FASHION IS NOT on the mind of designer Vivienne Westwood ahead of her autumn/winter show in Hong Kong last week. 'Where are the Chinese paintings?' she asks the hotel staff. Told that there's little on offer that dates from the Sung or Ming dynasties, she's appalled.
It's typical Westwood. Though best known for her subversive fashion, her name is no longer synonymous with punk fashion or the anarchist look she created in the 1970s. These days, she's known as a cultural commentator and outspoken activist. Her press kit includes the statement: 'Leonard Peltier is innocent'. Peltier, Westwood's latest cause, is a Native American activist who spent more than 27 years in prison for a crime he says he didn't commit. Promotional tactic or otherwise, the slogan is repeated on her T-shirts this season.
Westwood's fashion has always been political, and has included a Destroy T-shirt emblazoned with a swastika, Queen Elizabeth's head and Jesus on the cross, upside down. Then there was the image of the queen with a safety pin through her nose.
'I can't keep talking about fashion,' Westwood says. 'I use politics as my frame. It's like warfare every season.'
She no longer considers herself an anarchist, even though people still equate her with the punk movement. 'I'm more interested in the discipline of the individual. I need to have that inner judgment and I get it from culture. You need to have something from the past. If people are cut loose, they just do what they want.'
Westwood says her next project is a manifesto on culture. She advises people to oppose consumerism and not to settle for mass-produced clothing.
