Vivienne Westwood

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Toward the end where the main focus was on her activism, I love how Westwood said that everything costs less than it’s supposed to because the Earth is carrying that subsidy for us. (And yet it is also true that the current world economy does not allow us all to have the luxury of only purchasing sustainable items.)

Thanks to Ness, who died some ten years ago, she no longer had to feel she was alone at the barricades, because she no longer expected to find anyone of worth behind her. Fashion was for ‘an elect’ who understood the connections and recognised the ‘standards of excellence’ of the past. The irony is that, having adopted this position, she went on to achieve a popular success far greater than anything she had enjoyed in the past. By the mid-1990s, she was ‘the most sought-after designer in the world’, according to Kelly. Her Paris collections at that time included ‘Anglomania’, ‘Café Society’ and ‘Storm in a Teacup’, all based on historic, Ness-inspired themes. ‘We made incredible statements in Paris, with Gary’s input, because he did know what he was talking about historically.’ She was also starting to make serious money for the first time. The Marxisting people succeeded in marketing Vivienne Westwood as a brand to Swatch watches and the Littlewoods catalogue. Carlo D’Amario, her Italian business manager, started selling licences for her clothes into Japan, where fashion customers couldn’t get enough of her tweeds and tartans. I've been a fan of Vivienne's fashion for some time and every time I saw a photo of her I just thought "This really looks like someone I need to know". I was not mistaken. Though this co-authored autobiography is as close as I can get to 'knowing' Vivienne the impact it's left on me is incredible. For Ness, the pre-Revolutionary years were the fertile ones; Westwood’s inspiration now came from such aristocratic sources as Sèvres porcelain. Her ‘Watteau dress’, which despite the name was taken from a Boucher portrait of Mme de Pompadour, was made from silks that would have been used at the time. Her ‘spiritual home’ was now the Wallace Collection in Manchester Square. Ness egged her on to find her true voice, not as a revolutionary but a counter-revolutionary. ‘The basic idea,’ he once said, ‘is that Rousseau – proto-socialist and godfather of the idea of the “noble savage”– is responsible for the damage that has been done to traditional ideas.’ He schooled Westwood in a rejection of Romanticism and argued for a return to ‘high art’ created by a small, educated elite. Kelly explains that ‘Ness, like many of his generation, saw in the political emancipation of the Age of Revolutions the seeds of decay in Western culture.’ Ness and Westwood together rejected any notion of democratic taste. They adored the idea of the 18th-century salon and met several times a week to discuss ideas, with Ness telling Westwood what to read and Westwood giving him money. They liked to refer to the marketing people as the ‘Marxisting people’, because they paid too much attention to what people wanted. VOGUE ON VIVIENNE WESTWOOD by Linda Watson. Collection Rolf Heyne, München / China 1. Auflage 2014, ERSTAUSGABE, 160 SS. gebunden (Hardcover, ca. 8°) mit Schutzumschlag, durchweg farbig illustriert, mit Banderole, schön erhalten. At school, too, Vivienne saw herself as heroic, a ‘kind of champion, even as a little girl’. The supervising teacher would come into the lunch room each day and say: ‘Stand up whoever was talking.’ One day, Vivienne decided to test ‘the rhetoric, as it were’. When the teacher came in, she stood up and said, ‘It was me,’ even though she hadn’t in fact been talking.Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth

