Get a Life

by Vivienne Westwood

  We had promised ourselves for so long to visit Velázquez. His Las Meninas or The Ladies in Waiting is the most famous painting in the gallery. Nothing, no reproduction, could ever prepare you for the shock and power of the painting – you are confronted by another world, a parallel universe, the fourth dimensions of space and time. The surface becomes a room and the focus is on this little thing, this child who still hasn’t a clue of why she is so important: the Infanta. She’s blonde – everyone else is dark – and in a silvery white dress; the hair is important; it suffuses down over her shoulders, infiltrated by the rosy haze of the air which fills the room; the dress is silk and her skin has the liquid softness of a child who is still a baby. The way it is painted! The lady in waiting bending over the Infanta from our right has a knot of silver ribbons in her hair, but when you open up your eyes you see her head is just a twizzled daub of black and thick white which grabs you and pulls you into the picture. Eyes looking at you can be smudges and a hand can be lost. I’m always thrilled how much brush strokes and paint applied on a flat surface can emphasise – or not – and therefore represent – the movement of real life around us, where we never focus on everything at once but only according to our interest. The composition is highly original: so much going on, caught in a moment of time; Velázquez himself in the act of painting, and the images in the mirror of the King and Queen, as if they were really standing next to you looking into the picture.

  Velázquez’s masterpiece, Las Meninas, or ‘The Ladies in Waiting’.

  The Prado is one of the world’s great galleries. It has loads of the best landmarks of innovation. The museum has just been re-done and they’ve done it so well; the paintings are grouped and hung in such an exciting way – they seem to have all the Velázquez paintings in the world. And all the Goyas – so many and all so different. Goya had such skill he seems to have been able to paint in any way he wanted. Manet came to absorb himself in the collection and learn, and described Velázquez’s The Buffoon to be the most wonderful thing the world had ever produced. The man really stands in a space of his own – no background. The sense of reality is overwhelming when you are in front of it.

  Coming back to London, the plane was delayed by six hours, most of it spent on the tarmac. Two weeks before, coming back from France on the Eurostar, we had a nine-hour delay because of a pylon on the tracks. It was all very friendly but uncomfortable and some people were moaning because the delay was caused by French strikes. We are so used to the facilities of our consumer society. In a shrinking world economy and with more problems from climate change we are going to have more of this. For me it is the ‘Beginning of the End’. Normally, I try to fly less. We got to bed at 4 a.m.

  THURS 26 APRIL SHELL MUST CLEAN UP THE NIGER DELTA

  Shell has been extracting oil in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria for over fifty years. They are the major operator there and have made billions and billions of dollars out of the country. And what have the people of the Niger Delta received in return? The vast majority have been subjected to grinding poverty, little access to clean water, a polluted environment and ongoing violence and conflict.

  Amnesty International believes that leaks and spills from Shell’s pipelines have devastated the livelihoods of millions of people in the region. Amnesty research has revealed that the fish they catch, the water they drink and the air they breathe have all been ruined by oil pollution. I support their campaign to end the needless suffering of the people of the Niger Delta. Shell makes billions of pounds of profit each year. It is a profit that is being subsidised by the poverty and ill-health of the people of the Niger Delta.

  For decades Shell has ignored repeated calls to clean-up the mess they have left behind: a mess that they are responsible for; a mess that has blighted the livelihoods and health of thousands upon thousands of people. Shell needs to get around the table and put a proper cost next to the liabilities they are responsible for and to fund new structures to ensure that the life and health of the people of the Niger Delta are protected once and for all.

  The Niger Delta is one of the most polluted areas on the face of the earth. Decades of oil pollution has seeped into the water, the soil and the burning of oil waste pollutes the air. Where once the people could fish and farm in order to support themselves, their families and their communities, now they are reduced to begging. Their government has abandoned them to the oil companies.

  But they are fighting back. Communities in the Niger Delta have taken Shell to court in the US, UK and Netherlands. Shell is starting to be held to account for its devastation in Nigeria. You can add your voice too. No more excuses, enough is enough: Shell needs to clean up its act.

