Get a Life

by Vivienne Westwood

  SUN 30 JUNE ST-PAUL-DE-VENCE

  I have had several speaking engagements (fees to Cool Earth) focused on Climate Revolution – one of them in Cannes, where we met Brandon, Pamela’s son, who was working on the city’s Lions Festival). Prior to that, Andreas and I stayed two days with his aunt and uncle, Cristel and Otmar, who have a house on the neighbouring hillside leading up from Nice to St-Paul-de-Vence. They are a really glamorous couple and I so much enjoy their company.

  Miro wall fountain – Fondation Maeght.

  St-Paul is famous because so many artists stayed there, like Matisse. We visited the Fondation Maeght – modern art. Half the garden sculpture was by Miro, who bores me (one wall fountain was good). I liked a painting by Braque. I find cubism uninteresting and I had never looked at him but this painting was less formulaic and quite beautiful. Braque had also contributed a stained-glass window to the restrained decor of a tiny chapel. The wooden crucifixion was donated by Balenciaga. I have never experienced something so complete – austere, sublime, it made the soul quiet. St-Paul itself is full of derivative art reproductions for tourists and the other shops all sell the same stuff, same clothes, same gew-gaws as every place on earth.

  JULY 2013

  THURS 4 JULY AT THE DOODLE BAR

  A Climate Revolution event: we invited colleagues from work and friends for drinks and a film at the Doodle Bar, across the road from our studio in Battersea. The film was Bill McKibben’s Do the Math, which he had sent to us; it illustrates the content of the article he wrote for Rolling Stone about big oil and the fossil fuel industry. It was the best article this year and got far more hits on the internet than Justin Bieber, who was on the cover. We enjoyed ourselves (free drinks) with discussions and suggestions chalked up on Doodle Bar’s big blackboard.

  SAT 6 JULY JULIAN’S BIRTHDAY PARTY

  I went to Julian Assange’s birthday party at the Ecuadorian Embassy. He was wearing army camouflage; I was wearing my ‘I am Julian Assange’ T-shirt. I met some great people, the lady ambassadors from Ecuador and Argentina, and a beautiful girl called Angela, wife of the German artist Daniel Richter. She has written and produced a play on Julian – and just by supporting him she has received hate and threats from feminists, especially Austrian ones. These complacent wrong-headed Furies! My friend Gary used to call such women ‘Cunt Fu’.

  SAT 13 – TUES 16 JULY WORKING ON GOLD LABEL

  Iris came for a week and we really concentrated on the Gold Label collection, working with her on toiles and fittings. Then we had to fill in the charts while our other pattern cutters finished the toiles. To finish the charts means we have to choose the fabric for every design that exists as a toile. Many years ago when I worked on my own with a smaller collection this was not a problem; I designed together with the fabric as I went along. Now, the rush is to develop all the toiles and then choose the fabrics, and if the fabric has arrived we do a prototype. I consider right use of fabric to be the hardest thing – often you’re working in the air with just a scrap of fabric. Andreas needs the fabric to hold it and see how it behaves; hard though it is, he is a wizard.

  On Tuesday we finished; we had worked Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Sandra took the charts and information to Italy so they could finish the sample collection. We had already sent the toiles and patterns. That was such a relief and for the moment we can take it easy; we have time to work on grand dresses and putting outfits together, styling, telling the story of the collection.

  I am doing prints and embroidery designs and I have to finish the knitwear. I am waiting for a few more tests of different stitches – textures and colour combinations from Italy – then I can finish it quickly. I find graphic design easy and therapeutic because it’s so intensely absorbing. I keep it in my head at night in bed and don’t want to go to sleep. Also, knitwear is something you build from two basic stitches – it’s binary like a computer – you pass the loop either to the front or the back, you can also knit two loops together or increase by making two loops on one stitch. That’s it! The stitches replicate lace or tweed, plain or jacquard, and in the process resolve the 3D-shape of the garment. I feel guilty for having it so easy.

