{"id":203097,"date":"2020-02-15T11:46:08","date_gmt":"2020-02-15T08:46:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ww-vb.mine.nu\/w108\/ive-always-been-a-rebel-vivienne-westwood-and-andreas-kronthaler-on-squaring-environmental-activism-with-selling-fashion\/"},"modified":"2020-02-15T11:46:08","modified_gmt":"2020-02-15T08:46:08","slug":"ive-always-been-a-rebel-vivienne-westwood-and-andreas-kronthaler-on-squaring-environmental-activism-with-selling-fashion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/ive-always-been-a-rebel-vivienne-westwood-and-andreas-kronthaler-on-squaring-environmental-activism-with-selling-fashion\/","title":{"rendered":"‘I’ve always been a rebel’ \u2013 Vivienne Westwood and Andreas Kronthaler on squaring environmental activism with selling fashion"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Vivienne Westwood has barely taken her coat off and she is already halfway through explaining her plan to save the planet. \u201cI\u2019ve figured it out, you see,\u201d she tells me in her distinctive Alan Bennett-esque tones: dry, quiet, matter-of-fact. Her roadmap to an equitable, sustainable world economy, without private land ownership, is laid out in slogans on a set of playing cards. The idea is to print a million packs to be sold as works of art, for \u00a3100 each. \u201cYou see, anybody who is prepared to pay \u00a3100 for a pack of cards is buying them because of what those cards represent. So if Greenpeace sell hundreds of sets of cards, they are in a position to say, we have hundreds of people supporting us.\u201d She believes this will convince the world\u2019s governments to adopt a new global economic system. \u201cIt seems I am the only person who has identified a total strategy and who also has a platform to speak,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

It is quite the opening salvo, but at 78, Westwood has been ruffling feathers on a grand scale for half a century. She is the queen of punk, the fairy godmother of streetstyle, the dame who twirled knickerless at Buckingham Palace. In the dressing room above photographer Juergen Teller\u2019s studio, Westwood begins to extract the pins that secure her halo of delicate, baby-soft strands of vanilla-blond hair in its complicated updo of avant garde kiss curls. She spent this morning at her Mayfair boutique overseeing the presentation of a new collection, and was thinking through the playing card strategy all the time. \u201cIt\u2019s given me a headache,\u201d she sighs. Westwood\u2019s concept of no man\u2019s land, a principle that outlaws private land ownership, \u201ccan stop Putin saying he owns the Arctic,\u201d she says. \u201cWe can stop Bolsonaro saying he can cut down the Amazon. If no one owns land any more, they can\u2019t do it. I won\u2019t go into exactly how it works, but it will give a fair distribution of wealth. It all fits together. The strategy to save the Earth is on these cards.\u201d<\/p>\n

It would not, obviously, be difficult to pick holes in this argument. But to do so would surely be to miss her point. Because for all her over-reach on the granular detail, Westwood grasps a truth that many others in the fashion industry and beyond fail to see. She gets that saving the planet is going to be about root-and-branch disruption, not making the odd tweak to schedules and shopping lists. For all her flamboyance and braggadocio, she has a clear-eyed view of the shape and size of the climate crisis.<\/p>\n

Westwood is an English rose, as delicate as she is doughty. Her pale skin seems to be lit from beneath, like a bone china teacup held up to the light. It\u2019s not that she looks young, more that there is something Puck-ishly ageless about her. She is spry and petite, wearing a check shirt in soft brushed cotton tucked neatly into nubbly woollen jogging bottoms in dusty pink, with thick orange socks and brown suede boots.<\/p>\n

The six-foot Austrian beefcake who strides across the room to take a seat next to her at the makeup table could not present more of a contrast. Andreas Kronthaler has olive skin, rakish salt and pepper curls, a lustrously Tyrolean accented voice. The two have been inseparable, in life and work, for over three decades. They met at art school in Vienna in 1988 \u2013 she was teaching fashion design, he was her star pupil \u2013 and married in 1993. Westwood was 52, divorced with two sons; Kronthaler was 27. After decades as a silent partner in the design studio, his creative role was recognised in 2016 when the high-end Gold Label line, which is shown at Paris fashion week, was renamed Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood.<\/p>\n

Over lunch, Westwood sits quietly, daintily eating tiny pieces of pizza with a knife and fork. Her hearing is not perfect these days and she finds it hard to follow conversation in noisy rooms. But half an hour later, hair and makeup done, laced into angular, teetering boots, she is in her element. Wearing a crown of straw and flowers \u2013 imagine a bird was let loose to make a nest in a very chic florist\u2019s \u2013 she smiles for Teller\u2019s camera, as sweet and tiny as a little girl lining up for her school portrait.<\/p>\n

It is perhaps worth noting that, for all her famed eccentricity, Westwood\u2019s label remains fully independent in an industry peppered with burnt-out talents and backfired business deals. Around 300 people are employed in Britain, many in the Battersea offices where I arrive the following morning to find Kronthaler, in a rainbow-striped sweater, breakfasting on pancakes and Nutella in the light-filled design studio on the top floor. His wife, who is to join us later, is for now two miles away, in the Queen Anne house in Clapham that once belonged to Captain Cook\u2019s mother and which has been the couple\u2019s home since 2000, when Kronthaler persuaded Westwood to move from the ex-council flat nearby where she had lived since the 70s, when she shared it with Malcolm McLaren. The studio walls are covered with ideas for the forthcoming Paris show: a black and white photograph of a 20s showgirl, torso wrapped in furs, has been spliced with a clown in pantaloons. \u201cI\u2019m trying a few things. Who knows?!\u201d Kronthaler exclaims happily, with the abandon of a designer whose last show featured women in decorative codpieces and a five-foot sequined tuna worn as a hat. An assistant appears clutching swatches of lace in gold and black on which she urgently needs his opinion. She is working on a possible outfit for Beyonc\u00e9 to wear at the Oscars, he tells me. \u201cBut now I\u2019m gossiping.\u201d He grins. \u201cI must stop.\u201d<\/p>\n