Vivienne Westwood
[The Face, January 1981]
AT THE time of writing, clothes — that fleeting yet sharp mirror of the soul — reflect depression, poverty, a fear of the present and — worst — militarism. Music isn’t even worth talking about. If clothes carry dreams, most are stillborn. Oxfam food goes to nations below the breadline, Oxfam clothes to kids on the breadline. In this climate anyone brave enough or bright enough to suggest you can raise your head above the shit is worth a hand.
“To look rich is great.”
Will you wear your heart on your sleeve? Can you?
“One of the reasons why I’m not sure about doing interviews is that I don’t want to put people off and make out there’s some big heavy number about getting these clothes. They’re colourful and they’re exciting: I really would prefer the clothes to speak for themselves.
“And if they’re worn on those — I don’t know what you call those golden girls with wonderful bodies on the beach — if they’re presented in that way, I think it’s really great. That’s who I want to wear them. I don’t want people to think, ‘Gosh…if I wear these clothes I’ve got to be part of the underground’. These are definitely overground clothes. They’re for chatting in aeroplanes in, not tunnels.”
There’s a paradox in creating your own dreams out of someone else’s visions: each time, from Let It Rock onwards, Vivienne Westwood’s clothes confound it. Partly it’s the fact that they’re so extreme: no skulking in doorways, you have to wear them.
This winter Vivienne is trying again. After Let It Rock, Sex and Seditionaries — the straps that changed the world — she’s designed a new collection called World’s End. You’ve seen the clothes on Bow Wow Wow, but this time it’s only ancillary; someone could wear the clothes who’d never heard of the group. The important thing is pride.
“I think that once you put my clothes on they make you stand in a different way for a start, you don’t adopt the same postures, you can’t be anonymous, you have to sort of…strut around. They just give you a great lift.”
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IN 1977 Vivienne and Malcolm McLaren unveiled the only modern look of the ‘70s — Seditionaries. If the first punks had thrown up every youth style since the war and then stuck it together with pins and panache, Seditionaries avoided retro yet caught the confusion: the look — both in the original and the imitations — spread throughout the world. Neither got the credit they deserved.
“With Seditionaries, I didn’t bother to sell the clothes in any other venue at all. I didn’t have any outlet for the clothes other than that shop because the extension of my business was the Sex pistols. This time I’m doing it on my own: you see, I am the best fashion designer in the world but I’m also, by that definition, an enormous fool because I’ve never got the juice out of what I do.
“I never thought I’d do another lot of clothes: I was doing it for the purpose that I wanted to establish myself in that way, really, in the fashion world. Because being so good, it’s just a shame. Looking at it objectively, it’s not a question of one’s own personal ego, I just don’t want to see myself as a fool — in this commercial world, anyway.”
World’s End is Westwood without McLaren, working with a designer, aiming upmarket. The clothes are much more extravagant, richer than previously — perhaps too much so, veering dangerously close to the 1966 Chelsea preciousness hinted at by the name and the locale. But then times have changed: what may seem precious is actually a blast of defiance, colour splashed onto a canvas of drab.
“The shop will be called World’s End, and there’s the idea of time in there — I may have one wall all broken glass or something like that, and I have this clock that’s got 13 hours on it going backwards.”
Vivienne isn’t nuts about being interviewed; I can see her point. One picture is, after all, worth a thousand words. Yet what she has to say is worth repeating: she says it quickly, jerkily as the ideas pour out, changing mid-sentence in a twist of logic that is hard to follow but which on playback makes sense.
“I’m an anarchist, and your position is forever changing, really. I mean, for instance, if Wedgwood Benn and his lot were very strong I’d vote for them. For the first time in my life I’d vote for somebody. One reason that I didn’t vote is that I don’t believe that anyone is as clever as I am or whatever…I think Margaret Thatcher’s an idiot. I mean, she’s clever on one level, but she’s an idiot because she’s leading a life that’s just a waste of a life. She’s clever at destroying other people’s lives.”
McLaren and Westwood have always understood the crux of pop politics — should there be such a thing: pop is only ever good at communicating attitudes and moods, never specifics. That’s where the traditional Left approach falls down, and where the two of them come into their own, in their different ways.
“My job is always to confront the establishment to try and find out where freedom lies and what you can do: the most obvious way I did that was through the porn T-shirt (a series of them, including the cowboys with touching dicks) and so you find out what’s going on.
“I love Malcolm’s idea of the gold — the business of the kid at his art school when they had that sit-in at that time, and they were moaning about how they couldn’t get the right materials or facilities in the college or whatever, and he stood up and said he’d always wanted to sculpt in gold and didn’t see any reason why he shouldn’t… that was a great statement. The children shall inherit the earth: they should be allowed to cover themselves in gold dust if they wish.
