SAT 25 JULY GAELLE
Gaelle arrives from Paris. She was once our fitting model and we had great fun. Andreas adores her. She is now an actress and she’s staying with us for three weeks while she attends summer school at LAMDA. I have an idea for her and her friend Marie to create their own show called ‘Culture for Beginners’. Choose a venue where you can have an intimate rapport with your audience. Put together a programme of poetry and readings but also talk about these and put them in the context of the world they came from, telling the audience things that are normally written in the programme and connecting things, ending with the Map/Rot$ leaflet.
[She did it. First performance in June 2016 – central action ‘Introspection’ by Peter Handke. She’ll do more.]
I want to add – just so you know – that I spend an increasing amount of time, more than I spend on either design or CR, in improving the structure of my company, but I shan’t speak of it any more even though it’s a very human story because it’s about people and their skills. I also think it’s very good for the environment to have a company efficient in human happiness, resources and team work: quality in human values.
AUGUST 2015
TUES 4 AUG JULIAN AND ORPHEUS
I went to see Julian, this time taking Teddy: I want him to take a few notes and put them up on the site. Julian’s view is so sharp, it gives me ammunition. We’re both in this fight for human rights and to halt the destruction. The people in the embassy are so kind and I do appreciate my best cup of coffee.
Then with Andreas to the Albert Hall. We are friends of John Eliot Gardiner and are really privileged to be invited to a concert performance (remember we saw the opera in Munich) by his Monteverdi Choir. The music is different, brighter and clearer – due in part, I imagine, to the use of old instruments. The opera is Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo. Though Orpheus (sung by Krystian Adam) goes to hell, a metaphor for the exhilaration caused in me would rather be a climb up to the gods of Mount Olympus.
THURS 6 – SAT 15 AUG TINOS AND STONER
Yesterday Andreas couldn’t make his mind up if he should visit Yasmine who had rented a house on the island of Tinos. You know who she is – my French friend, stylist – works on our shows and has her own lingerie collection – Yasmine Eslami. My luxury is to stay at home and I wanted to write. But at the last moment I said, okay, I’ll come. So we are off, for a week. The plane left at eleven at night and when we got to Athens it was still dark. We had two hours to wait for the boat, and this was my favourite part of the holiday. I was dressed in a sack-cloth short cape, long black skirt, brown socks and white medium high heels and I felt glamorous, as if I was travelling in an earlier decade, when to travel was glamorous – sitting at dawn in one of the rough cafés on the quay, watching people as they turned up.
Tinos is barren hills and rocks with tiny one-cell churches here and there (I think they are visited just on their saint’s day) and bird houses, cubes of stones and holes, perhaps from previous years when people farmed here – perhaps for pigeons or doves. There were walls all over the hills, mostly embedded into the hills. We think they are to hold the ground; much of the land was for goats, though not now. Small trees looked like giant heather. Yasmine said they were called tamarisks.
Yasmine’s house overlooked the sea and we could walk down to the shore. It was wonderful – lying under the tamarisks – the warm calm sea of the ancient Mediterranean. There was a wind which kept the climate comfortable.
Yasmine was with her boyfriend, Dominic. I had not spoken to him much before, because he thinks his English is so bad. I never realised. Yasmine’s friends are always speaking English and I thought he was the quiet one. I could have practiced my French. Anyway we got talking and he’s great. My holiday was about reading John Williams’s Stoner, and afterwards I stole Andreas’s copy of another Williams novel, Augustus, when I could. Stoner was written in 1965 and has just been rediscovered, and now everybody hails it. Andreas says: ‘The words have such a wonderful flow; he’s found the essence of what he wanted to say – nothing to add, nothing to take away. It seems the most incredible English. With a few words you’re drawn in: an extraordinary labour of simplification.’
Here I am on the terrace in Tinos giving a talk to camera on ‘Politicians R Criminals’.
