Fruitcake Fashionista
Foul-mouthed rants at her terrified young assistants. A withering dismissal of her ‘boring’ ex Malcolm McLaren. And why she likes to keep Kate Moss VERY close. No wonder Vivienne Westwood doesn’t want you to see the new film that portrays her as a...
SHE is the fashion queen who clothed the punk revolution, but these days Dame Vivienne Westwood sees herself in rather more expansive terms. Today, she is no mere dressmaker but an environmental warrior waging battle on climate change, fracking and the growing tide of plastic pollution. So you might expect the once flame-haired designer to be looking forward to a major new documentary about her work, which is released in cinemas on Friday.
The fly-on-the-wall film, flatteringly titled Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist, follows a two-year collaboration with the producers. Yet it seems the opposite is the case.
Indeed, the grande dame of British fashion has taken such grave exception to the film that – much to the bemusement of her 419,000 Twitter followers – she has urged them not to watch it at all.
‘The film is mediocre, and Vivienne and [her partner] Andreas are not,’ she stated in characteristically pretentious style.
What is it, then, that she does not wish her followers to see?
Is it, as Dame Vivienne claims, that the movie contains ‘not even five minutes of activism’ – or is it the 80 minutes of unadulterated fruitcake behaviour on view?
Here, to help you make up your mind, is an exclusive preview of the colourful exposé that Dame Vivienne would rather you ignore...
NEVER MIND THE B ****** S
IN ONE of the opening scenes of the documentary, Dame Vivienne explains that she aims to spread kindness to others, a habit she acquired in childhood.
‘I felt like I had to be like a knight to stop people doing horrible things to one another,’ she says.
Yet minutes later, she is seen launching a foul-mouthed rant at one of her young female assistants.
Filmed on the eve of a recent London Fashion Week, the assistant appears stunned after an acidtongued tirade, apparently provoked because she made a cardigan’s hem too big. ‘Next time you make a judgment, don’t make a judgment,’ Dame Vivienne roars. ‘I don’t like the size of this rib, it’s crap. I don’t know if want to show any of this s ***, I don’t know what the f*** it is.’
It is not an isolated incident. Her marketing team is also on the receiving end of Dame Vivienne’s rage.
‘I don’t know what the heck they’re doing,’ she splutters. ‘They are doing damage.’
Guests invited to view her collections are similarly treated to expletive-filled invective.
Before one showing, she squeals: ‘Either come or go, sit down or f *** off yourselves.’
NO LOVE LOST
HER love life has proved as colourful as her catwalk collections. So Dame Vivienne’s barbed appraisals of her relationships for the camera are well up to expectation.
Referring to the traditional household she ran with her first husband, Derek Westwood, the father of her eldest son Ben, Dame Vivienne is dismissive: ‘We were living the American Dream, [I was] the housewife. And somehow that’s it.
‘I just realised, no, no, this is a load of old rubbish, what a load of old b ****** s that is.
‘I had to explore, I wasn’t fulfilling my potential.’
The marriage ended when she met music mogul Malcolm McLaren in 1965. It was to prove her best-known and most tumultuous relationship. McLaren, of course, would later manage the Sex Pistols.
They lived together in a council flat in Clapham, had son Joe in 1967, and are credited with creating the music and style which underpinned the subversive politics of punk.
Yet he, too, is attacked on camera. ‘He became very jealous of me when I went into the fashion business,’ she sneers. ‘And he would always pretend everything was him.
‘I stayed with him because I respected him, then I got to a point. His thinking had stayed where it was, I got intellectually bored with him.’
MOTHER LOVE
VIVIENNE’S youngest son, Joe Corré, launched the luxury lingerie brand Agent Provocateur. But in the film, Vivienne admits he nearly didn’t make it into the world at all.
Discussing her tumultuous relationship with McLaren, she reveals: ‘Malcolm was ill so I looked after him and that’s how it all began.
‘I didn’t want him at all, I felt like I had misled him. When I had Joe, I wanted to have an abortion,’ she adds, implying further profound dissatisfaction with McLaren.
Vivienne sacked Joe from her business after realising that he and the company’s CEO, Carlo D’Amario, could not work together.
Joe tells the documentary: ‘I decided I couldn’t work with Carlo. It had to be one or the other of us. My mum had decided that she needed him which hurt a bit.’
