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119 pages

English

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Vivienne Westwood was the Queen of Punk Rock and her fashions have scandalized and fascinated the world since the Sixties. Parading models bare-breasted down the catwalks of Paris, posing pantiless outside Buckingham Palace-she has an insatiable appetite for anarchic outrageousness. She has never lost her power to shock, and her continued innovations make her one of the most talked about fashion designers in the world. But little is know about this essentially private woman. What is she like What is the secret of her success.Gleaned from more than thirty years of interviews with Westwood herself, Vivienne Westwood describes for the first time in detail Westwood's childhood and early years; it also exposes the inside story of her stormy and bizarre relationship with musician and fashionista Malcolm McLaren. The author looks at the origins of Westwood's witty and erotic sensibility, placing it in the context of the sixties, and throwing light on the dynamics of punk and on Westwood's later ability to tap into the inner logic of fashion - a Romantic perversity which is at the heart of mass consumption itself. As a dirty history of the Sixties shared by Westwood, McLaren and the author, and as a story of the triumph of a mad, bad, outrageous girl, Vivienne Westwood succeeds brilliantly.

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Publié par	ABRAMS BOOKS
Date de parution	01 octobre 1997
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781468309850
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0808€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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First published in 1993 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
For bulk and special sales please contact sales@overlookny.com , or write us at the above address.
Copyright © 1996 Fred Vermorel
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast.
Photo credits:
Lisa Butler: page 6 top , Bob Gruen: page 3 top
Richard Lappas: page 1 top left & right
Laurie Lewis /Sunday Times : page 7 top
Norman Lomax: pages 6 bottom , 8 inset
Barry Plummer: page 4 bottom , Rex Features: page 4 bottom
Solo Syndication: pages 5 top , 8, Today/Rex Features: page 7 bottom
Virgin: page 3 bottom , Richard Young/Rex Features: page 5 bottom
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vermorel, Fred.
Vivienne Westwood : fashion, perversity, and the sixties laid bare
/Fred Vermorel.
1. Westwood, Vivienne. 2. Fashion designers—England—Biography.
3. Costume design—England—History—20th century.
I. Title.
TT505.W47V47 1996
746.9’2’092—dc20
[B] 96-19535 CIP
ISBN: 978-0-87951-691-8
Manufactured in the United States of America
First American Edition
For my students
‘Dare to do something worthy of transportation or imprisonment if you wish to be of consequence.’
Juvenal
Contents
INTRODUCTION
Part One: VIVIENNE WESTWOOD, AN IMAGINARY INTERVIEW
Part Two: GROWING UP AS A GENIUS IN THE SIXTIES
Part Three: PICTURES FROM THE REVOLUTION
Appendix: Shops and Shows
Introduction
Vivienne’s secret, as she admits, is Malcolm McLaren. Malcolm’s secret is told here for the first time in Part Two .
Part One: Vivienne Westwood, an Imaginary Interview is me taking liberties with everything I can recall Vivienne saying to me over thirty years, plus what she’s said in her many published interviews. Quite a lot, as you will see. Some of this is put into her mouth from other sources as well – for example, her family and Malcolm.
I also put two of my students on the case, and they extensively interviewed people from Vivienne’s past. It’s got that rather flat ‘interview’ tone, but I also think it’s got a lot of her. If you think ‘We’ve got a right one here!’, then I’ve done the job OK. This section is in a sense ‘factual’, as it has some ‘dramatised’ sections but is based on what I know and on what has been documented by others. In other words, I didn’t make any of it up, though you might be tempted to think so. I also resisted the temptation to put my own spin on events in the guise of her voice – my version comes in Part Two . Needless to say, however, this ‘Imaginary Interview’ doesn’t claim to represent what Vivienne might say on her own account or what she might say about all this in retrospect.
Like me, Vivienne and Malcolm are sixties people. That was our formative decade. But a lot of shit has been written about the sixties. I’ve tried to go beyond the clichés and examine our origins more ruthlessly by interrogating my own experience along with theirs. So this section is an eyewitness account of how we grew up together in an inconspicuous corner of the sixties, roughly from 1963 to the early to mid-seventies, when the sixties finally began to peter out – or are they still with us? There’s a lot about me in this, because biographies, after all, overlap, and shared circumstances and attitudes can say it all. Hence Part Two: Growing up as a Genius in the Sixties .
In this section I also reveal the strange secret of Malcolm McLaren’s talent – his talent for genius. I sketch the Romantic context of this talent – where it can thrive – and show how Vivienne has absorbed and made it her own.
To bring it all up to date I wrote Part Three: Pictures from the Revolution , which traces a line of vignettes up to October 1995, when I observed the scenes behind Vivienne’s Paris show at the Grand Hôtel. I’ve also tried here to give a sense of that curious organization, Vivienne Westwood Ltd.
PART ONE
Vivienne Westwood: an Imaginary Interview
