Vivienne Westwood: Like all great artists, she juggled the contradictions in society

The close of 2022 flickered with death. Gone forever Pele’s and Vivienne Westwood’s light and Pope Benedict’s long shadow. In the hands of the obituarists, they have already taken on their waxen identities: happy warrior, eco-warrior and diehard, anti-LGBT theocrat.

At first glance they have little in common. But Vivienne Westwood, the most non-conformist among them expressed a desire to meet the pope to get him to promote contraception worldwide. Because it would give “status to women” and “help the environment by reducing world population”.

In this, as in everything else, Westwood defies her own image. Where does it leave the anarchic, anti-religion, anti-feminist legend?

Over the weekend, commentators painted a shallow portrait of her as climate campaigner, a sort of geriatric Greta Thunberg. Others drew a mercurial ride from punk rebel to extinction rebellion.

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As though her long career in fashion was something of an aberration during the in-between years. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Westwood was first, last and centre all about fashion. It was why she got up in the morning. It was the unifying bond between her and the external world. It was why she wanted to be remembered as “heroic”.

Fashion was what brought her to Buckingham Palace as well as to the melting icebergs. It was what focused her sense of right and wrong. It was what honed her sophisticated understanding of how capitalism works.

Attack the system

Her first big insight came from her experiences of punk. She and her then partner Malcolm McLaren saw it as a way to attack the system. “But it wasn’t it attacking it at all,” she says. No sooner did they come up with a concept to attack the establishment than the establishment found a way to contain it. Punk was “marketed”, a symbol of English democracy and equality. “It wasn’t democratic at all,” she said. “It was just a distraction.”

She knew, like the French Marxist philosopher Roland Barthes, author of The Fashion System, that fashion is as important a cultural transaction as music; that it provides codes for social mores. But she wanted more than codes. She wanted change. Marx’s epitaph “Philosophers interpreted the world… The point is to change it” could well have been her leitmotif.

Although she was central to the Sex Pistols and the moral pandemonium of the 1970s where sexual fetishism became street fashion, she refused to wallow in it. In a recent interview she remarked incredulously of Johnny Rotten, “He hasn’t changed. Still the same.”

Westwood believed in change. In cultural revolution. Long-standing assumptions are the conditions against which revolutions occur. Gender and sexual inequality were the norms against which she railed. By every means at her disposal.

She reimagined all the signs and symbols of women’s oppression, from the corset to the conservative buttoned-up blue of Margaret Thatcher and made them wild and free. And beautiful. Most revolutions – and revolutionaries – become puritanical. Not Westwood. Collecting her OBE – and later her damehood – at Buckingham Palace, she gleefully revealed she was knickerless. And it’s a safe bet that, had she ever gone to the Vatican to meet the pope, she would have done the same.

Always the disrupter, she used violent, overt messaging on her most delicate designs. She wanted to “prevent people doing terrible things to one another”. So she emblazoned the word “destroy” on images of the perpetrators.

Like all great artists, she juggled the contradictions in society. Which undoubtedly led to her controversial statements on feminism. “I don’t think feminists are awake,” she said. “It’s like cos I’m a woman I’m better than you.” She worried that “A lot of women want to look like they’re kind of a victim. I really don’t like that mentality – you’re a victim but you live in the privilege world of western women!”

Subversive empowerment

The crudity of these statements belies the complexity of her thinking. Far from being a reactionary, Vivienne Westwood actually found feminism too narrow. Gender fluidity, women’s reproductive rights, gay rights were a second skin to her. And her every instinct was trained on empowering women to lead the lives they want, sexually, sartorially, artistically and every other way. With style, vitality and fun.

Genius doesn’t always have to be intellectual. She said she told stories through clothes. But the stories she told were always subversive. Always delighted by gender fluidity, she made the kilt iconic.

She saw tartan as the humblest “peasant” cloth. She used it on all her catwalk collections, even inventing one which was recognised by the Scottish tartan company. In this she was doing what she did best, reversing the hierarchical order of fashion as fine silks.

Everything she did consciously contained within it an opposing logic, a dialectic.

“Fashion,” she declared “was a way of engaging with things.” And she didn’t just mean an internal dialogue. She meant political engagement too: like her support for Scottish independence. And of course her final engagement with climate change.

Fashion, everyone knows, requires an industrial base but fast fashion means the stench of sweat shops from Belarus to Bangladesh is in all our nostrils. The world is drying up from cotton production abuse.

Westwood’s quest for sustainable fashion led her beyond slave labour and exploited farmers. Surveying the melting icebergs and the possibility of human extinction, this consummate fashion designer said, “I’ll be willing to give up my label if there was some way of saving the environment. If I thought it would make any difference.”

That’s heroic. That’s fashion.