“I’m too preoccupied with using it as a vehicle for talking about climate change, which is an incredible danger. In 2013, she told The Daily Mail that she could not talk about fashion. “She was an early adopter of PETA’s fur-free ethos, choosing to donate her brand’s remaining rabbit fur bags to a wildlife sanctuary, and shed exotic things from her collections years ago.” Westwood’s environmental edge impressed PETA’s founder, Ingrid Newkirk. The official website draws upon a busy life beyond design, speaking about activism over two decades in support of “hundreds of causes, NGOs, grassroot charities and campaigns, including Amnesty International, War Child and Liberty” in addition to launching the campaigning movement Climate Revolution. But she made it clear that she was in fashion for only one reason: “to destroy the word ‘conformity’.” Far from being a mere designer of fashion, she “wished to confront the rotten status quo” via that medium.
Instead, Westwood was anointed as a cultural engenderer of daring haute couture rather than activist grenade thrower.
The activist and designer were not always seen as one. Such a pattern would follow through the decades. So I lost interest.” The kids, in other words, just wanted the gear without manifesting any grand idea this was the confrontation of fashion without any enduring consequences. But as she noted in her autobiography, one jointly aided by the pen of Ian Kelly, “When I turned around, on the barricades, there was no one there. In her 2014 memoir, Viv Albertine of Slits fame offered a striking description of aspects of Westwood costumery: “mohair jumpers, knitted on big needles, so loosely that you can see all the way through them, T-shirts slashed and written on by hand, seams and labels on the outside, showing the construction of the piece.”įor Westwood, fashion was always meant to be a spear for change. In the opinion of Dame Zandra Rhodes, “We’d had flower power… then suddenly you had this very-hard hitting punk.”
The Westwood look became ubiquitous with enthusiastic teens of the late 1970s, the use of studs, clothes replete with antisocial indignation, and the jarring, spiky hair to match. Boldly, she claimed that prior to McLaren and herself, there was no punk. In fact, the late Dame Vivienne Westwood was already a proven stirrer, suggesting that she, not Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon, a.k.a Johnny Rotten, came up with the title for the barnstorming “Anarchy in the UK”. There was the punk scene, Malcolm McLaren, their racy clothes shop at 430 King’s Road that started out as Let it Rock, the creation of a look, and the gathering of the earth rumbling Sex Pistols.
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