The funny thing was, everyone assumed that because we were at the centre of punk Malcolm and I were incredibly debauched and perverted.
There were stories, for instance, that I used to lock Malcolm up in a cupboard all day, and that our Clapham flat was the scene of wild orgies, some of them lesbian, featuring me and young punk girls. In fact we were probably the straightest couple on that scene. Though the rumours were good for business.
Of course, there’s always been a dominant side to me, and Malcolm sometimes liked to enact his childhood traumas. But all that is very private to us, and I would never tell anyone anything that might hurt Malcolm. Whatever he has said about me since our break-up, I still feel very loyal to him. In any case we were usually too busy with our projects and our business to do anything very exotic. In fact, I don’t recall either of us having very much sex around that period – straight or kinky.
When did Malcolm and I split up? Perhaps it really started around the time of my Pirate collection, 1979-80. Adam Ant – around then.
I had known Adam for some time as someone who used to hang around SEX, our boutique in the King’s Road. I thought him a nice boy, very polite. Adam had been pestering Malcolm for ages to manage him. Eventually Malcolm gave him advice about stage presentation, like painting a big white stripe on his nose. He charged Adam £1000 for this advice. That was probably the best advice Adam ever got.
But Malcolm needed a band himself at the time, since he was thinking of starting Bow Wow Wow. So he got talking to Adam’s backing band. He explained that Adam was basically a no-hoper. Malcolm suggested they should leave Adam and form another band with another lead singer, and he would then manage them as Bow Wow Wow. He was thinking they might front the pirate look I’d been designing.
That band were all such craven boys really. They had no loyalty to Adam, and caved in pretty quickly. So Malcolm put them to work, sending them to recording studios to record demos.
He’d tell them to go into a studio, work there for several days, and once the engineer’s back was turned, steal the tape and do a runner. Then they would take the same tape to another studio and start all over again. That way all the demos were made for free – another kind of piracy, plus he sent a buzz of notoriety around the industry in advance of any sales pitch.
Then Malcolm came up with Annabella. She was fourteen then, with a high, shrill voice and a manic presentation. I thought she was crap to start with and the first time I heard a tape of her I smashed the cassette machine! But then Malcolm got a deal with EMI, of all companies, which was a surprise to everyone.
At the time Malcolm was also writing a film script. He wanted to fuse this with the band he was creating. The script was about the ‘Mile High Club’, a group of kids who meet in the ruined fuselage of a plane and use it for meetings which turn into sex orgies which get more and more elaborate and outrageous. I thought this was quite a promising idea.
You see, Malcolm thought the rock industry was really about kids having sex and wanted to rub its nose in the fact. So the idea was to get the industry involved in some aspect of supposedly underage sex, and then say innocently: ‘Oh, but what’s the problem with that then? It’s what you do all the time! It’s what makes the wheels go round!’
While this was going on, a BBC film crew headed by Alan Yentob was making a documentary about Malcolm creating this band. They were filming meetings inside EMI, with EMI people solemnly checking out pictures of kids in sexy poses, and listening to Annabella having an orgasm on ‘Sexy Eiffel Towers’. They were all making judicious comments about the whole thing and acting as if it was business as usual. They didn’t realize that Malcolm was setting up a crafty trap. But then everything started to go wrong.
Adam had sworn revenge on Malcolm. He’d got together with Marco Pirroni to form a rival band to Bow Wow Wow. Adam then pinched Bow Wow Wow’s ‘Burundi beat’ (which Malcolm had pinched from Bernard Rhodes, who got it from an old sixties single). Adam even stole my eighteenth-century feel in costumes and the pirate look!
Then Adam was very successful and had big hits with all this, while Bow Wow Wow was left standing.
I remember when Malcolm told the Bow Wow Wow boys that Adam had just released ‘Dog Eat Dog’. Malcolm said they looked so fed up. We thought that was funny!
But Malcolm had overstretched the kiddy sex angle – especially through a series of photo shoots in different locations across London. These were about Annabella and the band with lots of other kids, and they took place in different houses all over town during one day.
As ever, Malcolm wanted to push things as far as he could – to make it really crazy – and had these kids posing with the band erotically. This started to worry the photographer. Then, at the last place we went, Malcolm started a situation in which the photographer and a twelve-year-old girl were locked into a confrontation. The girl was supposed to take off all her clothes, but instead she held a cushion in front of herself. Malcolm was shouting: ‘Take that away!’ and the girl burst into tears.
Her mother, who had been watching television in the next room, was furious, and the photographer couldn’t believe what he’d been involved in. That was just Malcolm getting carried away as usual.
I think it was one thing to implicate the industry in its own salacious tastes, but another to upset children like that. I didn’t agree with it.
After th