Me (left) and Maureen (third from left).
Maureen later went to live in South Africa. She was a hairdresser and developed products for black people’s hair; no one did this at the time, and others took her idea and these same products were then used for white people everywhere – volume boosters, etc. When Maureen trained, no one mentioned that perm lotions could ruin your lungs but that’s what happened to Maureen: she had asthma, then emphysema and tuberculosis, from which she died.
NOVEMBER 2013
FRI 1 NOV LESLIE WINER
We did our publicity campaign with Juergen Teller. The idea is Leslie Winer. I knew her when young. She came to Paris and immediately became a top model; we were hanging out at the Bains Douches club the first night it opened. Andreas saw her now in Paris and was struck by her and the power of her beauty. She agrees to do it. Juergen is so excited. Wait and see.
Leslie Winer (third left) in a spread for the Buffalo Girls collection when she first came to Paris in 1982.
MON 11 NOV WHO ARE OUR RULERS?
It takes time to do a website and AR (Active Resistance) has now become incorporated into CR (Climate Revolution). By the time these diaries are published CR will be merged with the main Vivienne Westwood website.
You remember I said my job as an activist – communicating through my website – is to analyse the problem, epitomise and give the complete picture all in one go. Well, this MAP is it. This is our world and it is happening already. Because we refuse to engage with it, the result is inevitable and we will die. We are global! Don’t you realise what that means? It means a few thousand people control seven billion.
I copied the map about a year ago from maps supplied by NASA which predict the results of climate change according to current increasing temperatures. Their images are presented more photographically. By using the computer, we turned this into a simple graphic.
This is the best thing I have ever done.
The other most important thing I have ever done is to take the information from ‘Who are our Rulers’ and reduce it to a list of bullet points which set out how the Rotten Financial System works. We call it – neoliberalism.
I have used the map as a graphic on clothes and publicity posters, etc. I also carry a single sheet A5 leaflet in my bag to give to people who stop me in the street. On one side is the map and on the other the Rot$ which causes I climate change.
The Rotten Financial System
The central banks control the world’s economy. They do this by creating debt.
The central banks are private banks. The US Federal Bank is one, the Bank of England another. They are organised by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Zurich.
These central banks print money. Today, they do this by pressing buttons. They create virtual money out of nothing.
This money is loaned to other banks, monopolies and governments. It has now become a debt.
The central banks prefer it if the loans are never paid because what they want is the interest – which accumulates out of all proportion to reality.
This means they always have fantastic amounts of money to lend and they don’t have to print virtual money except in an emergency. It also means that central banks come to own everything – because they own the debt. How often have we heard of a poor country selling its assets and natural resources just to keep up with interest payments on the debt it has been forced to borrow?
The monopolies work this system for the central banks. They do the actual job of wrecking the planet and exploiting its people. They suck up small businesses.
Politicians serve the central banks and the monopolies. They promote Big Business and its speculators and investors – through tax cuts, deregulation and selling off national assets and through the war machine; they pay for it by squeezing the taxpayer and reducing public services so that everyone is in debt (Austerity).
Rot$ aka Neoliberalism.
WEDS 13 NOV EL DORADO
I meet my son, Joe, who has lived for many years within walking distance of the British Museum – and goes often. We go to see El Dorado, an exhibition of golden treasure from the tribes of Peru living at the same time as the Incas. The name El Dorado (The Gilded) refers to a legendary rich king – or his kingdom – abounding in gold. This idea might have come from a tribe that performed a ceremony each year in which the king was taken on a raft to the middle of a deep lake in the mountains and gold objects were thrown into the lake as a sacrifice. No one has retrieved the objects. (Anyway, the Europeans found that there was very little gold to be extracted from such precious objects, as they were gilded, not solid).
The larger objects, such as crowns and masks and breast plaques, were beautiful. The exhibition was so incredibly researched and resourced that the presentation was able to display the different methods, crafts and interests of different tribes. It showed examples of the same animals, so there were glass cases full of gold bats, frogs, snakes, fish, birds, crabs and spiders, most six inches high or less. These and the small spiritual/magical figures were powerfully intense. Jewellery! The methods of making the artefacts made it fascinating.
Afterwards, Joe and I walked through Soho and he took me to Andrew Edmunds’s club in Lexington Street. Andrew is a print expert, especially on Hogarth, and his premises comprise a print shop, club and restaurant. The interior is old, which makes you feel comfortable. How nice to sit down with a soup and a glass of wine and sit and talk without distraction. We talked quite a bit about Climate Revolution. Joe is really good on strategy.
THURS 14 NOV IAN KELLY AND CAROL ANN DUFFY
In the evening we go to the King’s Head in Dalston (since then, two or three times people have mentioned to me, do you know this club where there are all these stuffed animals – it seems to be the latest place to go). Picador Books are introducing the books they will launch in late summer/autumn and Ian Kelly is writing my biography. He gives a good speech and I think he will do a good job. He wants to be true to who I think I am. Then I speak and, of course, I talk about fashion because the book has to be about fashion – but first, I crash right in telling everyone about ‘Who are our rulers?’ because it’s so important to get this fact of the fragile economy clear to everyone – and that we’re letting it (it’s a pyramid scheme that must collapse) destroy life by causing climate change.
