Get a Life

by Vivienne Westwood

  HUMAN RIGHTS We should never forget the plight of Leonard Peltier, still languishing in jail after thirty-six years. Protecting human rights is now more important than ever, considering the danger of climate change chaos, the growing numbers of climate refugees (there are already 38 million) and the breakdown of society as we know it. I’m encouraging Leonard to write more about his life in prison but, in the meantime, this is a quote from his book, Prison Writings, which gives some insight into his thinking:

  We need each other. Each of us is responsible for what happens on this earth. We are each absolutely essential, each totally irreplaceable. Each of us is the swing vote in the bitter election battle now being waged between our best and our worst possibilities. How are you going to cast your all important ballot? Humanity awaits your decision … One good man or one good woman can change the world … and their work can be a beacon for millions, for billions. Are you that man or woman? If so, may the Great Spirit bless you. If not, why not?

  Leonard Peltier took up painting in prison. This is a portrait that he sent to me.

  FINANCIAL TURNING POINT I went twice to speak at Occupy, outside St Paul’s Cathedral. The way out is the Green Economy. They should nail these demands on the church door, like Luther.

  ART AND LEARNING I don’t know if I can manage it this year but I would work with a museum to curate an exhibition which answers the question ‘What is Art?’ I want to challenge received opinion that art can be anything; everyone’s opinion is as good as anyone else’s, therefore anyone can be an artist. My own opinion involves a hierarchy of values (see my Family Tree).

  One day I would like to have access to a theatre to produce important works which could be vehicles to understanding the world we live in today. I would start with Peter Brook’s dramatic adaptation of the twelfth-century Persian verse poem ‘The Conference of the Birds’ – visually so exciting. The underlying reason would be to promote the fact that Arabs have an amazing culture. The format of Brook’s adaptation inspired that of the journey to find art in my AR Manifesto.

  Then I would go on to dramatise great books I have read. I am mulling over the idea of Faust who sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for knowledge – knowledge for the sake of power. Well, in today’s situation, we seem to have sold our souls for the knowledge that brings power and destruction. That seems like an important message – it could be the idea for a new ballet. And the ballet is one of the great achievements of the human race.

  So, how much can we do in 2012? Let’s start now and see …

  WEDS 11 JAN THE IRON LADY FILM

  Years ago when she was in power, I impersonated Margaret Thatcher … the suit I wore had been ordered by Margaret Thatcher from Aquascutum, but she had then cancelled it.

  Margaret Thatcher was a hypocrite. That’s what I put in my head. I thought: there’s the child in the hospital bed and there’s the TV camera. I’m going to show the world how much I care. The photographer Michael Roberts was going mad with delight, ‘and it needs one more thing, you need to put a little doubt in your head, do they believe me?’ That’s how we got her. This cover for Tatler was blown up on billboards during London Fashion Week – even I had to look twice to believe it was me. One week later Tatler’s editor Emma Soames got the sack. I’ve never asked Emma if there was any connection.

  The Iron Lady is now a film. I don’t think it is going to show the real damage that she caused in the world. She helped to release financial madness and now the pyramid scheme has crashed. She’s definitely a woman of her time and our time. When will we wake up and take the long-term view? Financial crisis is a symptom and the herald of climate change – coming soon, apocalypse in 2020. When are we going to listen to the scientists?

  Thatcher got the North Sea oil bonanza and used the money to help business. If I had really been Thatcher I would have used this wealth to reduce the size of classes in school. Education is the thing that could really enrich our country and surely all those extra teachers would help the circulation of money and wealth. You need heart and head to have vision and that’s why I call her a hypocrite: she did not care and used her status as a woman to pretend she did.

  TUES 17 JAN: FROZEN PLANET – GREENUP!

  We’ve just returned from our MAN Autumn/Winter 2012/13 Show in Milan. Our collection is in support of David Attenborough’s documentary series The Frozen Planet, which will go to America but, unfortunately, without the final episode where he explains that we humans are responsible for the ice melt. So we took the polar explorers as our heroes, and we love polar bears.

  Double take. Michael Robert’s notorious photo of me as Mrs Thatcher on the cover of Tatler, published in April 1989.

  Barack Obama never mentions the words climate change. If our leaders would admit the fact of climate change and conduct their politics from that perspective then we might have a chance – we have ten years at the most to stop it. How impossible it is for us to imagine ourselves victims of disaster. We suffer for the poor people who were thrown into the sea from their cruise ship off the coast of Tuscany, some losing their lives. Imagine a world of accelerating natural disasters, one after the other so that nobody can help anyone else. Public opinion is the only thing that will save us.

  I was approached by the UN Environmental Programme to design a T-shirt for their GreenUp! campaign – when you start doing things you find people come to you. They’re starting with a terrific idea, which is to plant corridors of trees to link Europe’s forests. This new initiative is about triggering new habits for a greener Europe and for greener economies. It’s a really practical idea and it raises public awareness – it’s great for the environment, great for people, great for animals.

  Milan, backstage at our Frozen Planet show, with GreenUp! ‘tree-shirts’.

