Pilgrims is not a big enough idea for a whole collection – as a title it is too limited. Now that it’s finished it’s sexy, even kinky – you could style it like a sexy nun. To Andreas it looks Arab with clothes from a strange charity shop thrown in; Arab, that is, of the Middle East, as we British refer to it, and of north Africa; Arab as we imagine it before the global war machine largely smashed this culture. I would like to connect the idea of the collection and the show to Climate Revolution, my main preoccupation.
Gold Label Paris show. She is a pilgrim spattered with mud from the road. This dress is an accident, worked from the squares of knitting stiches which were never quite right (see p.230).
To review: the ethos of the medieval world is the complete opposite of our’s. Its structure is a hierarchy of different classes and functions, striving for harmony through reciprocal duties and help. However the hierarchy is unjust and ruled by dogma. It is swept away by scepticism which arrived with the Renaissance. The Renaissance is the re-discovery of the pagan Greek mind. The modern world embraced scepticism – diverse opinion, scientific enquiry, knowledge based on experience – but it came to ignore the Greek concerns of harmony, form, proportion and balance, of giving back what you take out, of not going too far, of over-weaning pride. Nature will always be our master. We are men not gods.
Shakespeare saw the disaster we were heading for. In the quotation below (from Measure For Measure) it is useful to know that glass means mirror, the picture it gives us is of man holding up his own image to challenge God. I am going to call the show ‘Everything Is Connected’ because so many influences of the last six months and of the past went into it. This tallies with our message as activists: Everything is connected. The most horrific connections between climate change and the rotten financial system (CC & Rot$).
Shakespeare understood where we were heading:
but man, proud man,
Dress’d in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d –
His glassy essence – like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep;
Andreas added this P.S. to the press release:
Dear Clothes Lover:
This season I would like to draw your attention especially to the knitwear. I am very fond of it and if I were a girl, for sure it would be my absolute must-have. Its fine netty yarns and burnt colours are perfect to show off my sun-kissed ‘super body’! It’s just like being naked and is going to be a great friend on my next holiday. Most pieces are enhanced with recycled mirrored sunglass lenses cut into special shapes and motifs. Again, I can so very much imagine the sun reflecting on them and causing quite a stir at the beach bar. You can put those knits into little bundles and take loads of them with you without paying excess luggage.
I love Vivienne’s sense for yarns and what she does with it.
Thanks darling – Your Andreas x
SAT 28 SEPT GOLD LABEL SHOW AT LE CENTORIAL
It was a beautiful show. The venue, Le Centorial, is a bank during the week. It is all wrought-iron and glass. The models came up and down escalators to an arena on the top floor and we had large mirrors reflecting their progress. This gave more feeling of space and travelling. Sam McKnight and Val Garland again for hair and make-up. They are the best. Dominik Emrich composed the music specially. Very beautiful, we really appreciate him. And the models – every one gorgeous, beautiful black girls having fun, strong characters, strong image.
Pamela came to the show and in the evening we met for dinner. She is travelling with her friend and ex-husband, Rick. He travels in the course of earning his living. He’s a professional gambler and they are living a life of high adventure – both surf as well. We really liked him, we’re all vegetarian and, like Pamela, Rick cares about the environment and supports various activists. Wherever they travel (next stop is Biarritz) Pamela runs – fifteen miles a day but not every day. She is training for the New York Marathon, raising money for Haiti. Pamela is always concerned.
Pamela with Ellen DeGeneres, raising sponsorship for her marathon for Haiti.
SUN 29 SEPT BUY LESS, CHOOSE WELL, MAKE IT LAST
Sunday: at 10.30 a.m. I was in our Paris showroom to present the collection to the buyers. I gave a talk about the clothes. They are really easy to combine and to buy – easy to understand.