I enjoyed listening to the other authors and one in particular could interest me but I have such a queue of books I want to read first. Then we came to the end and Carol Ann Duffy, the Poet Laureate, read some of her poems from her coming book. I liked very much one about English counties, and another about the person whose job it is to pollinate because there are no bees, ‘The Human Bee’. Carol Ann has a great voice; she’s one in a million who can connect things and put them into words.
FRI 15 NOV BARRY HUMPHRIES
We went to the opening night of Barry Humphries’s farewell tour (we hope it’s not). I was once on the Dame Edna show and I wore a red button-up cardigan and a pair of flesh tights with an applique green mirror fig leaf at the crotch. Barry wasn’t quick enough. He told me after, if only you’d told me, I could have checked my lipstick in the mirror. Whah!
The show was so original. I’ve never seen Les Patterson before and the characters who are part of his life – part of him. The main sketch was ‘Les Get Cookin’!’ – a supposed pilot for TV – done with the help of four dancers – two men, two pin-up posing women – ‘The Condiments’. It took place on his back-garden lawn and he was often rushing into the toilet with chronic diarrhoea then back to his hamburgers. It was so astonishingly lewd (it made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes) but so fast that he got away with it. Andreas had a pain – he hardly stopped bending up and down, rocking with laughter. Behind us were Siegfried and Roy, the stage magicians from Las Vegas. Roy, who had surgery after an accident with one of their tigers, was too impressed by the in your face daring of it all to laugh, just telling me and others how amazing it was.
I can’t tell the
second half. That was Dame Edna – I couldn’t do her justice and, anyway, she works with the audience and it changes every time. Her confidence in her petty (non)talent and achievement is so monolithic it’s exhilarating. It tells us so much about what the spoilt little child inside us would like to be.
SAT 16 NOV ROMEO AND JULIET
Fernando Montaño invited Andreas and me to the Royal Ballet to see him dance Romeo and Juliet. He looks after us, he’s so generous, and it can’t be easy for him to afford. I compensate by sending him our square T-shirts. He loves to practice in them. Champagne and sandwiches then supper in between acts; we imbibe the festive atmosphere of people coming together to celebrate the arts in this big beautiful space of glass architecture. It really is a grand occasion. This is the greatest love story in the world and the most tragic. There is nothing greater than this music by Prokofiev. The phenomenal Rupert Pennefather was Romeo and a beautiful one. Fernando was one of his mates, Benvolio. The opera are giving him the roles. We all believe in him.
THURS 21 NOV PROTESTING SHELL
Greenpeace pick me up at 7.30 a.m. at my house along with iD, who are making a film about whatever it is we’re going to do – secret up until now. Cynthia and Laura, who does our press, come along, too. In the car John Sauven from Greenpeace tells me we’re going to the Shell building at the Southbank to protest the arrest of the Arctic 30. John is on the phone to someone called Rachel, who I think is in the law court in Russia, and to Nina, Frank Hewetson’s wife, trying to get a copy passport so that Frank can ask for bail. John suddenly tells me, ‘Frank is just before the court’.
As we arrive, the Greenpeace team are unloading ten-foot-high wooden boxes covered with portrait photos of the 30. They line up the boxes along the front of the Shell Building to create a display. The idea is to hand out leaflets to the Shell workers as they arrive so they know the full implications of what their bosses are doing. The press are there and I do some interviews. I am chatting to Frank’s colleague when we get the news that Frank got bail. After two months with two Russian chain-smoking prisoners. I say, ‘I don’t think he even had a book.’ ‘Oh that’s alright, he can’t read,’ his friend jokes.
The Shell security people don’t try to stop the demonstration. It would cause more publicity. It’s cold; Cynthia is blue. We are waiting for something, so I answer some questions for the iD film (young people always want to know about punk – what was I fighting for then?). John is on the phone; whatever we’re waiting for, it’s taking ages. Another ten minutes. He points through the window to a space in the short distance between where we are and the river. ‘Do you see that flag pole – we’ve been waiting for a security person to move out of the area. Emily is going to climb it to a point where we can fix our flag to the rope.’ Now he tells me: I’m gonna hoist the flag!
Protesting against Shell on the South Bank.
We go over. Emily is smiling down at us. It’s taking longer than we thought. She has to throw the rope, which is fastened to a belt at her waist, around the tree and catch it, and the flag pole is really fat so she keeps missing. But she finally hitches it up high enough. They get me a ladder; two men hidden behind me let out the rope, the wind is too strong for one person (me).
I hoist the flag. Done!
FRI 29 NOV FIRST NATION UTOPIA
Andreas and I were invited by Julian Assange to the Ecuadorian Embassy to see John Pilger’s latest documentary film, Utopia, about the Australian First Nation people. There were three of my heroes there: Julian, John, and lawyer Gareth Peirce (Gareth is a woman), whose work and latest book, Dispatches from the Dark Side, I have written about before. Julian and John are both Australian. I really appreciate the impact on British society and the world some of these Australians have had: Richard Neville in the 1970s with Oz, Germaine Greer, Barry Humphries, Julian, of course, and John who worked as a war journalist in Vietnam and elsewhere, analysing the facts, witness to unbearable horror and mounting atrocity. He revealed the crimes of Pol Pot in Cambodia to the world. He has continued since the 1970s to bring world attention to the plight of the First Nation people of Australia. Along with Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy and other monumental writers, he continues to expose the global political/economic/social SCAM.