  FRI 27 APRIL STELLA TENNANT

  Came home after a glorious day with Juergen Teller shooting Stella Tennant for our publicity campaign. We had worked exhaustively over days to prepare it and it went well. We shot clothes from both the January MAN show and the February woman’s show on Stella, and created an atmosphere of seventeenth-century interiors. We wanted to present the clothes with the noble gravitas of Velázquez portraits and posed the shots accordingly. Stella was superb.

  A glorious day with Juergen Teller, shooting Stella Tennant for our campaign.

  SAT 28 APRIL THE STORY OF THE STONE

  Yoga. Decided every Saturday will be my day of rest and glory! Reading for pleasure in bed. I have a queue of books waiting, most of them non-fiction, but my current one is The Story of the Stone – it is fascinating, profound, exhilarating. It really is a book of life – a Chinese eighteenth-century classic in five volumes. Read until I slept.

  MON 30 APRIL TOILES

  First fittings for Gold Label – designing fashion is continuous. Our fitting model tried on the toiles. A toile is a draft – a work in progress of a design, executed in calico, which we develop and fit until finally we make the finished garment in the correct fabric. Iris really enjoyed working on some of the clothes inspired by beetles. A kind person had sent me a little book on beetles thinking it could inspire jewellery designs.

  MAY 2012

  TUES 1 MAY WE ARE THE MAJORITY

  Yoga. Then long talk with Julian Assange: WikiLeaks and their problems raising funds to ensure their survival. They’ve been fighting an unlawful economic blockade by giant US finance companies for over a year. This has destroyed 95 per cent of their revenue from the public. Our politicians are in default on every level – climate change created by squeezing everyone with a crazy financial system and decreasing regard for human rights. It causes people to think only of themselves. Yet it’s all connected. When I read the newspapers (I expect TV is the same) they make you think the public agrees with all this. But I don’t think we do. We know they are exploiting us. I am not alone. You are not alone. We are the majority.

  WEDS 2 – THURS 3 MAY IRIS AND FABRIC CUTTING

  Worked on collection. It’s hard. On average, if you can make one decision a day – that is speed. With Iris here we can work more quickly; Iris develops the new ideas for a cut. She is so light and so quick because she is technically trained; she brings more than one idea to a point each day; she helps us and our other pattern cutters. We can pin our ideas down at the fittings and I can check with her the use of fabrics for the designs. Andreas thinks the most important thing is to catch the accident, keep it, use it. Right use of fabrics is the hardest part, matching the idea – the toiles – with the fabric. This continues throughout the building of the collection and includes how to sew and make up the garment.

  You have to let the fabric do what it wants to do. At the moment we only have small samples of fabric – some are only 2-inch square, the rest 12-inch. Nothing has arrived, yet I need to work it out in the air because: a) I need to get a potential overview for the collection, e.g. what blouse goes with what skirt/jacket (through such practical solutions you develop the collection and the feeling); and b) this will show me what other fabrics I am going to need so I can still order before it is too late. Some fabrics – I think
, why on earth have we ordered this; what am I going to do with it? Print it? Cut it full of holes? Then I might get an interesting idea. When the fabrics do start to come then it often happens that the idea and the fabric just don’t work together; then you have to design something else for the fabric and something else for the idea which is still at the toile stage. Anyway, this is the hardest thing. Luckily, Andreas is genius at all this and only when the fabrics arrive will he start to commit himself.

  Knitwear is much easier to design. One day I’ll explain why.

  WEDS 2 – THURS 3 MAY KEN FOR MAYOR

  I voted for Ken Livingstone for London mayor. He’s done great for London throughout his career. He made you feel we were all in it together, that London was our town. I liked Siobhan Benita – an independent – she was very specific and practical. Boris adopted the bike idea from Ken and, apart from that, he’s shown no imagination – just hard-line Conservative policy. Yet people like him, like him because he’s disruptive. I remember some years ago I attended a discussion at the British Museum, run by the Telegraph, ‘Do we live in a free society’. Boris was on the panel and sabotaged the whole thing by showing off and saying silly things.