  I have created a design for UNEP in support of the project. It has been printed on a T-shirt provided by sustainable manufacturers, Anvil. The ‘Tree-shirts’ will be sold through YOOX.com and in our Milan shop during menswear Fashion Week, with all proceeds to be donated to the GreenUp! fund, helping to re-plant trees in Europe’s worst-affected regions.

  FRI 20 JAN SEVEN WONDERS

  A few months ago I did an interview for L’Officiel magazine in France. They asked what seven things I consider most important for our time – this is the English version as I wrote it.

  (1) THE GAIA THEORY OF JAMES LOVELOCK This is as revolutionary as the theories of Einstein or Darwin; indeed it is a more complete theory of evolution. It has changed our perception of the world – and this will change our behaviour. Gaia is the name the Greeks gave to the earth goddess and Lovelock chose it because of his insight that the earth is alive; Gaia and her life-forms have evolved together in a self-regulating system, and together they create the atmosphere which keeps her cool. If this harmony is broken then Gaia can no longer sustain or tolerate those same life forms; she, herself, will find a new equilibrium by moving to a hot state.

  (2) IMAGINATION Should we disappear from the face of the earth, Gaia would never again have the opportunity to create creatures as wondrous. No other species has our powers of understanding and expression: our imagination is a model which mirrors the world. All our sensations and experience are represented by coded imitations of reality which are stored in our imagination like a kind of blueprint. We decode these imitations by the power of insight, which we also call intuition. This is how we get our ideas – by connecting these flashes and impulses which our imagination feeds back to us; then we strive to convert them to real form, expressed externally. We can cross-reference the codes in our blueprint. No other animal can imitate an object or an idea by drawing on paper, or can dance to music.

  Four Wonders, Hatto and Aamon playing diabolo; Titian at the National Gallery; my friend Nina Ananiashvilli of the Bolshoi ballet; and the Amazon rainforest.

  (3) THE HUMAN RACE: OUR SURVIVAL We are an endangered species. Our survival depends on becoming more human; for that we each need to engage with the world – not c
onsume but live in harmony. I suggest: a) when possible prepare your own food (‘Do it Yourself’). My own diet is without meat or grains. I am one of the world’s privileged people and can choose what I eat. Fruit and vegetables is my preferred food, delicious and aspirational. It is convenient to prepare and the most efficient for your body to use, supplying all the goodness and energy you need; b) engage with the past through culture in order to understand the present. This will give you an anchor in life and a sense of personal progress; c) inform yourself about climate change, listen to the scientists; your outlook and behaviour will change (‘Get a Life’).

  (4) NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON Twentieth-century doctrine aimed to smash the past, break the mould of tradition. They managed to do this in the visual arts but by breaking tradition they also rejected skill: nowadays, anybody can be an ‘artist’. No point, therefore, in running around to catch the latest thing. Go to the National Gallery. Without judges there is no art. We need art lovers because we are dangerously short of culture, which means we are short-sighted, blinkered in our thinking. Great art aims at perfection and is timeless; there is no progress in art. Each of us, at different stages of our lives has had different points of views on the world. A painting is a mirror of the world, an outlook on life, and we find ourselves discriminating and comparing one world with another and with our own; criticism of our present world brings understanding. We are living in the present moment of the past, we are the past: art is true.

  (5) THE RAINFOREST: COOL EARTH With the exception of Norway, governments seem to be doing very little to stop climate change. They talk only of growth and in the same breath they talk of the collapse of the economy: the financial crisis is a match of the ecological crisis because the world has nothing cheap left to exploit. Hope lies with the thousands of NGOs, charities and individuals doing practical things. I have joined Cool Earth in their plan to save the rainforest. They aim to save the three great forests of the equator, efficient factories of our atmosphere – because the plan is simple and cheap and because they are working with the people who live and work in the rainforest. This is a bottom-up approach and the big idea is to link this with government – to get governments to support great ideas which are already working.

  (6) RICHARD BRANSON: CARBON WAR ROOM Branson is a businessman who cares. He is tackling the problems of climate change by use of business methods and by means of the Carbon War Room. He created the Carbon War Room to put forward the idea that over fifty per cent of the climate change challenge can be addressed today, profitably, by existing technologies, in ways that achieve billion-ton-scale carbon reductions. Since the first summit two years ago, the Carbon War Room has specifically targeted shipping, resulting in a rating system for ships that allows customers to choose the most efficient, least polluting ships for their businesses. Large multinationals need to use them. Can you believe it? Fifty per cent of ice melt can be traced to pollution from shipping! And the world has not bothered to try to regulate it. Good luck to Branson and his business methods. Clean shipping is also cheaper.

  (7) THE ORCHESTRA In London you can experience a live orchestra at the Barbican or Festival Hall for as little as £7. To someone who has not experienced this it’s like nothing else you’ll ever see or hear – when you have all these instruments playing together as one and in universal synchronisation of movement. So much depends on the conductor and every time they play it’s different. The music completely enters into your body – it’s a total experience. The sound of the orchestra and its instruments has been built up over centuries. There are no wires, no amplification – only the acoustics of the building and the very shape and dynamic structure of the instruments which have evolved from simple pipes and sound boxes. The Greeks thought music was the most pure expression of imitation. While you listen to the orchestra it does mirror the world: it is a completed whole, not one note too many.

