampleforth school until 1994, but since the Hunting Act of 2004, the pack is now managed by a local hunt and a group of Old Amplefordians.

Rugby School. Rugby's 1st XI cricketers are unique in wearing duck-egg blue shirts instead of the standard white ones. It used to be the case, that all cricket teams wore different colours before the end of the 19th century.

Harrow. Calling the register is known as 'Bill' and takes place in each house daily. However, on Speech Day, it is a more ceremonial occasion where the whole school files passed the Head Master and Head Boy, raising their hats as their name is read out. For this day only, boys are allowed to wear buttonholes and fancy waistcoats of their choosing with their Sunday dress.

Haileybury. The rackets court, a forerunner to squash, is unique at Haileybury because of its double viewing gallery

Radley. Lunch in the dining hall where boys still wear their gowns. A scene reminiscent of that of Hogwarts from Harry Potter.

Eton: The Eton Wall Game has been played here since at least 1766 and is unique to the school as it can only be played alongside the brick wall on College Field. Its rules are numerous and complex and are really only ever understood by those who play it.

Radley. The 1st XI cricketers and 1st VIII oarsmen sport discrete plain white blazers with only an embroidered magenta badge linking them to their sport.

1980s photographs go behind the scenes at Britain's most elite boarding schools

A new film taking a look at the very private world of British public schools is causing a stir in certain circles. But while The Riot Club, starring Douglas Booth and Sam Claflin, depicts a dark side to life as a privileged student a charming photography book has also been released documenting a more innocent time at some of the nation's finest learning establishments.

In the late 1980s photographer Mark Draisey was given access to document the British public school system.

Gaining an inside view of this usually closed and private world allowed him to produce a stunning record of life inside institutions that were, as a rule, out of bounds to the majority of the population.

The evocative collection - bought together for upcoming book Thirty Years On! A private view of public schools - is a unique insight into the life within twenty-five of Britain's leading boy's public schools just before they changed forever.

Mark's images were taken at a time just prior to major changes in the boarding house conditions and the general modernisation of facilities at many of the schools, brought about by a more competitive market, plus the introduction of girls into these once male dominated institutions.

Images of austere dormitories and bleak bathrooms, beagling on the moors and Sunday chapel, cadet training and early morning rowing, will remind thousands of times when tradition and eccentricity mingled with educational excellence to produce generations of boys destined to succeed.

The British public school system prides itself on the high standards of education, and also for producing leaders in the fields of politics, science, economics, sport and the arts.

Over the course of centuries, public schools have accumulated a bewildering array of quirky traditions. With the possible exception of the church, no institutions so fervently hold onto their rituals, customs and costumes as the public schools, be it the Tudor uniforms of Christ's Hospital and the straw hats of Harrow, or the Eton Wall Game and Wincoll football. This, combined with often magnificent buildings set in the most beautiful of British countryside, means that they are remarkably visually interesting.

The Queen's Messengers

The Corps of Queen's Messengers are couriers employed by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. They hand-carry secret and important documents to British embassies and consulates around the world. Many Queen's Messengers are retired Army personnel. Messengers generally travel in plain clothes in business class on scheduled airlines, carrying an official case from which they must not be separated - it may even be chained to their wrist.

The safe passage of diplomatic baggage is guaranteed by the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, and for reasons of state secrecy, the diplomatic bag does not go through normal airport baggage-checks and must not be opened, x-rayed, weighed, or otherwise investigated by customs, airline security staff, or anyone else for that matter. The bag is closed with a tamper-proof seal and has its own diplomatic passport. The Queen's Messenger and the messenger's personal luggage are not covered by special rules, however, so although the diplomatic bag, covered by the passport, is not checked, the messenger and the messenger's personal luggage go through normal security screening.