“To look rich is great. Malcolm’s opinion of why the 2-Tone thing did so well is because of the clothing. The clothing is always so important. I mean, you couldn’t imagine the punk rock thing without clothing — it was so easy for some bank clerk to wear, that all of a sudden you’ve got loads of people who’ve never stuck their neck out before suddenly thinking they can wear what’s fashionable and that’s why it caught on.
“I don’t really want to talk that much about fashion. It’s only interesting to me if it’s subversive: that’s the only reason I’m in fashion, to destroy the world ‘conformity’. Nothing’s interesting to me unless it’s got that element. Either it’ll have to go out of the dictionary, or it’ll change into something… what I’m saying is that if everybody wore these clothes, that word conformist would go because a conformist would then be a great thing to be.”
Whether that’s the way it’ll turn out is another matter. The clothes are superb: inverting style codes in a way that’s both subtle and shocking. A jacket uses a traditional sports jacket cloth, yet is cut medievally, with the sleeves slashed to reveal a dazzling flash of orange patterned satin. Beautiful. But will people wear them? Vivienne is confident, but then she has to be.
“I think the clothes are better than they’ve ever been and I do hope, if they communicate to more people, they must be better than clothes that communicated to a minority, by definition.”
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ALTHOUGH they’re not completely tied to Bow Wow Wow — part of the collection is in the West End, in Joseph’s shops — the clothes still need the band for lift off in the youth market. And they’re obviously closely linked: both use a burst of colour to highlight the surrounding drabness.
Can they both realistically expect that buying their product will cause a change in people’s lives? Vivienne insists that clothes can change your life.
“Malcolm has always been totally fascinated by clothes. They’re the most important thing in his life, really. And when he came out of college, I’d been teaching and he was looking for a job and I could sew and I helped him. And then he went off to do the New York Dolls and the Sex Pistols and I got left with it. And I, somehow or other, couldn’t put it down because I’d begun something, and, as I say, the culmination of that is communicating with a big audience. But having said all that I can’t think of a better way of putting yourself on the spot. I think fashion is the strongest form of communication there is.
“With these clothes, you want to look rakish, you want to look like you can walk down the street feeling like you can own the street and you’re Jack the Lad or whatever, you need to do that — you know fashion’s just life, and I do believe that appearances are everything.”
Rhetoric aside, I am interested in how she works.
“I’ve always worked through a process of research. The punk rock thing came out of the fact that I got so intrigued, when I started to make clothes in rubberwear in Sex, by all those fetish people and the motives behind what they did, that I really went into the whole research of it. I wasn’t content with thinking: Oh I’ll just do something that looks a bit like what they wear. I wanted to make exactly what they wore, or get them to make it, understand all the things there.
“Out of that, that’s where all the straps and things came from. You can never create anything in a vacuum. It comes out of chaos really, but that chaos is something you’re continually piecing together and discovering.
“When I did the clothes this time, I started to try and do something I had a feeling for, and I couldn’t get anywhere. Three months work I threw away and what I did, what I had to do, was to go to museums and find old patterns and things like that, and scale them up, and look at how people made patterns in those days.
“And I really then got a breakthrough, because their priorities were totally different from what our priorities are: they didn’t want to cut a trouser that neatly defined the two cheeks of your bum. They weren’t interested in that. They were interested in sexuality in a totally different way. The dynamics were different but the sex was there. And I only find it out by research really: my stimulus is always academic.
“This time, what I’ve used is anything that personally excited me, and so I took things like Apache Indians who were just great, those people after the French Revolution who were called the Incroyables, and pirates. Those three things are basically the things that this whole collection’s been based around.”
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IF SHE’S moving upmarket, isn’t she going to price herself out of reach of most kids? She denies this, saying that the cost of the clothes will be kept low enough and that kids will scam the money somehow if they really want them.
“If I don’t manage to keep the prices down, then what I’ll do is make some more clothes in cheaper materials, the same things, so that people can buy them you know. That’s what I’ll work on next…because I love selling to some of those kids. You can’t always put yourself into the role of performing a social service but I do nevertheless care that a kid who wants to buy my stuff can get something together.”
Are clothes really worth a candle? Oh yes. They are trivial in themselves, but they’re dream carriers — perhaps the most expressive and accurate one now that music is useless and papers even worse.
Are Vivienne’s worth a candle? Yes again, provided you’ve got the guts to wear them. You can go out dressed like that but the effect is shattering. I hope they’re not too tied to Bow Wow Wow: they’ll escape then the slight sense of anticlimax. And I hope a lot of people wear them: at least the world will be a little livelier. Because silly though they are, clothes are one of the few things left.
The last word lies with Eric Joy: “At the beginning of empires, when a nation is healthy, no one can be bothered with fashion as such. They’re much too busy. But when empires crack up, like the decline and fall of Rome, you get sartorial splendour, homosexuality, the equivalent of drug addiction and Mickey Mouse T-shirts…”