Vivienne Westwood

Vivienne Westwood, equipped with both a charming accent and valuable insight into how fashion can be a medium for social change walks us through the value of technical prowess, what qualifies as real art, and her relationship with her husband as a creative partner. We sat down with the Queen of Punk, forever opposed to adhering to society’s expectations of her, as she discussed how she drunkenly came to realize she and Malcolm McLaren were in love, sexual expression through rubber negligees, and the way fashion only becomes an art when it elevates its subject.

TRANSCRIPT:

Tania Ketenjian:
Vivienne Westwood, the well-known fashion designer who has changed the face of design over the last 40 years, just arrived to San Francisco with an expected splash this past weekend. This week on Sight Unseen, part 1 of my interview with Dame Westwood. As you may know, Westwood's initial designs shocked the world with their punk aesthetic. She worked with Malcolm McLaren, manager of the Sex Pistols, and opened a store on King's Road called Let It Rock. This was back in the '70s, and that was when her design career began. Over the years, she has both broken boundaries and remained committed to a history of design and fashion. Committed, meaning she has a reverence for it. But in her designs, Westwood has reinvented fashion objects, recontextualizing them, changing their meaning, and commenting on established British traditions, both of aesthetic and of class. Along with that, she's been embraced by the British establishment. She's been damed, even though she was so anti-establishment during the early part of her career. Now she has a show called Vivienne Westwood: 36 Years in Fashion. The show started at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, also known as the V&A, and is traveling around the world. Its only stop in the U.S. is here in San Francisco, and right after the opening, the museum was filled with visitors. The show is quite extensive, spanning Westwood's entire career, and the de Young has offered an entire floor of the museum for the show. In a way, When entering the exhibit, you feel like you're entering into the beautiful mind of the designer. It's dark, and you're gripped by these beautiful, somewhat shocking clothes. Vivienne Westwood and I spoke about the reverence to the past and the necessity of that reverence, the banality of contemporary art, the experience of collaboration, and her advice to young designers. Amongst other things. Again, this is part one of a two part interview. Please stay tuned for that and more on this week's Sight Unseen.


Vivienne Westwood:
I think that art must be timeless, and it must be perfect, and it is a mirror that reflects life as it ought to be. And I've just been to see the wonderful exhibition of Velázquez in London, and you just wanted to just collapse in a pool on the floor because it was so incredible. It was so more alive than life even. Whistler said that Velázquez painted with air and light, and it's really true. You sometimes had the impression that the people had got out of the paintings. They weren't there anymore, and it was so minimal. And this is what I mean, people think, oh, that old art, you know, that's not minimal. So minimal, it was done with so little paint. And so the illusion of the three dimension was incredible. You know, I mean, there are very few artists of, you know, he's the one, and then there's Titian and Rembrandt, that's, and then the others come as well, Rubens, whatever. But, you know, so art is something incredible, a really high thing, you know, the Elgin Marbles, whatever it is. Now then, of course, you've got other people who are not such gods of, you know, of culture as these people. And yes, every artist has a right to his own sort of truth and his own perfection. And you will see in… And so yes, there are wonderful gems and fantastic paintings and yes, yes, yes. Now then, fashion, it's very ephemeral. It's an applied art and is— it needs to be worn.

Now then, the only thing I can say is that when I do create my clothes, I do go through a process whereby it has to be perfect. It has to be so representative of something ideal, the ideal woman or the ideal sea captain, or whatever it has to be. And an idea is formed and it's technical. You need the technique because in order to form the idea. And part of that technique, of course, is your eye and your judgment and what you're trying to do. And so I just don't really consider fashion art, but you might say that when an amazing woman wears it and it suits her, and when the fact— well, the woman woman doesn't have to be amazing, she looks amazing because the clothes suit her so well, they do something for her and she is really looking marvellous, then yes, you could perhaps say that it is. It's certainly a craft and I would say that today I don't know of any artists, any vitally, any practicing vital artists. I don't know that we have any vital art at the moment. There's nobody practicing anything. They're all so easily satisfied. 

