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."
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
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
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
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)
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