Andreas and I then met our friend Lawrence for lunch. He works for the Gates Foundation and has high-level contacts. His work is all about empowering women in poor countries – involves mobile phones and facilities for saving which didn’t exist for them before. He is impressed by our slogan, ‘Buy less, choose well, make it last’, thinks it could have a big effect on changing people’s aspirations and could be a most important tool in Climate Revolution. He really gets into you, caring and spiritual.
OCTOBER 2013
TUES 1 OCT WE’RE LATE AGAIN FOR THE GOLD COLLECTION
Our Gold Label show was the culmination of our fashion season and now we’re already late with next season’s Gold – our most important collection. Why are we late? Because Gold depends so completely on Andreas and me. Of course, we have people to help us, we delegate. But we initiate. Our team has work to do for the production of the last collection, meanwhile we choose the fabric (samples from the factories are waiting in boxes); but we don’t, we are too taken up with all the daily business of running a company and its public face – interviews, etc.
Our people and design teams want Andreas’s input, opinion, approval. He did work with Iris for a week on new toiles. And he has an inspiration for the new Gold – his all-time favourite designer, Frederick Worth. Every dress Worth ever made is different, one from the other. Andreas went to study him in the new V&A archive in Olympia where they keep all their historical costumes, fabrics and images. He was extremely impressed by the building and archive the way it’s been done. He said he had had the happiest day of his life from what they had shown him, from what he had seen (nobody sees like Andreas).
I have managed to choose the knitwear yarn for Gold and ask for tests – samples of stitches and differences in handle for the designs I have worked out. Choosing the Gold fabric can take hours and days because you’re having to think what to do with it so that you’re getting a feeling for the collection. I have also been working on Red Label. I love this collection and I had some strong ideas. I want it to be really archetypal Westwood, I want to epitomise it more and more.
SAT 5 OCT FREE THE ARCTIC 30
Andreas and I went to the Greenpeace ‘Free the Arctic 30’ demonstration outside the Russian Embassy in Notting Hill. It was really great, lots of people on both sides of the Bayswater Road and all the traffic hooting and people on the buses waving. Do go on demonstrations – the more people turn up the more fun you have, the more friends you meet and who you can then go to the pub with, after. We know Frank Hewetson, one of the 30. We talk to Nina, his wife, and their daughter Nell who is there with her friend Cora, my granddaughter. Frank has been with Greenpeace for over twenty years, always at the front of the action. Once, when protesting against bad practice in tuna fishing in the Mediterranean, a fisherman harpooned him through the calf and, by the connecting line held by the man who shot him, he and his boat were being dragged at speed by the fishermen’s boat; each time Frank tried to pull on the line to get some slack, the man pulled it tight. Eventually, Frank managed to rip the barbed weapon out of his calf. Frank did a lot of diplomatic work for Greenpeace: e.g. persuading companies to buy soya from growers with well-managed soil instead of those who cut down the forest and move the crop in there.
Frank Hewetson in jail in Russia.
Greenpeace are fundraising for lawyers to work on the release of the Arctic 30. They come from eighteen different countries, so need eighteen lawyers. The Greenpeace activists must have been terrified when the Russian helicopters came over their boat and let down special forces on ropes, with their heavy guns and
balaclavas over their faces, coming on deck to arrest them. They were focusing world attention on a drilling operation which will endanger the lives of all people and Putin’s response was full military aggression. Now he’s hiding behind the ‘law’ (ha!) saying he can’t interfere. No doubt Greenpeace will build up pressure on Shell, the equal partner in Russia’s lethal Arctic operation.
MON 7 OCT VOGUE PHOTOS
I was invited with four hours’ notice to Channel 4 News to speak on behalf of the Arctic 30. So great is my respect for the importance of Greenpeace and for the danger posed by exploitation of the Arctic of tipping over into runaway climate change that I think I used the opportunity well. After this I went on to to Daphne’s restaurant in Fulham where my friend Linda Watson was expecting me. It was the launch of a book of Vogue photos of our fashion since the 1970s. Linda wrote the text.