And what they call art, you know, you might call, you know, a piece of cheese or whatever. It's nothing to do with anything representative or great. And so, and I can't take, I can't make a suit out of a pile of bricks and then put it in a museum and say, "Oh, this is my fashion art." I can't do that. We are limited by our bodies, and therefore this is very, very important. You cannot throw the technique away. The reason we don't have any artists is because they've thrown the technique away. They think they can substitute their feelings and what they choose and what they decide and the extension of their personality. Write a letter to your mum and frame it and then get your agent to sell it to everybody. I mean, it's just ridiculous. Anyway, but um, fashion is— it is limited by our bodies, and the cloth has to help that body. Don't make it look too fat, make it look attractive, whatever. And I just think that fashion is really, really alive and well, despite the fact that I totally distinguish against fashion, these stamped-out clothing. That's not fashion, and unfortunately most of the people in the world wear that, and they've never looked so sad and miserable and conforming in the whole history of the human race. But fashion, that fashion designers do, it's still got something vital about it, whereas I don't think there's anything vital happening in art at the moment. So I think that's one of the reasons people are interested in it, because it has got something to say. It is, you know, it does do something, you know.


Tania Ketenjian:
Well, it's beautiful. I mean, I think, you know, I think that I very much agree with you, although I'm an arts journalist and I interview contemporary artists and really conceptual artists, and there's always this question of the abnegation of beauty for the reverence of concept, which is happening in contemporary art, that beauty is being lost and craft is, you know, actual technique is being lost. And so I agree with that.


Vivienne Westwood:
I think that it's not a question of it has to be beautiful, it has to be true. And I don't think that it is a mirror on life as it ought to be. I mean, a little portrait, a sketch even, has to have something of that to do with it. I just think, as I said, they're so completely easily satisfied and they're just there to promote their own indulgence and there we are, and terribly boring.


Tania Ketenjian:
When you say something is true, so for you, when you're making a piece, it's true for you. What does that mean? What's true?


Vivienne Westwood: It means that it has to stand up. It has to be of itself, and everything has to work, and the idea has to be, you know, the idea and the form are the same thing, and you it couldn't be better and you're not easily satisfied. You're thinking, if I cut that a little bit differently, can I do this, can I do the other? You're constantly manipulating and trying to understand how to get it perfect. And, you know, so it's not— it's wonderful if you make it look spontaneous, like angels just threw it on you. I mean, that's what you would like it to look like. Yeah, and You know, even sometimes when you see clothes in museums from couture, I once went to an exhibition of Charles James and I didn't like the clothes even though you have these wonderful photographs of Cecil Beaton and all these fantastic things because the clothes looked like somebody suffered so much. 

You expected to really find blood in those clothes and they were so heavy and the man had gone, he must have just had to to turn himself inside out. So I don't know, maybe he was trying to push a technique for make cloth do what it didn't want to do. If you have to build something that's like building a car or something, it's not right. It's got its own medium. It's got its own possibilities. And fashion and clothes should be light. In fact, the first modern woman in dress was probably Madame Pompadour, because she's the one who got the— well, I mean, we look at her as the symbol, but at that point fashion had become extremely light. It was held on the little corset, which I use that idea. You know, you can hold all kinds of wonderful fabric onto a little corset. It's held, and then of course you've got the hoops underneath which lift it. You're naked underneath. You run around, the little thing swings all over the place, you know.— and terribly light with the most modern of all fabrics, which is silk. Thankfully, people still make that silk today. And what I think is so wonderful about it is it always comes back to life. It rejuvenates, so it never dies, put it that way. You can squash it into the tiniest parcel, put it in your suitcase, and then just leave it in the wardrobe. And when you want to wear it, you know, just flick it all out and there it is. It's all full of air and life. It's wonderful silk.


Tania Ketenjian:
Yeah. Well, it's actually a beautiful metaphor for a reverence to tradition that you can put it away for a while and then you can bring it out and actually make it alive once again. And I think, and I'm wondering if that is kind of part of your, you know, cause there's, there's so all this talk about your reverence for tradition and it's actually, not so much a recontextualization of it, but just a making it vibrant once again?