MATCH MADE IN FASHION
IN 1992, Vivienne married her Austrian former fashion student, Andreas Kronthaler, who is 25 years her junior. Yet the unusual partnership has been her most enduring, with Andreas both a muse and collaborator in her business. Previously unseen footage of their marriage – broadcast for the first time in the film – reveals the unlikely pair posing in flamboyant style. Andreas and Dame Vivienne are shown to have matching flowered dresses in their respective wardrobes. The designer’s appraisal of her husband is esoteric. ‘The biggest compliment I can pay Andreas is I actually like living with him as much as I like being on my own,’ she tells the film. But her son Joe’s
perspective is more informative. ‘I have to be honest, at first I was quite suspicious of Andreas, because, who is this f ****** guy?’ he admits. ‘He looks a bit gay and he wants to marry my mum and he’s half her age. What’s that all about?’
MOSS BE LOVE
AS ONE of the most well-connected people in fashion, Dame Vivienne counts supermodel Naomi Campbell, designer Bella Freud and musician Chrissie Hynde among her closest friends.
But perhaps her ultimate muse is Kate Moss.
The supermodel appears on the documentary to reveal her admiration for ‘queen’ Vivienne.
And the feeling, she implies, was most certainly reciprocated.
Recalling one particular encounter, Kate says: ‘We were backstage. And she went, “Kate, you know I’ve never been into girls but I could have got into you” and then she hugged me.’
She adds, with a celebratory fist pump: ‘I could have been her only lesbian lover – ker-ching!’
WHAT ROT
THEY may have stood side-by-side in the punk movement during the 1970s. But Sex Pistols’ frontman John Lydon, known as Johnny Rotten, is dismissed with one of Vivienne’s catty backhands. ‘He was quite a phenomenon back then,’ Vivienne demurs, ‘and he hasn’t changed from that. He should have changed into something else by now.’
It seems, in the end, she found him Pretty Vacant.
OFF WITH THEIR HEADS
SHE HAS dedicated herself to a plethora of causes, including the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament and the Green Party.
But above all, she says, the route to a better world lies in dismantling the current financial system, a fight she describes – in suitably learned terms – as akin to slaying the Lernaean Hydra, a beast from Greek mythology. (In the myth, Heracles slices off the Hydra’s head, only for two more to grow from the stump.) She is proud of this analogy. ‘This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever thought of or said,’ she tells the film-makers.
‘The total, rotten financial system is the enemy, it’s like the Hydra, don’t start chopping off, I shouldn’t mention chopping heads. You’ve got to kill the machine that is destroying us.’
Not that her charity work always impresses her staff or, indeed, Andreas. One assistant moans about the pressure that her absences place on everyone else in her team. ‘Here, there are so many things going on, meetings, bags, meetings, shoes, meetings, but Vivienne, she keeps herself busy with her NGOs, blogs.
‘Maybe the collection can be done in three days.’
CUT!
FORMER model Lorna Tucker, the film’s director, established a rather tumultuous relationship with her subject.
‘I was told off a lot by her,’ Lorna tells The Mail on Sunday. ‘She would tell me to go away. I would go away and then she would say, “Why did you go away, you’ve just missed this amazing thing.”
‘There were many days when I’d email to say I was coming to film and they would be like, “Oh, for f ***’s sake, can you just f*** off.”’
While Dame Vivienne’s reaction to the film was not unexpected, Lorna has defended her decision to proceed without the fashionista’s endorsement.
‘It has got me into trouble,’ she admits, ‘but I’m a film-maker, a storyteller.
‘I wanted to tell an intimate portrait, I wanted to show her personality so I had to keep filming.’
THE BARE TRUTH
THERE is some footage, however, that viewers will not see – and for good reason.
‘I would be on train journeys with her and Vivienne would be drinking wine out of a bottle because she won’t use a plastic cup,’ said Lorna.
‘And, she will lick the tiniest little bit of hummus out of the plastic tub, then wash it out and use it for two years.’ It wasn’t just her eating habits which caused consternation. She would be sitting there, with her legs wide open, without any knickers on, not understanding why people were taking pictures of her,’ says Lorna. ‘It was eventful and I will release a director’s cut one day.’
Don’t rush.