  MON 15 JULY ALEXANDRA SHULMAN AND MATTHEW ARNOLD

  Andreas and I went to Bryan Adams’s for dinner. Bryan is a friend of Alexandra Shulman and as I have never really spent time with her he thinks I should know her better; she came with her partner, David. Bryan’s mother, Jane, was over to see him. She was born in Devon, married a Canadian. She loves driving around Vancouver where she sketches and at age eighty she learnt to fly. A lively mind and exuberant love of life, wonderful company.

  Alexandra didn’t agree with some of my ideas but because she is intelligent and quite open maybe I can half convince her that pop culture gets us nowhere and that if we had true culture we would have different values and we would not have climate change. But she did not accept my point that if we had evolved according to our human potential for true culture we would have been able to eliminate war. That, she could not take; we would never eliminate the ‘territorial imperative’ meaning we cannot rid ourselves of the instinct to fight for and defend territory. If you read the chapter on Rwanda in Jared Diamond’s book Collapse, you would be forced to concede her point but people do have the potential for kindness, altruism and self-sacrifice – even some animals do. There was something else involving a rather more personal situation we did not agree upon and when we kissed goodnight Alexandra said, ‘We’ll have to agree to differ.’ I said, ‘No, we won’t.’

  Now we have to go to the thing I’ve been dying to tell you from the beginning. But it’s so important I didn’t want to present it cold. I had to warm you up a bit first with something a bit more chit-chat. I have been re-reading Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) and what I am about to tell you is the wisest thing I have ever heard and the greatest advice this diary can pass on. It is a star to live your life by: it is Arnold’s concept of the Best Self. This and the concept of Sweetness and Light are ideas I have carried with me since my first reading a good twenty years ago. The concept of sweetness and light (originally put forward in The Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift) prepares the way for understanding the Best Self. These two passions are complements, the dynamics of the Best Self. Sweetness is empathy, our heart: ‘all the love of our neighbour, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for removing human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing human misery, the novel aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it – motives eminently such as are called social.’ Light is the scientific passion, our mind – ‘a desire after the things of the mind simply for their own sakes and for the pleasure of seeing them as they are.’

  We all know our Best Self, especially when we compare it to our ordinary self. Our ordinary self does what it likes: feeds on desire and wants immediate gratification, sucking up what it can, childish; it loves to act, often with passion but without much thought; it wants material success, is envious and gets its adrenalin through gossip, causing trouble and the ‘culprit’ is punished. The cleverest thing to say about the Best Self is that you know it – it’s when you’re kind and brave and stand up for things.

  Arnold elaborates on the passions of the Best Self. Sweetness, the ancient Greeks had it: ‘Greece did not err in having the idea of beauty, harmony, and complete human perfection, so present and paramount. It is impossible to have this idea too present and paramount; only, the moral fibre must be braced too.’ The moral fibre is Light – that ‘desire for the things of the mind for their own sakes and for the pleasure of seeing things as they are’. Not simply as we would like them to be. This is intellectual bravery.

  How do we cultivate our Best Self? I give you my own example. As a child I needed information. Although I read it was not until I was eleven and went to grammar school that I discovered literature. Aged eighteen or nineteen, my friend Susan, who I had met at teacher training college, introduced me to theatre. I
n my late-twenties I started to understand politics, the hippies politicised us, there were ‘underground’ bookshops. Malcolm introduced me to modern art but no light went on. Then in my late-30s I met Gary Ness. He directed my reading – Bertrand Russell, Huxley, Proust – and introduced me to art and music. I would not be the same person if I had not met Gary, he sparked off my vision of the world. My husband Andreas has an original view, no-one could tell you what he tells, he seems to see the soul of things. When I was young I absorbed pop culture, which is fine. Teenagers have a great time running around, but it can’t last. You need to inform yourself, find what you’re looking for. I am self-educated but until those introductions I didn’t know where to find it. When the lights switch on and you begin to see, you have to continue. Your authority is your Best Self: it’s a moral choice, an attempt to understand the world and be part of the great human drama.

