In a review of Vivienne Westwood, a new autobiography co-written with Ian Kelly, Bee Wilson considers how the punk ethos influenced the designer’s career:
The key to Westwood’s enduring success, apart from her brilliance at ‘making’, seems to be her almost unnatural sense of her own charisma
and authority: her sense that wherever she was, those were the barricades at which everyone else should be fighting. At fifty, she admitted that she thought any man who didn’t desire her more than everyone else in the room was ‘mad or stupid’. In 1989, she famously posed for the cover of Tatler dressed as Mrs Thatcher, complete with pearls, cravat and tailored jacket. The power of the image is in the uncanny facial similarity between the two: how can the woman who helped invent punk look so like the Iron Lady? But for Westwood herself, it wasn’t a stretch. All she had to do was ‘put a little doubt’ in her eyes and she looked just like Thatcher. It’s worth dwelling on the implications of this statement: the real Vivienne Westwood looks like a less self-doubting version of Mrs Thatcher.
It was self-confidence that allowed her to leap from safety-pinning the queen’s face on the King’s Road to emulating the monarch’s dress sense on the Paris catwalks.
The only person she ever tried to please, she said in 2003, was herself. It didn’t bother her when the business nearly went bankrupt in the mid-1980s. Nor is she now awed by the immense wealth generated by her brand today. ‘Our Vivienne’ was always in her glory, long before the world caught up. In 1987, Westwood did her Harris Tweed collection, inspired by the idea of ‘debutantes going to balls but with a Barbour flung over their ballgown’. She declared herself inspired by pomp and circumstance and Norman Hartnell. John Lydon has attacked the way she turned her back on her punk past, switching to making posh frocks ‘for Ascot’. Seen as part of the larger history of the Dowager Empress, however, the punk years were just one phase in her longer quest to find a more ‘interesting life’ through clothes. In any case, as Westwood herself recognises, the swagger of punk could point in more than one political direction. It could be part of an anarchist rejection of the establishment; or it could be a proto-Thatcherite form of extreme individualism.
In another review of the book, Jane Shilling adds:
Westwood has always seen the catwalk as an extension of the literary and political salon and vice versa. Her co-writer, Ian Kelly, argues that her importance as a cultural figure resides in “her conviction that clothing can change how people think. Fashion as agitprop.”
Irksome in short quotations, the vaguely hyperbolic tone is less irritating once you get used to it. Although the biography is written in the third person, Westwood’s trenchant voice and her superlative sense of self-belief rise pungently from the page. She is now 73, but, like that other iconic figure whom she once mischievously parodied, she shows every sign of going on and on.
(Image of 1989 Tatler cover via Dazed)
The Dish 