Rebel queenAll hail Vivienne Westwood, a designer who has continually rewritten the rules of taste. On the eve of a ground-breaking retrospective, she tells Colin McDowell why she thinks she's so special
Everybody knows the name. Everybody knows the antics. She has dressed up as Gloriana and Mrs Thatcher; she has turned up at Buckingham Palace wearing no knickers; she has reinvented the female form with her tight corsets and uplift bras, giving women a look so brazenly sexual that the like had not been seen since Nell Gwyn’s day. She has grabbed publicity at every opportunity, even sending Naomi Campbell down the runway in shoes so vertiginously high that she was bound to fall.
Now, just weeks short of her 63rd birthday, Vivienne Westwood, grande dame of the anti-Establishment and one of our most valued national treasures, is finally being given the highest accolade of her career: an enormous retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the first for a British designer. It is a fitting tribute to this extraordinarily buccaneering woman. Her determination to drag her sex out of the “male-approved” closet and make it stand on its own two feet has won her fans at all age levels. She is a natural subversive, and much of what she has achieved has now become mainstream — every girl with a pierced ring in her navel is part of the Vivienne effect, whether she knows it or not.
Westwood has been designing clothes for more than two decades, and last year had sales worth £48.7m, up 25% on the previous year, not bad for a woman who has skirted bankruptcy more than once. “I think I’m lucky to have had a job that has enabled me to tap my potential,” she says, in the most polite and ladylike voice you can imagine, while maintaining a Derbyshire accent as thick as a dry-stone wall. “I really enjoy what I am doing.”
Westwood is in her Battersea studio, a scruffy Jack Russell asleep at her feet. Her shock of orange hair is stiffly piled up to one side in the 1940s fashion, but with her porcelain skin and delicate wrists, she looks frail. I realise that the only person who could have captured this amazing mixture of arrogance and childlike naivety was Toulouse-Lautrec.
For years, I have watched this woman parading down her catwalks like a latter-day Agrippa, and I am unprepared for the tentative speech and the way she gropes to finish a sentence. But then Westwood’s life has been a colourful one. She hasn’t always had success in fashion. Ten years ago, she hit a bad patch. She had just married her third (and current) husband, Andreas Kronthaler, a man 25 years her junior, whom she met when she was teaching in Vienna to make ends meet. The business was struggling, and he said to her: “I can see you’re not happy. Either do the job and enjoy it, or stop wishing you were doing something else and go off and do something else.” It wasn’t exactly “out of the mouths of babes and sucklings”, but it worked. “Since then, I have really enjoyed my work,” she says. “And I think what I do is very good. My innovations have totally changed the way people look at clothes. I look back at my career and see an incredibly rich body of work, but above all I am proud that I’ve always made real clothes.” Westwood, you see, is no shrinking violet.
She was born in Derbyshire in 1941, the daughter of a Wall’s sausage factory worker and a greengrocer’s assistant. To better themselves, the family moved to Harrow, where her parents ran a sub-post office. At 16, she attended Harrow School of Art, but after a term, she left to become an teacher and fulfil her parents’ hope for family betterment. She married a toolmaker — so far, so predictable, until she met Malcolm McLaren, scourge of the 1970s and, as manager of the Sex Pistols, the mouthpiece of Britain’s punk movement.
There is no doubt that the men in her life have had a huge influence on the direction of her career. As Kronthaler picked her up when she was down, so McLaren determined the direction that was to define her. She came into fashion unwillingly and entirely through his guidance. “I wasn’t very happy in those days. I didn’t find punk very exciting, and I certainly wasn’t happy in my relationship with Malcolm. I think I needed it as an exercise.” They set up their notorious shop at the bottom of the King’s Road, and their reputations as fashion terrorists were born. “After we split, I realised how far I had moved away from him. With Malcolm, it was all polemics, for nothing. But I needed ideas. And that’s when the richness of fashion began to overwhelm me. All that content, that innovation and beauty.”
Fashion gave her the confidence she had badly needed when she was younger. “I’m from the north of England, and early in my childhood, I thought I was stupid. But even as a little girl, I thirsted for information. I learnt at three that this was a terrible world. Looking at a picture of the Crucifixion made me what I am now. I couldn’t believe that grown-ups had let such a shocking thing happen.” It’s strange — her naive idealism has not left her, even 60 years later. But the other side of Westwood is her resilience and determination. “Being born in the north breeds a spirit in you. And I come from an entrepreneurial family, always looking for ways to make extra money, even if it was just breeding dogs. We prided ourselves on enterprise. As a child, I was very popular. I was always clever, so the teachers loved me. And I was the one who, if the kids wanted to do something naughty, would do it. Kissing the teacher, for example. I was always a leader. You can’t avoid your character — that’s your bag of tools. And I always think, if I don’t do it, nobody else will. But I don’t want it to be just me, me, me. And I don’t want to be tough, although I think I probably am.
“I’m an idealist, so I get depressed now and again. I could never vote for Tony Blair again, after the war. And those Tories are terribly dangerous. I wouldn’t give them my vote. I suppose it will have to be the Greens next time, but I do feel that Labour has sort of disenfranchised me.”
But Westwood is no dreamer, caring only for ideals and creativity. “I need to make money. Not to survive, but to feed my self-esteem. If I am not able to make money, then I don’t see the point. I’d just be a stupid northern girl surrounded by people who can make money.”
In fact, her creativity has often been spurred by the men in her life. “I’m very happy working with men. They are always so good at idealising women. Malcolm wasn’t a craftsman, but he was talented and we had a truly creative partnership.” Now, she claims, his creative role is taken by her third husband.
Kronthaler has the kind of romantic gypsy looks that are more often associated with the hero of a Mills & Boon romance. But it isn’t just his sexuality that appealed to Westwood. “I recognised his extraordinary talent as well,” she declares. “And we were attracted to each other like magnets. We were always seeking each other out, wanting to share everything together.”
Being the woman she is — part naive, part calculating, and much more aware of what is happening than people might imagine — the sniggers over her toyboy infatuation did nothing to deter her. She brought Kronthaler to England and, besotted with him, married him. She would be horrified at the thought that she did it for effect, or even publicity. Even more, that she needed a youthful creative injection to move her forward. “Andreas is brilliant at developing and exploiting what I do. He always designs just as much as I do, and he does practically all the menswear. I don’t do anything for that, except take a bow on the catwalk at the end.” And, she whispers seductively: “He’s ever so sensual. He always changes his underwear to match whatever he’s wearing.”
Whether Kronthaler has developed or deflected her spirit will be judged by pundits and amateurs alike when her retrospective opens in April. Whatever the jury decides, it will have little effect on her. As she grows older, Westwood becomes increasingly involved in her own mental processes. “I have a great intellectual curiosity that fashion doesn’t always need,” she explains. “I sometimes think that what I do — designing clothes — is actually just a duty, even a chore. But then I think: I have to design, because I can. I’m special, and you have to pay a price for that. I know how much I’m appreciated in the fashion world. I have an amazing amount of credibility.”
Westwood is confident of her place in history. But then, if anyone can call themselves a revolutionary, it’s her — the woman who rewrote the rules of taste. W
The Vivienne Westwood retrospective is at the V&A, SW7, from April 1 to July 11
or even to the august Vivienne , but I think her MENSWEAR is a JOKE !!!! 
