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Get a Life Page 9

by Vivienne Westwood


  At this point, I’d had enough. I went to the back of the bus to talk to my friends, Noreena Hertz, economist and author of books on global capitalism, and David Fenton, an American PR activist. David says, and I agree, that Rupert Murdoch has done only harm in the present world. He owns Fox News, which is the same lies repeated over and over. ‘Everybody in the UK should be made to watch Fox News for a week’, David says, to wake up to how ridiculously unbelievable it is.

  Now we are arriving. The house is an eighteenth-century architectural gem. The setting! A perfect landscape between lush hills and woods. Inside, I never saw such flower arrangements, such wanton gorgeousness of colour and blooming magnitude – thrown into the vases. It’s a great party. Trudie Styler’s long legs as she descends the staircase feeling so hot in her hot pants. Drinks. Andreas points to the Grayson Perry tapestry. Jemima: ‘Do you like it? I saw the programme he did on TV and he is such a sincere and highly intelligent person with such an interesting view. That’s what made me decide to buy it.’ Andreas had told me the same and that he has such original observations to make on the working class. I would like to listen to this. We don’t talk much about the different classes any more. We talk about the haves and have-nots.

  Jeanne Marine takes us up to her and Bob Geldof’s bedroom to look at the view. Over the bed is an artwork in neon writing by my dear friend, Tracey Emin, ‘Those who suffer love.’ I go, ‘Oh, dear!’ Andreas says, ‘It takes two.’ (She who did it and she who bought it.) Without judges there is no art. We look down on the terrace – at one side is a pool – overlooking the French rose garden with lavender and set in geometric box hedges and leading down to a stream then up again to grassy hills.

  I try to speak with Joseph, Assange’s assistant. We go into the kitchen with Bella Freud to be on our own and Joseph says that Julian never told anyone, not him, not anyone, that he was going to seek asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy; he also said that people would not lose their bail bonds because asylum takes precedence over other bail conditions. Then we were joined by a boring man holding forth on a stream of borrowed opinions and Bella and I walked off, leaving poor Joseph who was too polite.

  Then a lady, Helen Lewis, introduced herself to me, a writer from the New Statesman. I suddenly realised who she was and said, ‘Oh, you’re the one who wrote your bad opinions about Julian Assange.’ She said, ‘I would have been very pleased if he had defended himself in the Swedish Court.’ And went on about justice.

  Julian is unlawfully detained. [The UN have now called for his release.] Julian has not been charged because there is no evidence against him. I said, ‘And who are you to be very pleased? You’re a journalist, get the facts.’

  I was delighted to meet Tracey Worcester whose film Pig Business you can watch on the internet (www.farmsnotfactories.org). It’s about the harm done to pigs and the whole world by corporate factory farming. This woman is so strong and beautiful. What she does comes from the most refined human motivation. Please see it and act for change: for hundreds of years animals have had no rights and are seen as there for our use. All rights are identified exclusively with humans; we have become disoriented, alienated from the planet – we have lost touch with reality. Let’s get real and stop the devastation. Start with cruel bacon sandwiches.

  Tracey Worcester – campaigner against factory farming.

  At night I stood on the terrace by a brazier with Andreas and Rifat Ozbek who was telling us how he enjoys the London club scene. Once he did fashion but now, after three year’s work, he has just finished decorating Robin Birley’s new London club, Rupert’s. There were hundreds of glamorous guests and Jemima was the centre of it all, running around in her lamé mini-dress, talking to anyone and everyone. She’s witty and sarcastic and full of fun, radiating energy. Andreas says she’s a sphinx, ‘I can’t make her out, perhaps it’s all that hair.’ (She said to her sister-in-law who was wearing jeans and a sweater, ‘Oh, I see you made an effort!’ ‘But I didn’t know there was a dress code!’ ‘Nevertheless!’).

  JULY 2012

  SUN 1 JULY AN EGYPTIAN AMULET

  I go with Andreas to an antiques fair, ‘Masterpiece’. There are really precious wonderful things that you can have an intimate relation with and here I am, trying on the best pair of diamond earrings, Georgian ones that suit me perfectly; holding in my hand a glazed pottery amulet of Thoth, twelve centimetres high, from Egypt, fourth century BC. After having lived a little The Story of the Stone, I very much fancy living in my imagination, close to whoever wore the amulet.

