Who is

It’s June and it’s Men’s Fashionweek in Milan. Organizing the timetable for the Fashionshows I was about to attend, one of the shows I highly anticipated was the Vivienne Westwood Man SS17 Show. Two days before the show, I got a message, that my request for an interview with Vivienne Westwood had been confirmed and that I’m going to meet her before the show. Due to a tight schedule, I was granted two questions, which got me a bit concerned if I will I be able to get a glimpse of who Vivienne Westwood is, with just two questions.

So what to ask a woman, who had been asked everything before. For me, like for many other people, Vivienne Westwood is mostly known as a Fashiondesigner, the godmother of Punk, she didn’t wear undergarments while at the queens dinner, she was made a Dame by the very same queen, etc. I had a vague idea, that she was involved with topics like climate change. With the interview I hoped for adding more to the general picture of who Vivienne Westwood is. Arriving two hours before the show, the backstage area of the venue was already crowded with models and crew members preparing, chatting, joking and working. After a while, Vivienne Westwood arrived, together with Andreas Kronthaler, her husband since 1992 and Creative Director of her Label.

Vivienne herself seemed to want to swim under the radar, taking her time to fully arrive. If you only got the iconic picture of her in mind, with the fiery red hair and overwhelming presence, you could easily be at risk to not recognize her. Her famous red hair fainted to white, the eyes exhausted at her arrival before the Fashionshow -one of those shows she did a million times before and with it the press circus she managed to get done with countless times- She doesn’t seem to want to deal with the necessary evil called press.

Vivienne Westwood seems tired of the circus, tired of the press-marathon, tired about answering the same questions about her fashion over and over again.  Having her Husband Andreas being the creative force behind her collections since 2015 (also with his name now attached to hers „Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood“), the grand dame of rebellious punk-fashion seems to be happy to keep her face out of the happenings of the fashion-world… 

What happened to Vivienne -who turned 75 in April? Did she become an tired old woman? I sat down with her and started the conversation with the first question, hoping that I made a good choice: „You always used your public voice, to point the finger on environmental issues, human rights, animal rights. Do you think it’s gotten more important nowadays, that more brands take responsibility and using their voice as well?“

She started to answer the question in a way I expected, that „everybody should take more responsibility.“ This could have been the short end to the first of my two questions, but luckily it wasn’t and Vivienne continued: „Everybody’s future is imperil. And I’m very grateful, that I got the credibility through my fashion to open my mouth some time. And so I don’t talk about fashion anymore. Well, not very much. I use this as a platform to talk about the danger we’re in. And in this particular case, I’m talking about the danger we’re in from governments all over the world. And Governments just think, that they can do anything they like, everything illegal, they can do whatever they want. With the help of the press they can manipulate public opinion and they’re used to that.“

The manipulated public opinion comes to a very visible point in the discussions about environmental issues, still saying, that climate change is a hoax. Viviennes view on the topic is pretty clear.„

We do face mass extinction and it could happen within a generation. The scientists are really clear, that if we do nothing now, then the world will get hot and it will stop at four or five degrees, because it will have achieved an equilibrium then. It will be able to balance itself out, but if you draw a line, parallel with Paris, everything below it will be uninhabitable. The first time I got scared by this is, because a very famous scientist said -7 years ago I think it was- that by the end of this century there will only be one billion people left. And there’s an amazing article you must read. You must read all the articles by this particular journalist Chris Hedges and he puts articles on the social media site „Truthdig“. 

„And a particular essay I think you should read -read all what he writes- but the particular article is „We Must Understand Corporate Power to Fight It“ (posted on June 12th, 2016 on truthdig. com) What he’s saying, is that jewish people right up to the point when the gas came into the gas chamber, they believed the Nazis all the way. They gave them tickets for their clothes, they were very nice to them and everything. And so they didn’t revolt or rise up or get upset. They just went to their deaths in agreement. And he (Hedges) says, that the few people that rule us they know what they are doing. They just do think they are the few people left, and… anyway, that’s what he says. And that is a holocaust far bigger even than the 6 million people that were killed. Like how many billion people are there in the world and if there’s only one billion left… you know, it’s just… and people don’t know it. People do not know it.  They don’t want to know it and they are constantly distracted as well.

Somebody said to me the other day, that you get news for three days and then something completely different and that’s forgotten. You just keep getting distracted. But the press is repeating what the politicians say. And the politicians are all saying, that you’re going to all have jobs again, you’re going to have full pensions again… all this stuff to tell people which is absolutely untrue. It’s the opposite. The world is already bankrupted. And the thing why people don’t know it’s already bankrupted, is because everything you read in the press about the economy is only to do with investors. It’s not to do with the reality of everybody getting poorer and poorer. It has to do with what investors can get money out of in a short term. And so fracking for example. You could make money out of that, but fracking is a bubble that is already burst. So everybody’s going bankrupt who’s trying to frack. They got portfolios, that say you can have a hundred percent profit where in fact you can actually in reality probably get profit of one percent of it. That is what’s being told from investors: The potential of investment. It’s like this game „Passing the Parcel“… we can make money, you can make money, you can make money…“

Already behind the schedule, we had to finish the interview at this point, after the first question. While Vivienne was forced to stand up to get ready for the waiting Italian press, I asked her the short version of the more complex second question I originally prepared, why she picked Whistleblower Julian Assange to be the leading topic of her SS17 collection, which was already visible through the invitation for the show, which featured a picture of Assange with a cat and the caption „Julian Assange and @ EmbassyCat“.  Vivienne only had time for one quick answer, before facing the press. „I always supported Julian Assange, he is a friend of mine and all the accusations against him are made up and are untrue“