  FRI 4 MAY WILL.I.AM

  Met Will.i.am. He popped in to see me about an idea he has for fashion. We talked a lot. He had helped Obama get in with his hit song, ‘Yes We Can’, but he is quite politically aware. Because Obama is a fan of drones and because Will believes in technology, I talked about drones. We now live in a world worse than 1984 for surveillance, and drones can be targeted at anybody the Ruling System decides to kill. Do we really believe they’re killing only terrorists and that they know who these terrorists are? (To me a terrorist is often just someone who is in the wrong place at the wrong time.) Will thinks that social media and the internet provides a transparency so that no-one can lie.

  I say: for two centuries Western people have agreed with the belief system which masqueraded as democracy, especially in the US. Movies, bombs, War is Peace – we believed the myth. Even in the face of the lie, we believe; the more blatant the lie the more we believe. We do not see our own face in the mirror. We can only hope that as the lies become more blatant, more of us will admit to the reality. It will be great if the internet increases our disbelief. Will works hard and donates a lot of money for education. He connects education with being able to use technology in a creative way. He took my point that education doesn’t start from you and what you can do. You have to know the past in order to understand the present and to launch into the future. He laughs that I don’t have a mobile phone, etc. but acknowledged what I also said – whatever the marvels of technology, the internet can’t read a book for me.

  Will.i.am wearing our Spring collection.

  He is a very good, sweet, clever man. Apart from his other charities, he’s interested to help with Cool Earth and I told him about Leonard. There is no better way to know things than from the motive: how can I make the world a better place?

  Re the collection: another milestone attained! I had not found a tailoring fabric I liked. Now we’ve decided on three and I have some idea of ‘how it’s gonna be’.

  SAT 5 – MON 7 MAY READING

  Spent all three days reading. Newspapers: I don’t usually read them except when I travel – and I don’t travel much. Then I read them from cover to cover. I prefer surveys in book form, e.g. environment: Lovelock, Mark Lynas, Jared Diamond; politics/human rights: John Pilger, Gareth Pierce, Jung Chang – and for real solidity and overview: Bertrand Russell. I’ve been reading him for years and always recommend his books Freedom and Organization 1815–1914 and The Problem of China.

  I read The Week (which is a survey of the week’s news) but not always, and the New Statesman for Pilger. Cynthia King, who works on our political campaigns, finds and prints articles for me, too. So, I was reading articles, dipping into my books, making notes and thinking. I must read novels again, soon.

  WEDS 9 MAY CONCERT AT THE BARBICAN

  I am usually awake at 6.30 a.m. but thinking for at least thirty minutes. Wrote a letter to James Lovelock. 11 a.m. called in to see a neighbour. The council want to evict him and others from their homes so I will write a letter against this. At work: spent rest of the day with Andreas designing a label. Labels are the important thing. We will see samples and then we may have to rework it.

  Concert at the Barbican: piano and violin. Andreas loves music and gets tickets. He is usually totally absorbed and carried away but, for the first and only time I can remember, he was distracted by stress. He takes responsibility for the way everything on the creative side of our company is done; he carries it with him and anticipates everything that can go wrong – he’s the boss and I’m the assistant, though he depends on me doing lots of design without him as well as designing together. He really lives for fashion, whereas I have all these other things.

  I used to be, ‘When I finish this pair of trousers I can read my book’, plus human rights. But now I have a general worry: climate change is the overriding worry. How to get through to enough people to promote urgent action? Noam Chomsky has been trying to get through on politics all his life. Now he thinks the Occupy Movement may be that catalyst. I enjoyed the concert (Mendelsohn, Greig, Frank).

