Her first shop became the centre of punk’s empire. What she put into fashion as the business grew was a mind ablaze with ideas
, where London’s Chelsea swerves towards Fulham, was a shop you entered in the 1970s only if you dared. The couple who ran it, Vivienne Westwood and her on-off partner Malcolm McLaren, liked it that way. Shocks to the system were their stock in trade. Any system, more or less., with frightening staff who might greet you with a middle finger or a parade of naked rumps. By 1977 it was Seditionaries, a punk shop. More than that, it was the centre of punk’s empire.
Making and mending had been dinned in by her factory-worker parents in Derbyshire. She had watched her mother turn out clothes on a treadle machine, and learned how to darn. Sewing and jewellery-making, which she studied, might just about provide a living if she worked hard. Though she was crowned Queen of Punk by the press, her true slogan was never “I wanna be anarchy”. She was too keen on a fine cut and the feel of conservative fabric, like worsted or Harris Tweed. She was also too dedicated.
All through she played with gender, putting women in heavy-shouldered suits and men in lovely kilts and skirts. The public mockery didn’t faze her at all. Those suits made women look important, and there was nothing sexier than that. Some looks misfired, but she produced them so fast that it hardly mattered. She seemed to know better than the young themselves what they were really craving.
She was against pretty much everything. War of course, capitalism, nuclear power, inequality, poverty, austerity, global warming. The world as it was. Her plan to save it—for she had to rebuild as well as knock down—was to stop war, establish that land belonged to no one, give up cars and be altruistic. Simple.
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