THURS 10 OCT THE CHEAPSIDE HOARD AND CLERKENWELL
Andreas and I met my son Joe at the London Museum for the opening of ‘The Cheapside Hoard’ – the stock of a seller of jewellery from Elizabethan times which had been discovered by complete and lucky accident during a ‘normal’ digging operation (anyone who travels appreciates the distinction between London and any other town: roadworks – the streets are constantly dug up). Elizabethan jewellery hardly survives except for this stash. The exhibition gave you a feeling of the importance of the streets of a London that was thriving and commercial.
We walked over to Clerkenwell Green. Joe, who lives in this part of London, took us for something to eat. As we walked, he told us some of the history. Lying just outside the city walls, Clerkenwell became the natural home for those wishing to live outside the law. He talked about Jack Sheppard and Bess Lyon’s escape from Newgate Prison. A hero of the poor, Sheppard escaped from prison four times before being hanged at Tyburn, aged twenty-two. A third of London’s population came to his execution. Joe’s latest fashion collection is called Jack Sheppard.
When Charles Dickens wrote Oliver Twist and cast Clerkenwell Green as the training ground for Fagin’s crew of pick-pocketers, the area was commonly known in the press as ‘the headquarters of republicanism, revolution and ultra-non-conformity’. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin drank beer and discussed revolution in the Crown and Anchor pub (now the Crown Tavern on Clerkenwell Green). From revolting peasants to revolutionary Communists, Clerkenwell has a long history of political radicalism and religious non-conformity. Perhaps the most significant demonstration occurred in 1890, when the green was the gathering point for London’s first May Day March – a left-wing tradition that continues into the twenty-first century.
The Cheapside Hoard at the London Museum – and Jack Sheppard and Bess Lyon’s escape from Newgate prison, Clerkenwell.
Everywhere was packed even though it was a Thursday and we ended up sitting outside on a cold night with a glass of wine and a packet of chips.
SAT 12 OCT KEATS HOUSE FOR YOUYOU
To Keats House in Hampstead and the latest project of Brenda Ramsey’s YOUYOU mentoring. Brenda is passionately dedicated and she must have managed to get sponsorship and free mentoring at every stage of her project, which now culminated in the poets reading their work to an audience.
I’m sure she was disappointed in me. For though I encouraged the poets to continue I did not praise them just because they’re young. The poems were good but not yet good enough. I thought they had been too easily satisfied with themselves, even self-indulgent and therefore not quite honest, and we attempted a public discussion which I hoped was better for them than patronising praise: if the poem didn’t touch the poet, how could it touch us?
One of the poets, Laura O’Driscoll, was very good. What I like about her is her courage; she wants to be the voice of the world. Her poems were about climate change: ‘The Last Sunset’.
WEDS 16 OCT ANTI-FRACKING AND JOCHEN ZEITZ
Andreas is in Italy working on our menswear. I went to Joe’s office where he and Cynthia had put together a meeting of anti-fracking NGOs and friends. Jane Thomas from Friends of the Earth, who had fought the frackers in Blackpool, was really impressive – said only what was important, understood everything it was possible to do. Cynthia pointed out to me that she and Jamie from Reclaim the Power were from Occupy; every time they had a good idea they did a little two hands wave in the air.
In the evening I went to a reception to mark a CNBC film on the philanthropic projects of Jochen Zeitz (he spent his career building up Puma), one of which is Segera in Kenya which Andreas and I visited and for which we are now ambassadors. I am also ambassador for the school there – which had nothing, it didn’t even have a door. I was amazed to see what the Zeitz foundation has done to improve the school and the health of the children. The school just won a Greenest School on Earth award.
SUN 20 OCT ELIZABETHANS
I meet my friend Shami Chakrabarti and her eleven-year-old son Christian. We plan to go to the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition Elizabeth and Her People, as Christian is studying the Elizabethans at school, but first we got to lunch in the National Gallery restaurant. In Trafalgar Square I bump into the villagers of Balcombe who mean to stop the fracking there. They are dancing to attract people and gain public support.