The first recorded King's Messenger was John Norman, who was appointed in 1485 by King Richard III to hand-deliver secret documents for his monarch. During his exile, Charles II appointed four trusted men to convey messages to Royalist forces in England. As a sign of their authority, the King broke four silver greyhounds from a bowl familiar to royal courtiers, and gave one to each man. A silver greyhound thus became the symbol of the Service. On formal occasions, the Queen's Messengers wear this badge from a ribbon, and on less formal occasions many messengers wear ties with a discreet greyhound pattern while working.

Badges of King's or Queen's Messengers from 18th to 20th centuries

Modern communications have diminished the role of the Queen's Messengers, but as original documents still need to be conveyed between countries by "safe-hand", their function remains valuable, but declining.

In 1995 a Parliamentary question[2] put the number then at 27. The current number of Messengers as of March 2015 is sixteen full-time and two part-time, and the departmental headcount is nineteen.

In December 2015 an article in the Daily Express suggested that the Queen's Messenger service was "facing the chop by cost-cutting Foreign Office mandarins who see them as a legacy of a by-gone age".

The British Rail Class 67 diesel locomotive 67005 bears the name Queen's Messenger.

Hermann von Pückler-Muskau / VIDEO:Nicholas Penny on the letters of Hermann von Pückler-Muskau

Pückler-Muskau was the first of five children of Count Carl Ludwig Hans Erdmann Pückler, and the Countess Clementine of Callenberg, who gave birth to him at age 15. He was born at Muskau Castle (now Bad Muskau) in Upper Lusatia, then ruled by the Electorate of Saxony.

 He served for some time in the Saxon "Garde du Corps" cavalry regiment at Dresden, and afterwards traveled through France and Italy, often by foot. In 1811, after the death of his father, he inherited the Standesherrschaft (barony) of Muskau. Joining the war of liberation against Napoleon I of France, he left Muskau under the General Inspectorate of his friend, the writer and composer Leopold Schefer. As an officer under the Duke of Saxe-Weimar he distinguished himself in the field. Later, he was made military and civil governor of Bruges.

After the war he retired from the army and visited England, where he remained about a year, visiting Her Majesty's Theatre, Haymarket and Drury Lane (admiring Eliza O'Neill), studying parks (he visited the Ladies of Llangollen) and high society, being himself a member of it. In 1822, in compensation for certain privileges which he resigned, he was raised to the rank of "Fürst" by King Frederick William III of Prussia. In 1817 he had married the Dowager Countess Lucie von Pappenheim, née von Hardenberg, daughter of Prussian statesman Prince Karl August von Hardenberg; the marriage was legally dissolved after nine years, in 1826, though the parties did not separate and remained on amicable terms.

He returned to England in 1828 where he became something of a celebrity in London society spending nearly two years in search of a wealthy second wife capable of funding his ambitious gardening schemes. In 1828 his tours took him to Ireland, notably to the seat of Daniel O'Connell in Kerry. On his return home he published a not entirely frank account of his time in England. The book was an enormous success in Germany, and also caused a great stir when it appeared in English as Tour of a German Prince (1831–32).

Being a daring character, he subsequently traveled in Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt and Sudan and explored ancient Nubia. He is documented as having visiting the site of Naqa in modern-day Sudan in 1837. He also visited the nearby site of Musawwarat es-Sufra, and in both places he carved his name in the stone of the temples. 

Mahbuba, ca. 1840

“In 1837 the prince visited a slave market in Cairo, there catching sight of a near-naked Abyssinian girl of no more than 13 called Mahbuba, “beloved”. He promptly purchased her (ever the gentleman, he didn’t even haggle). The prince self-righteously pronounced that he was “too conscientious” to treat her as a slave, but his description of how he “civilised” her, much as one might train a puppy, makes for pretty disturbing reading.

But as they travelled together, north through Lebanon and on into Turkey, a genuine warmth developed between them, made easier once Mahbuba learnt Italian so the two could at least converse. Pückler-Muskau was smitten and while never professing romantic love for her guardian, Mahbuba did refer to him as “beloved father”. [At this point, if I were of a romantic nature I might say “he could buy her body but he could never buy her heart” but…y’know, romance schmomance.] The pair travelled on to Vienna, where they appeared before a fascinated imperial court.