Vivienne Westwood:
Well, um, nothing changed. All ideas came from somewhere. And, um, you know, when I just did a show called Wake Up Cave Girl, I'm not talking about when people invented the wheel, you know, and then, you know, things take a long time to start, but everything is built on what— What began. And yes, I expect fashion— I'm going back really far now and speculating, but I expect fashion began in a very practical way. People wanted to do things, but no, decorating themselves with feathers or whatever, of course, this is who we are, you know, some birds do it, you know, we do it, we decorate ourselves and people have built on things and there have been great big innovations in fashion, but nevertheless they didn't come from nowhere. For example, one of the great innovations in Western dress, which is really different, and you'll see what I mean, from Asian dress, from Eastern dress, because Eastern dress is based on a sort of caftan kimono robe, you know, which is about the beauty of the fabric and all kinds of textures and whatever else. But this great innovation came when people needed, where they invented plate armour, and then they put these padded garments underneath to protect their bodies, and they started to wear them as some heroic form of dress once they took the armour off. So they had these little padded jackets, tights. They'd just been on the Crusades. They started to put these marble floors down instead of rushes. They added these enormous long sleeves to show that they didn't have to do any work, and there they were sort of dancing. Sliding around on these marble floors in these incredible costumes. 

But what I'm saying is that that is an innovation because it's really garments made out of different pieces that have a shape that are put together, constructed out of bits that make a kind of shell for the body. Whether you pad it or whether you're restrictive, essentially it's a shell that you then enhance or do something with that fits the body. And this is the beginning of Western dress, and you had an absolute orgy and lust for change of proportion. And this is how, you know, this is all the historical dress that we've had, and we always want something new. And by the way, if you are going to history, which is all we know, where else does it come from? You know, when people ask you those questions, they say, you know, and I say, well, where “Where else are you going to get it from?” Or you go into the, you know, you're atavistic, you sort of get things from the past. I say, “Where else do they come from? Do they come from the future? We don't know the future.” Of course they have to come from somewhere. I go back further. I don't just go to the '60s and look in dustbins and find what's still left and scrape the bottom of the barrel with a few ideas. I go further because human beings have always been the same. Their ethics have been very different, their dressing, the way they dress has been very different, and I think that by doing that you can actually also challenge the way people look today, but essentially what you're still doing is you're always doing something new, and this, by the way, that I wanted to say is that, by the way, when you know what has been done, you also get a sense of what can be done and what hasn't been done as well.


Tania Ketenjian:
Very true. And I think probably the reason why people ask you about this issue of tradition is because the way you came onto the scene, so to speak, was in such a non-traditional way. I mean, through the— through such a non-traditional movement, or at least a movement that really worked against traditions, which is the punk movement. I think this would be a good way of kind of talking about not that time in your life, but whether you feel that a movement like that exists, whether punk— where punk exists now. Do you, do you see it, that kind of not just aesthetic but ideology today?


Vivienne Westwood:
Well, I, at the time that myself and my partner Malcolm did that punk collection, no, I was not looking at history. I was looking at streets and trying to do something around. And that punk rock look evolved and was synthesised from various things that we did, and one of those things that we did was to take S&M clothing and wear it in the street. Now then, it seems today that everything seems to have been done. There's no stones left to turn over to find something that hasn't been used as fashion. And um, so, but nevertheless, and therefore I think it had such an impact because it was something that had not been used before. So me walking around in rubber negligees and stuff, you know, that was the look and all that torn stuff. You know where that came from? It came from those little '50s pinup magazines where, you know, this woman looks like she's just been thrown up on the beach. She's just arrived, you know, woman is on the beach ready to be raped, you know, with her little torn shirt that she, you know, was okay when she was on the ship, but now it's in a state, you know, this kind of thing. It was this sex idea, you know, to tear your clothes. It's very easy, you know, I mean, people use that in films, you know, Sophia Loren or somebody, or people having a fight. 

People love to see this torn clothing, and it suggests the idea of sex. And I'm sorry to say, even that it suggests the idea of rape, which is, I don't know. Anyway, we won't go into that. But anyway, so it didn't come from nowhere, that's the thing.— and that's where we found it. But then, I don't know, at that point, actually, the point I'm talking about is the time when the Sex Pistols stopped and Sid died, and that was the end of the story. My shop came up for renewal. I thought, am I going to continue with fashion? I thought, yes, I am. It's all on these Paris catwalks now, so I'm going to carry on. And so in order to find something new, I started to look into history. And so I worked with Malcolm on those things, but at that time we were sort of separating, so not too much. And then I worked for about 10 years on my own. And then when I met my husband about 20 years ago, he's continued to work with me ever since. And he really introduced me, even though he's 25 years younger than me, he introduced me to couture. I'd never studied Saint Laurent or anyone before, not really, and, and just turned my head around just to realize how brilliant all these things were. So where am I? I'm just, just saying things don't come from nowhere.