I worried that the portraits of Elizabethans might be too formal for Christian to appreciate. You just have to imagine what they would look like in real life – from another planet, Elizabeth, her dress covered in embroidery and jewels, dazzling in the light, flickering in candlelight, her white face in an aura of soft frizzy hair lit with jewels, presented in a ruff and transparent veils, her beautiful hands. The exhibition has objects as well. It shows the different pins she would need to get dressed, starting with small fine pins for the ruff. Getting dressed was a big deal. Elizabeth’s most impressive dress is one where she is being carried through the streets on show to her people. First of all, it’s all one colour and that colour is white, architectural and plain but for the fact that it is covered all over with the one uniform decorative effect, which is studded with jewels. It’s the most minimal dress; it acts like a heraldic shield with just one great badge of a jewel on the sleeve: I am the monarch.
Elizabeth’s most impressive dress – and a copy made for me for the Venice Carnival by a student when I was teaching in Berlin.
When I look at paintings I notice the age of the painter – and in portraits the age of the sitter. Half of them die around forty and death from old age is sixty-five, though one sitter, Bess of Hardwick, lived into her eighties and survived four husbands. In one family the young wife, aged about twenty-four, already had five children. And this is in a family rich enough to have their portraits painted. You married young, women died in childbirth, child mortality was high.
Youth must have been so short, children brought up with the idea that they would soon be married and live the same life as their parents. Courting was very important, the most lovely time of your life if you were lucky, truly springtime.
Like in Shakespeare’s As You Like It:
It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
That o’er the green corn-field did pass,
In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding; 5
Sweet lovers love the spring.
WEDS 23 OCT MASTERPIECES OF CHINESE PAINTING
Our friend Bruno invited us to the opening of Masterpieces of Chinese Painting at the V&A. You know my passion for Chinese painting and this exhibition is possibly the most high-level ever mounted. It has the originals of some of the most famous paintings we have seen in reproduction. You have to see it to realise the height of genius that human civilisation has been capable of. It is going to have an earth-shattering impact on the values of those who visit. My son Joe went; he came out shaking. I went five times.
After the opening about forty people went to Bruno’s house for sit-down dinner – beautiful tableware and prime-quality food. Bruno is Chinese
and I think his family are Chinese American investors. He is cultivated and has some sensational Chinese objects and paintings. He also had some modern abstract paintings – churned up colour, paint as thick as possible applied to canvas. I was sitting next to Patrik Schumacher, the creative and business partner of Zaha Hadid. He made a statement some of you may be interested in: abstract art had a radical influence on design, it freed up architecture.
It was late so we left before the pudding – I was happy, I had filled up on kimchi – Andreas had to go early in the morning to Vienna, because he has designed the costumes for the ballet interlude of the Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s concert – televised for millions.
Andreas’s ballet costumes for Vienna’s New Year’s concert.
SUN 27 OCT MAZELTOV: MRS PURCELL AND MAUREEN
Like everybody, I spend time with family and friends – and their troubles and joys – but I seem to have less time than ever. I don’t mention them often because that’s not what I want to talk about. I mention Pamela often because she’s well known.
But I just wanted to show this photo of Mrs Purcell on her 100th birthday. Well done, Celia. She is the mother of my friend Maureen, from Glossop, where I went to school. Maureen’s family kept a hardware store and lived at the back. Celia changed the light fittings often, putting them back to sell in the shop. When I first went to Maureen’s home after school and met her mother the first thing she said was, ‘Hello Vivienne. Do you like my new light fitting? Put some coal on, love, it’s out the back.’ The family was one of two Jewish families in Glossop; I loved them, they were so lively. Maureen stayed with her cousins some weekends in Manchester, twelve miles away. She had to go dancing there so she would find a Jewish husband.
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