However Mahbuba found it difficult to adapt to the climate and a cold she had caught in Lebanon developed into tuberculosis. Hoping the health-giving waters of Muskauer Park might provide a cure, the two travelled there in September 1840. There they had to contend with the prince’s ex-wife, who was still in residence and refused to let Mahbuba stay in the palace.

Mahbuba’s condition worsened but Lucie, who had departed for Berlin and herself fallen ill, summoned the prince there. Caught between love and obligation, Pückler-Muskau – unusually – chose the latter.

Lucie recovered, Mahbuba never did. She died on October 27, 1840, alone; Pückler-Muskau didn’t even make it back in time for the funeral. He claimed, in a letter to a friend, that “I felt more love for her than I thought myself capable of; that was probably my most intense pain…and greatest comfort.” Unlike most of his love letters it bears the hallmark of authentic feeling, though of scant consolation to the woman who still lies in Muskauer Park, surrounded by the names of the Prince’s other flames.”

https://strangeflowers.wordpress.com/2010/02/04/slave-to-love/

In the same year, at the slave market of Cairo he was enchanted by an Ethopian girl in her early teens whom he promptly bought and named Mahbuba ("the beloved"). Together they continued a romantic voyage in Asia Minor and Greece. In Vienna he introduced Mahbuba to European high society, but the girl developed tuberculosis and died in Muskau in 1840. Later he would write that she was "the being I loved most of all the world."

He then lived at Berlin and Muskau, where he spent much time in cultivating and improving the still existing Muskau Park. In 1845 he sold this estate, and, although he afterwards lived from time to time at various places in Germany and Italy, his principal residence became Schloss Branitz near Cottbus, where he laid out another splendid park.

Politically he was a liberal, supporting the Prussian reforms of Freiherr vom Stein. This, together with his pantheism and his extravagant lifestyle, made him slightly suspect in the society of the Biedermeier period.

In 1863 he was made a hereditary member of the Prussian House of Lords, and in 1866 he attended — by then an octogenarian — the Prussian general staff in the Austro-Prussian War. He was awarded for his 'actions' at the Battle of Königgratz, even though the then 80-year old Prince had slept throughout the day. In 1871 he died at Branitz. Since a cremation of the deceased was forbidden at that time for religious reasons, he resorted to a provocative trick, and ordered that his heart be dissolved in sulfuric acid, and that his body should be embedded in caustic soda, caustic potash, and caustic lime. Thus, on February 9, 1871, his remains were buried in the Tumulus - a lake pyramid in the park lake of the Branitzer Castle Park. Since he was childless, the castle and the park fell after his death to his successor to the Majorats, his nephew Heinrich von Pueckler, and all cash and the inventory to his niece Marie von Pachelbl-Gehag, née von Seydewitz. The literary estate of the prince was inherited by writer Ludmilla Assing, who wrote the biography of the author and published his unpublished correspondence and diaries.

“In 1826, the prince of Pückler-Muskau embarked on a tour of England, Wales, and Ireland. Although captivated by all things British, his initial objective was to find a wealthy bride. He and his wife Lucie, having expended every resource on a plan to transform their estate into a vast landscape park, agreed to an amicable divorce, freeing him to forge an advantageous alliance that could rescue their project. For over two years, Pückler’s letters home conveyed a vivid, often quirky, and highly entertaining account of his travels. From the metropolis of London, he toured the mines and factories of the Industrial Revolution and visited the grand estates and spectacular art collections maintained by its beneficiaries. He encountered the scourge of rural and urban poverty and found common cause with the oppressed Irish. With his gift for description, Pückler evokes the spectacular landscapes of Wales, the perils of transportation, and the gentle respite of manor houses and country inns. Part memoir, part travelogue and political commentary, part epistolary novel, Pückler’s rhetorical flare and acute observations provoked the German poet Heinrich Heine to characterize him as the “most fashionable of eccentric men―Diogenes on horseback.”