  A self-portrait by my friend Gary Ness.

  Arnold’s talk of the pursuit of our perfection refers to each individual’s unique potential for fulfilment, and to our evolution, our ability to become more human, more civilised through culture. Leading up to and throughout the twentieth century the main ethos has been the cultivation of the ordinary self – doing as we like! This ethos is now global. We have been arrested in our development. This is why politicians cannot progress, they’re stuck in a trap, glued to the rotten old financial system (Rot$). Progress is measured by consumption. This is why I say we’re dangerously short of culture.

  If our ethic was that of the Best Self we would have different values, we would not have climate change. It’s not that people don’t go to art galleries etc. and engage with our great cultural tradition. They do, but this passion is not aspirational for the public at large; it is not supported, not shared by everyone; they have been trained up as consumers. We do not engage with ‘the best that has ever been thought or said or shown’. Nevertheless the art lover is a freedom fighter for a better world. Without judges there is no art.

  FRI 19 JULY RÉNEE FLEMING’S CHIC

  Renée Fleming invited Andreas and me to the Royal Opera House where she was starring in a concert presentation of Richard Strauss’s Capriccio. We had done her dress and it was the coolest look ever – beyond elegant – and she is one of those few people who really knows how to wear clothes: She uses the dress to express herself emotionally and aesthetically: this is the true meaning of the word, ‘chic’ – it means what you’re wearing has your signature.

  Our dress for Renée Fleming.

  The opera was unimaginable – meaning I am still astonished that such a thing could exist. How did it happen? Because a genius did it. There was no plot, just an argument about which was more important to an opera, the words or the music. Renée, the heroine, had two lovers – one who wrote the words, and the other the music. There were other arguments, all personified by the role of each singer: bel canto v. plain speaking, elaborate stage effect v. the bare minimum, modernity v. tradition. Andreas marvelled that Renée could remember all these words and in a foreign language, all the shifts and subtleties of argument. No plot, much passion. We were enthralled – for two hours and twenty minutes with no interval. Everything fitted together. It was so delightfully hyperbolic. The music was out of this world.

  At the end Renée didn’t choose either of the lovers: to choose was too banal. What would she now do?

  SAT 20 – TUES 23 JULY LIBERTY

  Andreas left home on Saturday for the Tyrol – at 5 a.m. I didn’t go back to sleep. I stayed at home because I want to deal with a few outstanding things. Some meetings, some writing. I tried to write; I stayed confused and tired all the hot weekend.

  I went to see Shami Chakrabarti. I haven’t seen her for ages and I was so excited and so looking forward to it. It was lovely talking to her and I feel affected by having seen her and happy just thinking about her now. I am a trustee of Liberty and I wanted to know its position with Julian Assange. Liberty has to fight within the law (though they can challenge laws). For example, Sweden is legally able to ask for extradition even though this is unprecedented for an alleged offence that even if it were proven would not carry a jail sentence. If Sweden were then to send Julian to America this would break international law – you can’t ask for extradition for one reason and then change the goalposts and extradite him for another reason (whistle blowing). And Britain would have to agree. I wouldn’t trust them – once they’ve got you they do what they want.

  Liberty cannot acknowledge this danger because if it happened it would contravene international law. If America requested extradition then Liberty would oppose it on the grounds of freedom of speech. Liberty did support Julian’s lawyer at his appeal before the European Court. They too were of the opinion that the Swedish prosecutor who signed the European arrest warrant for Julian was not ‘judicial authority’ entrusted to issue such warrants.

  Monday night was a full moon. Now I realise why I have been so sluggish. So on Tuesday I was all fit and active again. I’m at home a bit this week doing my writing for the diary and continuing the embroidery designs.