  Embroidery was once such an important part of the lives of privileged women, who would sit talking while they sewed or one of them would read aloud. I know that even after Henry VIII divorced his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, she continued to make his embroidered shirts. I learnt so many interesting details talking to the vendors of embroideries. I hadn’t realised, for example, that education was widely available to children in the sixteenth century where girls were taught embroidery.

  Guardi’s tiny Venetian masterpieces.

  If I could choose one thing, it would be a set of three miniature paintings by Guardi. In reproduction you cannot see the air. You have to look at Guardi’s paintings themselves to see a never-ending horizon in each of these tiny masterpieces. In his views of Venice, he worked exclusively on depicting reality such as the eye saw it. His new approach to painting and the manner of painting influenced the Impressionists and modern painting. Even so, he was a master of the tradition of oil painting – the indirect method – which gives unlimited possibility of expression, and he pushed the technique into his own original method. ‘He was prolific and ‘churned them out’ for the tourists of Venice though he was not so popular as the more traditional Canaletto,’ Andreas told me. ‘I love small,’ he said. Small when it’s great is any size at all.

  MON 2 JULY Q V Q AND GOLD LABEL

  Our pattern cutters are working on the patterns and sample toiles created last week by Iris and Andreas and bringing them a stage closer to finish, so Andreas and I carry on with Q v Q (Quality v Quantity). Then on Friday afternoon Andreas and I work together trying to put outfits together for Gold Label – of course this brings us nearer to deciding which fabrics to use. We do this again at work on Sunday. And the next week, too, is occupied by Gold Label fittings.

  TUES 3 JULY TRACEY EMIN’S BIRTHDAY PARTY

  Cynthia and I had a very exciting lunch with Michael Stein and Jon Snow, who is a friend of his. Michael has a solid strategy underway to mobilise business in the fight against climate change. He has a new baby; he’s very concerned and clear about the danger we face. We really believe in the power of his conviction. His plan is so sound, he’s got it all worked out. It’s about crowdfunding for green energy projects.

  In the evening Andreas and I go to Tracey Emin’s birthday party at Annabel’s. Tracey is one of the sweetest, most kind, loyal and reliable people I know. She is so generous to her friends and she always celebrates her birthday with a big party for them and we all love her (she writes us letters and postcards).

  I first met Tracey at a photo shoot and I talked to her because I found her attractive to look at, with her super-feminine figure and legs. I think she could make more of an effort with her art but she is happy with it and with success. She likes me, so she ignores the fact that I criticise her. She knows I dismiss all these modern artists, e.g. Andy Warhol, as artistically irrelevant. Tracey said to me, ‘Aren’t we lucky to be friends!’

  10–17 JULY PRATO AND LUCCA

  Andreas and I are off to Italy for a week to work with our people there. Rosita and Paola have a company in Prato, an old town near Florence. They produce our Gold Label. The company is a studio which does more than manufacture and dispatch but helps from the start of the collection, helping us source and develop fabrics and yarns, and we work step by step with them changing, building and, through our assistants, sending emails and patterns and samples to be copied. It is obviously efficient for Andreas and me to
go there personally for a few days. We get so much done face to face. We have worked with these two women for around twenty years and they have become dear friends.

  We arranged to work either side of the weekend and to visit Lucca together on the weekend. By the time we left on Tuesday evening we had made so many of the small decisions that pin down a collection; I now feel that I have grasped its identity.

  Paola comes from Lucca and though it is only a half-hour drive from Prato I had never visited. We all stayed in an apartment in Palazzo Pfanner belonging to a friend of Paola’s brother, Alfredo, who still lives in Lucca.

  With Andreas in Lucca.

  Medieval Lucca was an independent republic for almost five hundred years, rivalling Florence, and the old town is preserved intact as it is enclosed and protected by a wall. It sits in the middle of a flat area (once marsh), surrounded by the Tuscan hills. It really is beautiful. Paola guided us through the narrow streets, against the old walls of the houses. She showed us her old school and house. The church interiors do not beautify themselves with added pomp and splendour; it is the church buildings which are important, the experience of entering the church itself – the sparse clarity. Andreas, who has loved churches since he was a tiny boy, had never seen the like before; he described them as ‘shockingly elegant’.