https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Dead-Man-Horto-Dumbarton/dp/0884024113

Albert Thurston Braces since 1820

“In 1820, five years before Nelsons Column was built (to celebrate his life and death on the 21st October 1805 at the battle of Trafalgar) braces and suspenders were first made and sold by Albert Thurston from his emporium at 27 Panton Street, Haymarket, London. If you want to know whether any of your ancestors fought on the British side at Trafalgar click here Trafalgar

the Great Exhibition in Hyde ParkThirty one years later, in 1851, the nation celebrated the Victorian era, when the Great Exhibition was held in Hyde Park. Albert Thurston received an Honourable Mention for the excellent standard of their products.

By now, Albert Thurston had become a by-word for quality in gentlemens' accessories, and their braces and suspenders were destined to be sported by kings, princes, presidents and successful businessmen across the world over the next 2 centuries.

Into the twentieth century, Thurston's reputation for quality and style has continued to grow.When asked for his reaction to the outbreak of war in 1939, actor Sir Ralph Richardson replied that he had gone straight to his tailor on Savile Row and purchased half a dozen pairs of Thurston braces in case they might be in short supply. “

http://www.albertthurston.com/history2.cfm?catid=49

Sunday Images / Ten Crested Ties

Vivienne Westwood, Get a Life and the The Climate Revolution

A collection of diary entries by fashion designer and political activist Vivienne Westwood, Get a Life is a fresh, unpredictable look at the life of one of the most influential artists and campaigners of our times. Spanning six years of Climate Revolution, fashion and activism, the book is as provocative as you would expect from Britain’s punk dame.

"My diaries are about the things I care about. Not just fashion but art and writing, human rights, climate change, freedom", Westwood said. "I call the diaries Get a Life as that's how I feel: you've got to get involved, speak out and take action."

http://www.viviennewestwood.com/en-gb/shop/accessories/books/get-life-book

 How Vivienne Westwood fell in love with Prince Charles

A T-shirt emblazoned with an image of the heir to the throne might not seem like the likeliest showpiece from Vivienne Westwood’s AW15 collection – but perhaps the pair have more in common than we thought …

Morwenna Ferrier

Monday 19 January 2015 14.38 GMT Last modified on Monday 19 January 2015 14.52 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2015/jan/19/how-vivienne-westwood-fell-in-love-with-prince-charles

For a designer who has long used the establishment as a frame of reference for reaction, Vivienne Westwood – the anti-monarchist, anti-establishment, godmother of punk – dedicating her autumn/winter 2015 collection to Prince Charles in celebration of his environmental work was always going to polarise fans.

“I want to pay tribute to Prince Charles,” wrote Westwood on a set of briefing notes (emblazoned with an image of Charles in a beret) given to guests at her autumn/winter 2015 menswear show in Milan. “If Prince Charles had ruled the world according to his priorities during the last 30 years, we would be alright and we would be tackling climate change.”

The T-shirts, worn under blazers and by Westwood herself, are part of a Westwood perennial of using fashion as a political vehicle; fans might recall tops embellished with “I Am Not a Terrorist” for civil-rights charity Liberty, and an entire collection in 2013 dedicated to Chelsea Manning. The rest of the collection, though, was relatively staid for the designer, referencing traditional royal sartorial norms: sharp Savile Row-style tailored suits, trad brocade florals on blazers and coats in a houndstooth print.

Given Westwood’s history with the royal family – she has twice attended Buckingham Palace with no knickers on, and has regularly goaded the establishment in various ways over the past forty years – this homage might seem implausible. But she recently set her targets on the environment, and previously endorsed Prince Charles, saying he had done an amazing amount in this world.

Charles has long been an outspoken environmentalist, and was recently handed increasing responsibility of the Queen’s Sandringham estate as part of the “gentle succession”. He is expected to use the land to implement more changes, including organic farming, an activity Westwood has backed with equal candour.