  FEBRUARY 2012

  WEDS 29 FEB NO FUN BEING EXTINCT

  We have had three fashion shows to present over six weeks. The final show is in Paris this Saturday – we are calling it ‘London’ and we want to link it to saving the planet by asking, why do all the empty buildings in London have their lights switched on all night? {We talked to Boris Johnson for weeks – he was very keen, but nothing happened.}

  Stella Tennant modelling London Blackout.

  Besides the fashion shows there have, of course, been many other things happening. At the end of November we launched the ‘No Fun Being Extinct’ campaign to raise £7 million to kickstart the rescue of three of the world’s most endangered rainforests. The Times, Guardian and Telegraph interviewed me and covered the Cool Earth story, which went viral in the national media. As a result, the World Bank contacted us and Cool Earth have just met with them in Washington DC.

  Storm Model Agency has backed the project enthusiastically. Stephen Fry tweeted to Save an Acre – and within an hour the Cool Earth site received nearly 2,000 hits. The funds raised have enabled them to extend their work: a new Green Teen Philanthropy project was started to teach students how to use their skills to protect rainforest. Ovo Energy is protecting an acre of rainforest for each of their customers with Cool Earth. This number is now 70,000.

  Cool Earth’s Matthew Owen (left) and anthropologist Dilwyn Jenkins (centre) signing an agreement with César Bustamante (right) of the Ashaninka tribe in Peru.

  Matthew Owen, Director of Cool Earth, visited the Aguaruna communities in Northern Peru to scale up the conservation project and include more communities fighting against logging. Several of the Ashaninka communities in the Amazon received a clean water supply: a joyous moment for families who have had to cope with polluted water and walking several hours over arduous terrain to collect fresh supplies. Each village also received a medical outpost. Now there is medicine to deal with venomous bites and malaria.

  I donated the original artwork for my Family Tree (see p.46), inspired by the Gaia theory, to help save James Lovelock’s archives for posterity. It was auctioned at the Science Museum’s fundraising dinner last week. Together with other funds raised, it will make it possible for the museum to become the perfect permanent home for these invaluable records of a lifetime’s work and discovery.

  I went to a book launch and signing for Dispatches from the Dark Side by Gareth Peirce, the famous human rights lawyer. The book is on ‘torture and the death of justice’ and the political misuse of the law in England and America that has accompanied the war on terror. Torture today is easier to read about because most of it is of a kind that doesn’t leave physical marks – when it does, the victims are killed. Today, the agony of torture is prolonged; it destroys people over an indefinite length of time.

  MARCH 2012

  SAT 3 MARCH 38 MILLION CLIMATE REFUGEES

  Experts estimate that there were more than 38 million people displaced by sudden-onset, climate-related natural hazards in 2010. Climate refugees now outnumber refugees fleeing persecution and violence by more than three to one. What we’re talking about regarding climate change refugees is total chaos, where natural disasters are more intense and more frequent. I have been working with the Environmental Justice Foundation’s (EJF) ‘No Place Like Home’ projects and recently recorded a video interview in support.

  No Place Like Home, our new T-shirts in support of the Environmental Justice Foundation, modelled by Naomi Campbell.

  Every year climate change contributes to the deaths of over 300,000 people, seriously affects a further 325 million people, and causes economic losses of US$125 billion. Four billion people are vulnerable to the effects of climate change and 500–600 million people – around ten percent of the planet’s human population – are at extreme risk. Climate change has been recognised as a fundamental threat to human rights and developing countries stand to bear almost all of the burden: 98 per cent of seriously affected people, 99 per cent of deaths from weather-related disasters, and 90 per cent of economic losses. Recent disasters show the potential scale of the problems:
1.5 million homes were destroyed in Bangladesh by Cyclone Sidr in 2007; floods in Pakistan displaced around 1.8 million people, and damaged or destroyed up to 1.6 million homes and 6.8 million acres of crops in 2010; more than 950,000 Somali refugees were displaced to neighbouring countries between January 2011 and January 2012 as a result of the complex East Africa crisis.

  Unlike refugees recognised under the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, climate refugees have no legal status. There is no legislation, agency or institution specifically mandated for their protection and assistance. No existing framework or institutions in the domain of migration, displacement or climate change specifically address the issue of climate refugees, and no international institution has a clear mandate to serve these people who so need human rights protection and humanitarian assistance. EJF’s No Place Like Home campaign is working to get the voices of those most vulnerable to climate change heard internationally, with the goal of securing a legally binding instrument for the recognition, assistance and protection of people who often have nowhere to go and no means to survive.

  I have designed T-shirts to support EJF’s campaign. They have a 90 per cent smaller carbon footprint than an average cotton T-shirt; they are organic, ethically made and manufactured by renewable green energy.

  APRIL 2012

  TUES 10 APRIL THE PRADO AND VELÁZQUEZ

  The weekend before Easter, Andreas and I went to Madrid for three days and, apart from one morning when we visited the superb Thyssen Collection, we spent each day in the Prado.