The day Stoner falls in love with literature is the most memorable event in the novel. His teacher is called Archer Sloane and sets him to read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73. The novel has the power of a Greek tragedy. The characters are lit like monuments, revealed according to the events of the daily drama. At the end I marvelled at the integrity of Stoner – of a life fully realised. Only truth is left.
I also did my last ‘talk to camera’ video but we did not have the technology to send it. I need two days to do a talk – think about it and work out how to say it – how to get the message across, then memorise it, then do it. I find myself able to concentrate on nothing else until it’s done. So I did not go with the others when they went shopping for food down at the port town.
The rest of the time was about dinner at the taverna with Yasmine’s friends. I discovered that Tinos is popular with French fashion people, they rent houses and know each other. Andreas bumped into John Galliano on the beach one day and he was surprised to hear I was here, too, as I don’t go on seaside holidays.
TUES 18 AUG CANTERBURY TALES
Evening get-together for staff and friends at the Doodle Bar. We showed Pasolini’s Canterbury Tales. Pasolini was a genius filmmaker who was murdered in mid-life, aged fifty-three.
The costumes and the casting were really good. The cast were not film stars but real people and therefore a very unusual bunch from what you usually see in film – they were just as good as actors but their real pimples and crooked teeth made you constantly aware that the images in front of you are actually real people pretending. This got you personally involved and taking part in the fun.
The Doodle Bar will be demolished along with anything else interesting – that or empty high-rise flats, unaffordable and for speculators, and the amount of concrete, the amount of stuff to build them. We are being overruled by the antipeople.
We take advantage of the Doodle Bar whilst we have it. I am pleased the Vauxhall Tavern won’t be wrecked.
TUES 25 AUG HAMLET AND SONNET 73
Hamlet. Barbican. A big production, great use of the Barbican stage, lots of running up and down. Viridian green with an electric-blue glow (sometimes strobe lighting); in the second half, black slag had blown in and buried everything. Costume reference: Edwardian mixed in with today. In the beginning (e.g. at the banquet) the court was staid, whereas the play gives out that it is decadent, corrupt and drunken. Hamlet contradicts the staid impression by telling it like it is. And the invading slang in the second half confirms it. I agree with the press criticism. Benedict Cumberbatch was wonderfully intelligent in understanding his role yet he did not move you. But Ophelia moved me more than any I’ve seen.
At the end of August the lamps were out in Battersea Park. Cycling home, Andreas got a different impression of the twilight, the trees were somehow ever more present but yet they loomed and filtered into the universal shade. I had memorised the Shakespeare sonnet that is discussed in Stoner, and I quoted it (‘In me thou see’st the twilight of such day/As after sunset fadeth in the West’). Andreas: ‘That’s it. I must have kept the poem and that’s what I noticed.’
The sonnet (no. 73) is about ageing. If you read it, let the poem find its way to tell you of the beauty that fuses you with the world.
WEDS AUG 26 YOUNG WERTHER
Andreas bought me Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. It was the first tragic novel and it caused a sensation – and was one of the factors that led to the Romantic movement. It was translated into languages across the world. Napoleon took Werther on his Egyptian campaign in 1798 and when he met Goethe in 1808 he told him that he had read the book seven times – he decorated him. Werther became a model for the Romantics. On the co
ver of my copy of the book is a self-portrait by Philipp Otto Runge – still wearing Werther’s blue frock coat and buff leather waistcoat and breeches in 1805 (thirty years after the book).
The book is based on a true story combining Goethe’s own experience and that of a man he knew called Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, who shot himself after declaring his love to another man’s wife. It is the first confessional novel and takes the form of letters from Werther to Wilhelm, a one-sided communication. Goethe wrote it in six weeks at the age of twenty-four.
His hero follows his heart and loses himself. Young Werther was the happiest of men. Under the sun he lay in the warm grass and knew the teeming life of the microbes. His heart was his proudest possession and he marvelled at the power of his love which fitted in the whole creation; his soul rose in ecstasy to meet its heaven, the wind and the stars and the divine mystery of the cosmos. I write this in criticism: he believed that it was noble to indulge his finer feelings beyond the bounds of sanity. Because of this practice, his love for another man’s wife – convinced that she was his one soul mate – turned from joy and collapsed into the unbearable pain of depression until at last he found the calm to shoot himself under the self-delusion that his life was a sacrifice to her.