It’s evidence of the designer’s continued move away from her roots. After all, along with her partner Malcolm Mclaren, she played a pivotal role in establishing the punk scene in the late 1970s and has previously described her motivation for adopting anti-establishment messages into her collections as “an heroic attempt to confront the older generation”. But as Westwood knows, the medium is the message – and what better way to send it home that by subverting expectation?

Vivienne Westwood by Vivienne Westwood & Ian Kelly, review: 'fabulously, fetishistically brilliant'

The life of Vivienne Westwood is told as an uproarious picaresque romp by Beau Brummell's biographer

By Philip Hoare1:00PM BST 25 Oct 2014

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/11182744/Vivienne-Westwood-by-Vivienne-Westwood-and-Ian-Kelly.html

The Seventies may seem like another age, but it was not the decade that taste forgot. It was an era that utterly reinvented the modern world. In almost every aspect of culture, from politics to pop, the status quo was overturned. And in the fast-moving arts of music and fashion you could detect those tectonic shifts most distinctly. Bolan, Bowie and Roxy Music reconfigured the way an ordinary suburban boy such as myself could imagine the future. They evoked a retro-glamorous, science-fiction world, an epoch defined by George Melly’s Revolt into Style as a third period of pop culture, “its noisy and brilliant decadence” lighting up “the contemporary landscape as if by a series of magnesium flares”.

It is that landscape that Ian Kelly examines in Vivienne Westwood. As a practised, deft biographer, he’s already given us flash-lit lives of Beau Brummell and Casanova – and is thus a perfect match for the Enlightenment figure Vivienne Westwood aspires to be. The book is billed “as told to”, but one gets the impression it was one long stream-of-consciousness rant, careering off on an uproarious picaresque romp through a wild and often unaccountable life. Holding a legend to account is Kelly’s dilemma – and his skill. He accomplishes it by the skin of his buckskin breeches, with a wit and humour of his own.

In 1976, newly arrived at college on the outskirts of London, I’d make my pilgrimage down to the darker, emptier end of King’s Road, home to the black hole that was sex – announced by huge letters in what Kelly dubs “condom pink”. It took a lot of courage to cross that threshold. In the dim interior stood the intimidating figure of Jordan – the first person to receive an Arts Council grant for being herself. With her peroxide punk beehive, Kandinsky make-up and PVC fetish wear, Jordan was the living symbol of Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s startling new aesthetic. Indeed, the entire staff of the shop were Warholian superstars, awaiting their 15 minutes of fame, from Chrissie Hynde and Glen Matlock to Midge Ure and Toyah Willcox.

This was, recognisably, the birth of something – though we weren’t quite sure what. Scaffolding rails were hung with jumpers which were little more than nets knitted by giants, and bondage trousers with strapped knees and zips that ran right up your backside. This was more hardware than fashion; less style than anthropology, dealing in notions of tribalism and myth; more James Frazer’s Golden Bough than Vogue editorial. Towelling flaps slung around the groin were vestigial loincloths. Tartan kilts became pleated symbols. Gender was blurred and heightened. “Sex,” Westwood tells Kelly, “translated into fashion becomes fetish… the very embodiment of youth’s assumption of immortality.”

These clothes frightened people. I had to save up for a shirt roughly stitched together out of muslin with elongated, straitjacket sleeves and a screen-printed inverted crucifix over a swastika. It offended everyone, including me. But I wore it because Johnny Rotten did – indeed, Westwood claims she was as much the inventor of the Sex Pistols as McLaren. When Anarchy in the UK erupted, she tells Kelly, “the idea and the title were mine”. (Mr Rotten has since declared Westwood’s claim to be “audacity of the highest order”.)

Vivienne Westwood's autobiography, book review

By Vivienne Westwood and Ian Kelly

Andrew Wilson Thursday 9 October 2014 13:12 BST

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/vivienne-westwood-by-vivienne-westwood-ian-kelly-picador-25-9779619.html

Vivienne Westwood was at school when she wrote her first autobiography. Since then she has made various attempts to document the extraordinary story of her life, from the child of working class parents in Derbyshire to the mother of punk and later the creator of a global luxury brand.