Tania Ketenjian:
Well, actually, let's talk about your husband now that you brought it up. Tell me what it was like to fall in love with someone that was so much younger than you.


Vivienne Westwood:
Oh, well, I'm not going to go— it doesn't matter. It's not that I'm keeping secrets or anything, but it's just, I don't know. I mean, apparently we were in love and we didn't know it. And everybody was saying, oh, they're in love. And there came a point because he was Austrian, whereby We did not have a sexual relationship at this point, but whereby he was Austrian and we were having such problems because we need to travel and we were really working together. He is the most talented person I've ever met and he does the half of what we do at the moment. It's half him and half me. We, it's sometimes it's combined, sometimes he does one thing, sometimes I do another. And, um, Anyway, but it was such a problem coming in and out, and it was always, you know, so nerve-wracking. And I said, I only know one way that you can stay in this country. You have to get married to somebody, because I know how difficult it is and how the English are very, very protective, more than any other European country, about letting people in to work. 

And I said, I don't know how we're going to do it, but you have to find somebody to marry, we have to do it. And he said, Vivien, I have to marry you, he said. But apparently we were really in love. We were always, even when he was a student, we always, that's, you know, as soon as I went to the class, I looked for him. We just were companions and very, very attracted to each other. But I had no intention of chasing up this young man. It never occurred to me. In fact, it was the other way around. And when I look back, I remember us both being a bit drunk just a bit before this and we were at, actually we were watching a sex thing of Jeff Stryker one time and there was a gay man talking to me, an old friend of mine, and I just remember Andreas getting so annoyed and he just grabbed me and pulled me away and said, "She's mine," he said. I don't know. So somehow or other it wasn't me chasing him, that's all I wanted to say. And we don't quarrel, we really, he is, I learn so much from him. He doesn't learn that much from me. About fashion, yes, he learns more than enough from me, but I'm interested in intellectual things and he's very, very visual. And he's not so interested in me preaching and carrying on and, you know, doing my thing, telling everybody what my opinions are about the world. He’s incredibly, incredibly visual. And so he seems to have this direct experience of things. And if you can get him to tell you about it, well, it just really opens your eyes. And I, and I learn an awful lot from him.


Tania Ketenjian:
Yeah, I'm sure. And, you know, ages, it's not— someone's age is really not reflective of who they are necessarily. Sometimes they have a very old soul. 


Vivienne Westwood:
People change as well, you see. I mean, I'm not jealous. I was 10 years without a man and I wasn't looking for anybody. And so I love to read, and I'm so happy when he goes down the club and I can get on and do a bit of reading. And as I said, we have to travel a lot, and so I don't go on holiday. He goes on holiday, I stay at home and read. You know, we don't go to the supermarket together. We're not, you know, pushing our trolley around together. We're not in each other's pockets all the time, but we work, yeah. Very, very supportive of me and of each other. It's great. I really like it when I do travel with him. He's so good at getting you into your clothes. He helps dress you and everything. It's absolutely brilliant, yeah.


Tania Ketenjian:
So he's not here now, he's not with you now, yeah? So maybe you're missing him a bit? 


Vivienne Westwood:
Ah, yeah, I look forward to seeing him when I go home, yeah. It'll be lovely.


Tania Ketenjian:
Yeah, those were the words of Vivienne Westwood, designer and subject of Vivienne Westwood: 36 Years in Fashion, a show that started at the V&A in London and is traveling around the world. Its one and only stop in the U.S. is in San Francisco. I had the honor of interviewing Dame Vivienne Westwood, and those were her words. This is part one of a two part interview part two will air next week, again on Sight and Scene, of course. Please stay tuned for that. And for more information on Vivienne Westwood, just look her up online. There's so much there. And stay tuned for more great programming on Resonance FM, the UK's first radio art station.