Why was Werther so passionate/desperate? Why did the Romantics abandon themselves to the task of living on the edge? The first reason given is always that the Romantics reacted against the cold dry reason of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The Encyclopedia was the engine which clarified opinion during this time. Diderot was in charge of it and it was a monumental task; it attempted to amass all knowledge and great thinkers contributed essays. It had a moral purpose: to combat (1) the supernatural and fabulous in history, (2) religion on irrational grounds, e.g. the doctrine of eternal damnation, (3) intolerance and persecution.
The Romantics didn’t agree that reason gave truth, they found it limiting: knowledge isn’t just stuff you can measure and argue about. And it was all too materialistic. The heart gives knowledge through direct experience and one’s soul experience eternal truth. So the Romantic poets and their muses went round showing off their noble emotions; posing as beautiful women without mercy, dying saints, vampires, over-sensitives, wild gypsies, necromancers; they flew to anything morbid or exotic, deviant, virginal or mystic; they looked like medieval dandies or like they’d come through a storm – consumers of an idea.
Today we are still Romantics, millions of posers who just consume. Any old rubbish will do; status lies in catching the latest thing. That’s why we have no original ideas. So I didn’t feel so sympathetic to Werther. But it’s an important book and wonderfully written. And it’s about someone young and sincere – and, yes, noble, letting himself get carried away.
SEPTEMBER 2015
THURS 3 SEPT CONTRIBUTORIA
Contributoria, the newspaper I edited for an issue on the environment and our ‘Politicians are Criminals’ campaign – came out, and I was pleased. The graphics were exciting. Contributoria was affiliated to the Guardian but now they want to cut loose so as to have complete editorial freedom. Good luck!
Lush campaigned against TTIP. We did the packaging and the shops gave away copies of Contributoria.
SUN 20 SEP RED LABEL SHOW
I’ll just pick out one more special detail here. It’s about Lizzie Jagger and her walk. Though she’s been educated mostly in England she sounds just like her mum – from Texas. She is charismatic, with such a giggle filled with happiness. You can’t get enough of it. This is her walk as Andreas described it:
Mirror the World
The most important philosophical question ever asked is ‘What is a good life?’ A good life is one that mirrors the world.
That means that you understand the world through art and culture. You understand the genius of the human race and you understand yourself in relation to it. You’re like a little tiny shard of mirror glass that’s exactly a copy of the whole world. You’re very beautiful because you understand the beauty of the world and you understand the human race and you want to do your best.
So what are we doing? There is a demonstration outside the fashion show today. These people are model and activist friends of mine, they have asked me ‘What can we do?’ and I said to them ‘You’ve got to demonstrate! Let’s build demonstrations. Public opinon will stop them.’
They look great and the idea is that you can have a good time at a demonstration but more importantly, it’s a matter of life and death. I’m saying something you don’t hear, and we should be hearing it. And we’ve got to keep saying that Politicians R Criminals and that way people will get the idea that we’re being completely misled and lied to.
Mirror the World – press release for the Red Label show.
‘The walk of Lizzie Jagger! She exudes presence. As if the Roman legions had been sent out in advance to prepare for her – the path of her triumph. She proceeds without molestation, one step at a time. She thinks about every step, when she turns a corner she thinks, now I turn the corner, takes a little step back to adjust her position, hands on kidneys at the back, pushing herself forward. And the emperor went forth and the multitude acknowledged her. I never thought I’d see the day!’
Lizzie Jagger, Red Label show.