  WEDS 18 JULY THE HOTTEST YEARS ON RECORD

  When we left Prato the temperature was 36 degrees centigrade. When we got home the weeks of rain still continued and we had to put on the central heating. In America, this year has been the hottest since records began, and in the last twelve years, ten have been the hottest on record worldwide. The Met Office says that climate change may be the cause of the extreme weather conditions. If climate change may be the cause, why aren’t we doing something about it? If we don’t, then the catastrophe we face will be unprecedented.

  Back home I write a piece for the New Statesman. They are doing an issue on ‘My London’, so I talk about the importance of art, how I have engaged with it since I came to London when I was seventeen. London is the greatest city in the world for high culture.

  FRI 20 JULY THE SAMPLE COLLECTION

  Worked on Gold Label – we have already sent some of the final samples to Rosita. She needs to copy them, and also in other fabrics, to prepare the sample collection and to do as much as possible before the August holiday in Italy. At this stage we make charts of all the permutations, so that we arrive at a scheme of all the collection. Our job now is choosing those final fabrics and how they are to be manipulated – we take the toile and rework it so that it becomes one with the fabric. I have only just begun on the dresses and each one has a life of its own; we make it come alive.

  I spend about four hours on this and then have to go to the Wallace Collection which is being used by Chinese Harper’s Bazaar as a location to shoot some of our designs and they want me in the pictures. The cover will be my Family Tree.

  SAT 21 JULY ANTIGONE AT THE NATIONAL THEATRE

  Yoga. Reading. Can’t remember if I had a little sleep – I usually do on a Saturday. Evening: went to meet my friend Peter Olive at the National Theatre. I met Peter a few years ago when I gave a talk at Oxford University where he was studying Classics. I was really excited to meet such an interested, interesting person. He’s a musician and he teaches Latin and Greek. We saw Antigone at the National Theatre. The staging was a cabinet war room, with a chorus of Creon’s staff, chipping in with commentary across their desks. Soon after the play began – I hadn’t looked at the programme – Peter and I had been talking too much, catching up – I whispered to him, ‘Is this play by Sophocles?’ I couldn’t believe it hadn’t been written today, now! The ringing economy of the language, efficient instrument of the unfolding drama, transfixed me with its power and beauty. There was no interval, thank God. I was held in a state of such intensity that I think it would have harmed me to be interrupted.

  MON 23 – FRI 27 JULY THERAPEUTIC KNITWEAR

  Gold Label work all week. Worked on two more knitwear pieces, mostly to do with sequences of coloured stripes: therapeutic – absorbing but easy.

  Spent most of Wednesday with my PA, Tizer, who had a backlog of so many requests to do things or to attend events, so many charities these days who need patrons and help, so many things to ask me. I can only do one or two.

  AUGUST 2012

  SUN 29 JULY – SAT 4 AUG CHALET IN THE TYROL

  Andreas and I go to see his family in the Tyrol for a week. We stay in a chalet, high on the mountain, belonging to his brother, who is a farmer. The chalet is three hundred years old and is self-sufficient with no mod cons. Electricity is solar. We will walk and read.

  We walked every day and did yoga outdoors. The views were exhilarating and always different depending on the weather – especially when the sun goes down, which was the same time as the moon was rising. The thunderstorms this year came at the end of the day. I love them – being so high you’re in the middle of the clouds with the lightening and thunder all around you, and once we had buckets full of hail the size of peas bouncing back up as high as a metre.

  The people there are so sweet. Apart from Andreas’s family, one day we met a man from the neighbouring farm – just a chalet and a barn for his cows. His name was Thomas and he was in his eighties. He invited us in for a schnapps and we noticed the toys of his grandchildren. He was so pleased. He and Andreas at the table in his rustic home and in his check shirt. I noticed he had a proper handkerchief to blow his nose – a check one like my father used to have years ago. I was so happy sitting there listening to them talk and laugh, though not understanding. The scene was like something Van Gogh would paint.