Andreas was impressed with John, his clarity and humanity – no ego. I’m glad Andreas came as we have been able to talk about the film at home. It is fair and very well done. John interviews white and aboriginal people who are trying to deal with the problem – the neglect and inhumanity, the absence of justice. To the minister who said he was proud of certain incentives, John asked how in all the long years he’d had the job, he could be proud when nothing, absolutely nothing, had changed? John got involved in the 1970s (he includes some footage from this time) and since then nothing has improved. And this is the really shocking thing: what are we doing on this earth if we continue these abuses unabated? The First Nation people are a small percentage of the population, it would be possible to restore them their rights.
The film begins with an official person – I think a politician – who says that he can tolerate the ones who fit in, not the others. And here you have it, the real problem that no one can solve: the right of people to be different, have different values; not the values of our civilisation whose ethic is leading to self-destruction. This difference I think, is what the white Australians are afraid of, why they ignore the problem. Recently there was a press campaign against the First Nation people falsely claiming that they were paedophiles. Why? To prove that they are different and therefore barbaric? To harden people in preparation for future abuse?
Other ways to deal with difference: there is a gross disproportion of First Nation people in jail and John cites examples of a complete lack of care, which has caused shocking deaths in custody and for which no-one has been prosecuted. And I mention one last fact which you won’t believe could happen today: First Nation mothers have their new babies snatched from them in the hospitals by government forces without explanation, never to see them again.
I told Julian about the article ‘Who are our Rulers?’ from the Climate Revolution site. He wants a print-out and also of the diary. He said it’s more relaxing for him to have it in this form than reading on the computer. He said that our real rulers are probably the secret services, who are a law unto themselves, though they serve the highest bidder.
DECEMBER 2013
SUN 1 DEC FABRICS FOR THE GOLD COLLECTION
Iris arrives for a week. Our resident pattern cutter, Barbara, has also become a real tour-de-force. Both she and Iris are German – you can still get proper training in Germany. Their capabilities would not be possible without it. They really know tailoring.
Andreas is getting very excited by the Gold collection. He’s so happy with the fabrics – they’re so odd! Inflation is rocketing: the main fabrics for this collection were up to £20 a metre a couple of seasons ago, now they are £20–50. Andreas says he wants to make clothes that nobody can wear; meaning, I hope, that whoever does choose something will look beyond special.
TUES 3 DEC REPRIEVE AND EGYPTIAN PUPPETS
We bought a table at an event to support Reprieve. It was a quiz night and Jon Snow was there supporting. He’s a man who knows what’s going on in the world and does what he can. The questions were good last year but this time they were just popular trivia, which I know nothing about; indeed the team who came second was Harper’s! Sara Stockbridge (‘such naff questions but I’m so competitive’) and my son Ben took it seriously. However, it was a treat to be in the Serpentine Gallery, where there was an exhibition of puppets by Egyptian puppet master, Wael Shawky. His film used puppets who were more riveting in the close-ups, as they spoke, than people.
FRI 6 DEC CHRISTMAS PARTY
Our Christmas party. Entertainment: Northern Lights Symphony Orchestra, Abigail Iverson, The Carnabys, Fernando Montaño of the Royal Ballet, Nadine Shah. All really good. Nadine Shah is good-looking – masculine, powerful, sexy, good voice, own mate
rial. Fernando – very classy, a tango – had combined two pieces of music for his own fast and furious choreography, riveting and ravishing. Amazing the stamina these dancers have.
SAT 7 – WEDS 11 DEC ITALY WITH WITH ROSITA AND PAOLA
Andreas and I went to Italy. We stay with Rosita and Paola, our best friends, who produce Gold Label. I would never have been able to pin down the knitwear and communicate the ideas in time if I hadn’t gone. The knitwear is unisex, done for the men’s collection in mid-January and for the Gold Label, which is end February. It looks good on a woman – I like the look of wearing your old man’s sweater. It’s a good trick because now from this base I can just add a few garments exclusive to women for the coming Gold. It’s lovely to stay with our friends, and Rosita’s mother, who lives in the country nearby, cooks for us. She grows and makes everything herself.
SAT 14 DEC MASTERPIECES OF CHINESE PAINTING
I’ve been back to the Masterpieces of Chinese Painting three times and I have been in bliss just reading and looking at the catalogue. I am so interested in the scholar-officials, the literati. Every painting tells the story of the painter’s life. Bertrand Russell’s book The Problem of China gives the background. For 4,000 years China was an empire (the dynasties changed) until Western depredations finally sabotaged it. China – so unlike any other civilisation! Respect for others and for learning was already embedded in the culture when Confucius (c.500 BC) edited the mythical annals of the Golden Age (supposed to be c.3000 BC). They tell of the legendary emperor, Yao:
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