  THURS 10 – FRI 11 MAY RED CARPET COLLECTION

  All day Thursday with Andreas styling our Red Carpet Collection for a photo shoot. On Friday, a person-to-camera video campaign for Liberty and interview for GQ China with Robert Johnston. He asked me, ‘Are you political?’ I answered, ‘Well, a political person tries to influence people and that is what I try to do.’ The difference (between me and politicians) is that I know the problem we absolutely must solve and they ignore it. Robert asked me, ‘Is fashion intellectual?’ I answered, ‘It has to have a story.’

  Concert at the Barbican: Stravinsky, conductor Valery Gergiev. Andreas and I had a lovely time: snack and cup of tea, wine in the interval. There’s nothing more modern, therefore universal, great and exciting than Stravinsky (no progress in art). His fame came from the Ballet Russes; by age twenty-seven the world was at his feet. He looked an intellectual but he caught people’s imagination. He was a romantic hero. The age of the Ballet Russes had an amazing impact, and Diaghilev, its creator, was one of the great artists of the twentieth century, along with Matisse and Picasso. Tickets for the Barbican concerts start from £10 and it’s the greatest music in the Western world.

  Valery Gergiev conducting the London Symphony Orchestra.

  SAT 12 – SUN 13 MAY SUDOKU

  Yoga. Reading – articles and dipping (take it for granted that I read in bed). I must mention cooking and talk about it in full one time. Also, I often spend an hour doing Sudoku – I enjoy it too much to consider it a waste of time. On Sunday I read only my book, Story of the Stone. Pleasure from morning till night.

  TUES 15 MAY WORLD’S END AND OEDIPUS REX

  Yoga class, then to work. By the time I’d had lunch and Tizer (our PA) had gone through stuff – you know, invitations, appointments, etc. – it was 3.30 p.m. But I was able to work at last – I’d been promising myself for months – on my favourite shop, World’s End (opened in 1970). Going through, making sure everything is happening and building ideas for more to happen.

  In the evening, Andreas and I went again to the Barbican (I told you he books tickets at the beginning of the season – but it’s so large you can always get tickets on the night). Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, perhaps the most famous musical event ever staged (it’s a ballet but tonight it was the music alone) due to the furore which erupted in the audience on the opening night. People had never heard or seen anything like it before – it’s a great driving cacophony of strange rhythms and beats and overwhelmingly beautiful strains. The tribes surge around the Chosen Maiden who must dance herself to death; they lead the pounding rhythms along with their heads leaning to one side on their shoulders. Amidst the row somebody calls out, ‘A doctor!’ someone else, ‘A dentist!’

 
; During the interval I met Mary Greenwell, a very fabulous makeup artist, a friend whom I’ve often worked with. She was raving! She talked of how an orchestra is at a pinnacle of evolution in music, a highly complex unity. I said I thought that’s what Plato had meant when he said, ‘Man is a political animal’, political referring to polis or city – that he moves towards more complex social structures which culminate in the city and that the hierarchy of different functions provides the means for humans to express and develop more and more the human genius, to evolve into more perfect humans. Mary thought that African music was not so evolved as our orchestra. I said that it might seem so to us but let us be aware that man has forgotten more than he knows.

  The second half was music from Stravinsky’s opera Oedipus Rex. You know, it’s one of the great stories which obviously has its source in primitive ritual: Thebes is afflicted with plague because the king, Oedipus, had unwittingly killed his father and married his mother. Gergiev was great. He had once told me that the most important thing for a conductor was to listen to the audience; a member of the orchestra had told me that it’s different every time they play, they never know what to expect. At the end, Andreas said, ‘I love the mess! Wasn’t that so Oedipus Rex? So meaningless, so tragic, so great!’

  WEDS 16 MAY CRAIG AND VANESSA

  Did my roots with henna. Worked on World’s End. Afternoon: photos of me by Craig McDean and stylist Vanessa Reid for Interview magazine. Amazing how clothes can help and give you such a feeling of adventure – powerful, important, funny, heroic. The photos seemed very nice on the monitor (Juergen doesn’t seem to use one; he says it’s important to look at the subject and, I guess, look for the subject). Craig gave quite a deal of direction to me and to his lighting assistants – the light was on wheels. I enjoyed myself.