  Before I left, Theo gave me a copy of an article called ‘The Reckoning’ by Bill McKibben which was published in Rolling Stone. Cynthia tells me it is all over the internet. It is the best political thing I’ve read since an interview with James Lovelock first shocked me into understanding the scale of the danger we face from climate change, about five years ago. Every word hits the target. I shall tear out the pages and frame this article as an important document. (John Milton framed his copy of the death certificate of Charles I. I felt sorry for Charles – he acted according to his beliefs.)

  Bright sunshine and lederhosen in the Tyrol. Behind me is the little chalet.

  McKibben nails the madness of the fossil fuel industry, whose assets are the proven coal, oil and gas reserves (and don’t forget tar sands and shale gas). If these are all burnt, as they are planning, the amount of carbon this would release into the air is 2,795 gigatons – five times higher than the figure of 565 gigatons which scientists say is the point of runaway climate change. (In reality, the figure is much lower – McKibben explains.) So, once everything is out of control and we have runaway extinction of the whole earth community, including humans, the industry will still be drilling away, will they? (Drill Baby, Drill!) No wonder we have a financial crisis when the corporate industries are running the world.

  SUN 5 – MON 6 AUG STAYING WITH IRIS

  On Sunday we left the chalet and said goodbye to the family on the way as we drove down to the station. We took a two-hour train journey in order to spend two or three days with Iris, who lives on the edge of Lake Constance. The train followed the River Inn for much of the way. Its bed lies in a narrow strip of land left by a glacier cut between great walls of the Alps. The soil is so rich, the land so cultivated and the total view so mind-blowingly spectacular. There used to be silver mines in the mountains. Iris and her boys, Aamon, nine, and Hatto, seven, met us – all in bare feet. This whole area is green hills, rising up to the mountains and it is like a garden. Andreas said you probably would not find anywhere equal to it in the world – not in Italy – for such rich land.

  Three years ago, without warning, an avalanche on Mont Blanc swept Iris’s husband, a doctor and a climber, to his death. She is glad she had two boys; they helped each other and are close friends.

  They are a sporty family. From the house you just
walk thirty yards down the road in your bare feet and onto a patch of grass beside Lake Constance – it’s like having your own private lake. There is a sailing boat, surfboards, skateboards, skis, a trampoline. Aamon is a wonderful gymnast and Hatto is strong and trying to copy him. Each summer evening they jump and dive off the pier into the lake. Iris says they’re on the move all day. They are also creative, like her. They go to a school in the woods and are allowed freedom with responsibility. They have ceremonies to honour the natural world and the world of the spirit at important times of year.

  Hatto (the younger one) and Aamon – Iris’s boys.

  I had a lovely time at Iris’s house. One day I stayed reading while the others went out. Otherwise we talked, ate and drank (one night her friend Roland came and prepared us a meal fit for gods), swam in the warm lake, played games and watched the Olympics on telly. I felt like we all had a party.

  TUES 7 AUG ANNA PIAGGI

  Came home to hear that Anna Piaggi has died. Dear Anna. What a lovely person! Had she been ill? We missed her at the last show because she always came. She was one of the first important fashion people to come in my shop, then called Let it Rock in the World’s End in 1970. She worked at Italian Vogue but she loved London and some of her best friends lived here, like Gene Krell from the shop Granny Takes a Trip. He came from New York and his personal style influenced the whole look of the ‘Swinging Sixties’, especially the Rolling Stones. He told me that, meeting Anna in London, she came out of the taxi with seven suitcases of clothes for the weekend. She liked to try things on and experiment, every time she went out she had a different ensemble. Gene is now fashion editor of Vogue Nippon and Korean Vogue. Another of Anna’s friends, Vern Lambert, had a very influential shop in Chelsea Antique Market; he bought up a load of bell bottoms from the navy and they became the whole style right through the 70s (when we were selling drainpipes). Vern went to live with Anna and her husband in Italy. Anna did five or six terrific ad campaigns with us. She was really, really talented and her personality and work helped to give the fashion world its identity for us. Andreas and I will miss her.

 

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