  THURS 25 JULY OUR LIBRARY

  Went to visit my neighbour Julian Hall. He’s part of a housing cooperative and Lambeth Council want to evict the members and sell their houses. Climate Revolution is about promoting a green economy, it’s about short-term policies storing up trouble and cost for the future, in this case breaking up communities and adding to the queue for social housing. I wrote to Lambeth Council.

  We have started a library on the window ledge in reception. The fiction includes Brave New World and 1984, two socio-political satires. I have written introductions for them. There are other books there which are just stories. I love these stories because it is like carrying another person’s life along with your own, adding to your experience of the world; it could have been you. I included one or two such books, like The Catcher in the Rye, but also a humble story by Alison Uttley, The Country Child. It has no plot. It is just the experience of a child living on a remote farm in the Pennines in the mid-nineteenth century, one or two generations before Alison Uttley but from the same area and, as it happens, where I come from. I also put it in the library because of the illustrations by C. F. Tunnicliffe; today the illustrations in children’s books are an insult to the intelligence of a child, trying to keep them infantile.

  Farm house amongst the hills of North Derbyshire, where I was born. Illustration by C. F. Tunnicliffe.

  I remember as a child of eight my dear mother coming home on a Friday from her work at the mill – she made herself ill with asthma worrying about us having to stay with our neighbour until she came home. This was when the aspirations of mothers were to stay at home and look after the family; with her wage she brought us a cake, sometimes a present. I always had a ginger biscuit and one day she brought me a children’s book by Alison Uttley – one of her series on Little Grey Rabbit; it must be the most treasured gift I ever received.

  I want to finish with a chorus about Alysoun. In the time of Chaucer the name was popular – like Sharon or Tracey are today – and it signified a sweet nubile girl (hot!). Read it fast to get the rhythm – it was sung.

  AUGUST 2013

  MON 5 AUG AMERICA LAND OF THE FREE

  I and my friend Frank, who lives in San Francisco, communicate by letter. The stamps on the one he just sent read: America Land of the Free, God’s Country! Tell that to Leonard Peltier, having spent coming up to forty years in jail, framed and convicted in a travesty of courtroom justice for a crime he didn’t do, set up because he was a member of the American Indian Movement (AIM), which was targeted by the US government in its offensive to wipe out the rights of Native Americans and continue the process of centuries of abuse.

  It is a bitter irony that America is still able to get away with this propaganda, not only at home but abroad, at the same time as promoting the propaganda of an invincible empire that will not tolerate resistance. In the 1980s, when the countries of Central America tried
to rid themselves of American domination, America responded with slaughter and barbarism, creating societies ‘affected by terror and panic … collective intimidation and generalised fear … and the frequent appearance of tortured bodies’ (Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival). America wanted them to see the tortured bodies.

  This is how the Roman Empire behaved. It wanted people to know it had no mercy and that its cruelty was inhuman; whereas willing subjugation brought the benefits of the Pax Romana. America wants the world to know that its war machine is more than all other weapons put together. How dare you oppose it? We’ll just take what we want and we will give you in exchange – the American Dream.

  MON 12 AUG THE NEW WEBSITE

  So what have I been doing in August?

  Lots of our people are away and the factories in Italy are closed but Andreas and I have been going to work making sure everything is sorted out so that our next Gold Label collection can go straight ahead at the end of the month when everybody’s back to work. We have edited the shoe collection, worked out how to do the embroidered garments, selected fabrics for the couture evening dresses. I have supervised the Red Carpet collection and next season’s Red Label collection.

  I wrote the new and final Charter for the new Climate Revolution website (replacing Active Resistance). I think it will be the final one because I’ve reduced it to its essentials. I’m really pleased with it because it is also a working manual e.g. my son Ben wanted to write a piece for the site on the plight of elephants. I said, you can talk about elephants if you explain how the danger they’re in is linked to the fact that everything is connected, because ‘Everything is connected’ is a basic tenet of Climate Revolution. That’s what he’s going to do.