Some time after meeting her friend Gary Ness in 1977 she collaborated with the ‘Canadian homosexual aesthete’ on a fifty-page memoir that they later set aside. Then in 1993 she asked the fashion historian and journalist Jane Mulvagh to write her life story, a project that Mulvagh accepted on condition that the designer did not vet the manuscript before publication. Westwood soon had second thoughts and promptly withdrew the offer of co-operation. On the publication in 1998 of Mulvagh’s insightful book the designer described the unauthorised biography as ‘a lot of rubbish’.

After this debacle, Westwood’s husband, Andreas Kronthaler - whom she met while teaching in Austria - insisted Vivienne write her own book to set the record straight. ‘I said the last thing I want to do is write about myself,’ she told an interviewer recently. And so it was that this new book was born, a publication trumpeted as a memoir but written by an amanuensis, the actor and biographer Ian Kelly (whose previous subjects have included Casanova and Beau Brummell). The resulting volume is a strange hybrid, neither memoir nor critical biography, and its beautiful pages emit the distinct odour of hagiography.

One of the problems of the book - thankfully mostly confined to the opening chapter - is the insistence of Kelly to place himself in the story. Phrases such as ‘My Year of Magical Blinging’ - a reference to the year the author spent interviewing and shadowing Westwood - and ‘the business that is show’ really grated, and I didn’t care how little sleep Kelly had during Paris Fashion Week.

The pace begins to pick up with the introduction of Westwood’s own voice about thirty pages into the book as she details her childhood. Here, we learn fascinating details that suggest that her character had been largely formed at an early age: she had a precocious visual memory, believed that she could make a pair of shoes at the age of five and, from the beginning, she was something of a rebel and non-conformist. She remembers being in the back of her aunt’s greengrocer’s shop when she was a girl and seeing a representation of the Crucifixion on a calendar. Her cousin Eileen told her about the death of Jesus Christ, which up until that point had been kept from her. ‘I could not believe that there were people in the world who could do this,’ she recalled. ‘And the truth of it is this: I became Derbyshire’s only five-year-old freedom fighter! Dedicated to opposing persecution!’

Kelly is particularly good at documenting Westwood’s co-creation of the British punk movement and her toxic partnership with Malcolm McLaren, the red-haired, pale-faced (courtesy of talcum powder) Situationist who helped change the course of 20th-century fashion and music. (It’s a shame, however, he gets the date of the first Sex Pistols gig at St Martin’s wrong: it was 6 November 1975, not 1976.) Incisive testimonies from Westwood’s two sons, Ben (from her first marriage) and Joe (the product of the relationship with McLaren) as well as her brother Gordon (who introduced Vivienne to Malcolm) reveal McLaren to have been an abusive control freak. Although the biographer has had access to Westwood’s inner circle (complete with anodyne quotes from a number of models, PRs and fashion insiders) there are some notable absences. For instance, Vivienne talks about her first husband Derek Westwood, but the man himself does not have a voice.

Kelly also passes over certain events that are crying out for more analysis and interpretation. For instance, on the way to have an abortion (paid for by McLaren’s eccentric grandmother Rose) Vivienne changed her mind and used the money to buy herself a cashmere sweater and a matching piece of fabric from which she created a skirt. I would have liked more on this, more on the psychology of fashion, the deep-seated reasons why Westwood felt so drawn to clothes. ‘Nothing from the past is entirely true,’ she told Kelly. ‘But you are only in those scenes properly when they are put together. That’s what we should do, you and I, Ian: sew together all the life scenes.’ In this respect, Kelly is a competent tailor, but my guess is that in the future there will be other, more adventurous seamstresses who will come along to unpick and restitch the Westwood story.

Andrew Wilson's biography of Alexander McQueen will be published in February (Simon & Schuster)