FRI 25 SEPT DON’T LET ME DIE IN JAIL
Leonard Peltier has been in jail for forty years; we know he did not commit that crime. Many years ago I was collecting VIP signatures for the Leonard Peltier is Innocent petition – that’s how I met Pamela. Geri from Ireland, a committed supporter of Leonard Peltier, came to see me. She told me that now is the time to build the campaign for Obama to free Leonard. Leonard is in a high-security jail and has been quite sick. The prison officers requested that he be transferred to a more lenient prison, but unfortunately just one person said no. So Leonard is really suffering: ‘Don’t let me die in jail.’
WEDS 30 SEPT EVENTS
September was busy. I am always working to improve the structure of our company and I had a visit from the lovely people who weave our blankets and cloaks in the Scottish Borders. And I took part in dear Tracy Worcester’s film to campaign against the terrible suffering of animals in pig factories. Ninety per cent of your bacon comes from them – three major animal monopolies. Her campaign is ‘Farms not Factories’ and you can stop this by how you shop (Take the Pig Pledge). Or be vegetarian like me.
I went to six evening events this month to support other NGO friends – fundraising. One was a film about Malala and her work. Another was our own event with Cool Earth which raised £400,000. In between I worked on our next fashion collections whilst Andreas was finishing the one for Sunday.
OCTOBER 2015
THURS 1 – SUN 4 OCT GOLD LABEL IN PARIS
We went to Paris on Wednesday for the show called Salva Venezia on Sunday. On the night before we left I was exhausted but I had one thing left to do. I had promised Andreas to make a dress out of a long elastic net of two-inch-hole mesh and embroidered with sequins. The idea was to stretch it out onto the stand/dummy/mannequin then pull it round into a tube and ‘sew’ the sides together by pushing a strip of gossamer fabric through the holes.
I pulled the elastic net out of the bag. It came out all together like a bouncing solid pipe, a snake of sequins. I threw it on the stand; I didn’t know where to begin. I couldn’t. Andreas wound it round his neck, hanging like a boa and played around with that idea. He was on form. He then pulled it around him and held it and walked with it and posed. This is the dress he made in five minutes. You could do anything with this net. It was like chewing gum, it fitted anything and it stayed where you put it. The hardest thing in fashion is the right use of fabric.
Andreas did this Gold Label collection solo but of course with our team. I hardly touched it. When we arrived in Paris on Wednesday afternoon Andreas was relaxed and in a good mood, though tired. And now I’m going to tell you something about love, which is an unusual thing for me to do.
Yasmine’s shop, selling he
r underwear, is next to one of the best flower shops in Paris. We met her with the idea of getting something to eat and for Andreas to get flowers for our hotel which is in the same street, Rue de Richelieu. Andreas always does this. He loves flowers, it’s a routine. I told Andreas to buy these white freesias. I love flowers in season and they were just beginning to come out and they smelled with a very concentrated spicy freesia smell; the stems were especially green and strong.
The florist wanted to do her thing and add more flowers and I kept saying no. Andreas thought I had a cheek telling the woman that we just liked the single bunch of freesia. He looked upon her as a priestess of flowers whose authority was sacred. So we ended up with the freesias with just their heads showing and embedded amongst a bouquet of white blossoms with woody stems.
Gold Label – the dress Andreas made in five minutes.
While we waited for our light meal in a little café, I said two or three times, I couldn’t help it – I don’t like the flowers. Andreas got up, said I was terrible – ‘I worked my arse off’ – stuck his hand in the flowers, broke off their heads and walked out, leaving his lunch untouched. We found him later and I apologised.
The next day I stayed in our room writing the press release and he left. Half an hour later the maid came to the door with a vase of flowers – just a bunch of the same white freesias. I had not realised before that Andreas liked me, loved me, so much.
MON 5 OCT PAUL WATSON AND SEA SHEPHERD
Pamela invited Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd to the show and next day Andreas and I met with him and his wife, Yana, in his local café. One of the most important meetings in my life. The first thing I asked Paul was, ‘Is there a chance to save the world?’ He said, ‘No, we are not too late. We must regenerate the seas. The seas give us 80 per cent of everything we need; oxygen, waste disposal, it sequesters 80 per cent of CO2.’
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