Wir erfahren, dass sie immer nur am arbeiten war, zwei Kinder versorgend und einen Mann unterstützend, der versuchte seine Träume zu leben und der ein purer Egoist war. (jedoch ein unglaublich inspirierender Egoist) Bishin zu ihrem Einsatz für den Planet und eine bessere Zukunft nicht nur für ihre Nachkommen, sondern für alle Generationen, die noch kommen werden. Finding out how much of my own life she influenced. All the fashion I adore most comes from Vivienne's career. She talks about how clothes give you confidence and how punk especially was for making you feel more than what the world made you feel like. This is such an amazing book about the ongoing legend of Vivienne Westwood, who played an indispensable role in the formation of punk. The book opens with Kelly at a fashion event with Westwood, and as readers, it felt like we were also there, following Westwood around as she chats about her life. Vivienne was famously uninterested in trends, seeking to create what appealed to her own artistic sensibilities, causing immeasurable stress for those working with her. Her use of impractical fabrics and cuts made her designs “extremely complicated to manufacture, as she [rejected] any recognizable template or pattern”. In the business world, Vivienne’s companies dealt with constant financial mismanagement, largely stemming from employees taking advantage of her trust (or oversight, as the case may be) and swindling money. Vivienne fought for recognition among her contemporaries, such as John Galliano (with whom she unsuccessfully competed to become Design Director of Dior in the mid-90s), Alexander McQueen and Jean-Paul Gaultier, many of whom restructured Vivienne’s original concepts, such as the corset and bustle, to beAnyone with an averagely fragile ego would have been unable to take the way McLaren behaved. He was brought up in a North London Jewish family by his grandmother, an eccentric landlady called Rose Corré Isaacs, who didn’t believe in children going to school and was given to pronouncements such as ‘to be bad is good.’ Westwood and McLaren’s son, Joe, who also works in fashion (he founded the lingerie shop Agent Provocateur), was given the surname Corré in honour of Rose. McLaren’s mother, Emily, was a prostitute. Westwood says that the ‘root of all his troubles’ was that he ‘never knew real maternal love as a child’. He displayed a pathological desire to dazzle and insult the world with his brilliance and to disparage the abilities of anyone close to him, Westwood especially. Nothing, however, seems to have been able to dent her hero-image of herself. When they first met, he spent ‘most of his student grant on clothes’ for her, changing the way she dressed from ‘a dolly bird into a chic, confident dresser’. He bought her schoolgirl uniforms from John Lewis and made her wear them with rubberised cotton macs and red tights. But the more he insulted her and dressed her like a prostitute, the more she loved herself. By 1974, they had changed the name of the shop from Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die to SEX, and she was mostly to be seen in fake leather trousers and purple make-up: Vivienne Westwood covers everything from Westwood’s childhood, her motherhood (sons Ben Westwood & Joseph Corré), her intellectually stimulating and abusive ex-partner Malcolm McLaren (Joe’s father) with whom she shaped punk, her post-Malcolm years of launching her own brand, and her passion in political activism. I personally find it all very fascinating and informative about how Westwood shaped the world around her as well as how the world shaped her. Venus with severed leg a portrait of Vivienne Westwood in 1975 by William English. Private view invitation for the show at the Aquarium Gallery, Monday18th October, 6.30-9.00pm. It baffles me that Kelly kept on deadnaming and misgendering Chelsea Manning, who came out publicly in 2013. Note that this book was published in 2014, and there was one sentence that mentioned her name, so Kelly wasn’t exactly clueless. This issue made me unable to give the book a rating. Art. Das Kunstmagazin. Nr. 2 / Februar 2006. Rätsel Rembrandt. Seit 400 Jahren modern. Alles zum Jubiläumsjahr / Mode und Kunst: Interview mit Vivienne Westwood.

Condition: guter Zustand. 1. Auflage. fester Einband ("Hardcover") 223 S., mit zahlreichen Farb- und Schwarzweißfotos, Fadenheftung Schutzumschlag minimal berieben, ein schönes Exemplar Sprache: ger/deu*. Remove the pomp and aristocratic knobs attracted to high culture and fashion, and you’re left with a woman who created luxury largesse out of basics who not interested in materialism, her idea of luxury is a night in reading. A bibliophile comforted reading many and varied books, sipping a flask of hot water kept by the bed, and shared with her Italian BF, Andreas – a better suited collaborator IMO. When I left my abusive family punk clothes and Lolita fashion especially started to give me confidence and helped me find a voice, and to find out that all of that was started by Vivienne- it just gave me this very satisfied feeling on coming full circle. Whether you like fashion, punk, activism, or stories of perseverance and the strength of real people this is a fabulous book. Her sense of her own heroism came at least in part from a fierce conviction that she was ‘good at making’. In the years of wartime and afterwards, being good at making could have considerable impact on how you lived. Although there wasn’t much money at home (her father worked in a munitions factory during the war, her mother in a cloth factory), Vivienne was never aware of wartime restrictions, for example, on the use of elastic. Both her parents came from generations of grocers and shoemakers and were good with their hands: Gordon made holly wreaths to sell at Christmas and Dora was a ‘demon’ knitter and very ‘particular’ about making all her children’s outfits. Vivienne inherited their dexterity. ‘Honestly, at the age of five, I could have made a pair of shoes.’ Once, she showed the other children at school how to make a fairground scene involving swingboats out of cardboard and matchboxes. She and her parents also had a strong sense of mutual pride. She was proud of her father, because he was attractive and sporty and sociable and ‘just the best possible dad’. And she always knew her parents were proud of her – proud when she was ‘little’ and proud of ‘what I became’.Because, honestly, who the hell am I to be critiquing the life story of the grande dame of British fashion? It’s not like I can add any real value to the conversation.