Fred Vermorel - Vivienne Westwood: Fashion, Perversity, and the Sixties Laid Bare

First published in 1993 by

The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

141 Wooster Street

New York, NY 10012

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Copyright 1996 Fred Vermorel

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast.

Photo credits:

Lisa Butler: page 6 top , Bob Gruen: page 3 top

Richard Lappas: page 1 top left & right

Laurie Lewis /Sunday Times : page 7 top

Norman Lomax: pages 6 bottom , 8 inset

Barry Plummer: page 4 bottom , Rex Features: page 4 bottom

Solo Syndication: pages 5 top , 8, Today/Rex Features: page 7 bottom

Virgin: page 3 bottom , Richard Young/Rex Features: page 5 bottom

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vermorel, Fred.

Vivienne Westwood : fashion, perversity, and the sixties laid bare

/Fred Vermorel.

1. Westwood, Vivienne. 2. Fashion designersEnglandBiography.

3. Costume designEnglandHistory20th century.

I. Title.

TT505.W47V47 1996

746.92092dc20

[B] 96-19535 CIP

ISBN: 978-0-87951-691-8

Manufactured in the United States of America

First American Edition

For my students

Dare to do something worthy of transportation or imprisonment if you wish to be of consequence.

Juvenal

Viviennes secret, as she admits, is Malcolm McLaren. Malcolms secret is told here for the first time in .

is me taking liberties with everything I can recall Vivienne saying to me over thirty years, plus what shes said in her many published interviews. Quite a lot, as you will see. Some of this is put into her mouth from other sources as well for example, her family and Malcolm.

I also put two of my students on the case, and they extensively interviewed people from Viviennes past. Its got that rather flat interview tone, but I also think its got a lot of her. If you think Weve got a right one here!, then Ive done the job OK. This section is in a sense factual, as it has some dramatised sections but is based on what I know and on what has been documented by others. In other words, I didnt make any of it up, though you might be tempted to think so. I also resisted the temptation to put my own spin on events in the guise of her voice my version comes in . Needless to say, however, this Imaginary Interview doesnt claim to represent what Vivienne might say on her own account or what she might say about all this in retrospect.

Like me, Vivienne and Malcolm are sixties people. That was our formative decade. But a lot of shit has been written about the sixties. Ive tried to go beyond the clichs and examine our origins more ruthlessly by interrogating my own experience along with theirs. So this section is an eyewitness account of how we grew up together in an inconspicuous corner of the sixties, roughly from 1963 to the early to mid-seventies, when the sixties finally began to peter out or are they still with us? Theres a lot about me in this, because biographies, after all, overlap, and shared circumstances and attitudes can say it all. Hence .

In this section I also reveal the strange secret of Malcolm McLarens talent his talent for genius. I sketch the Romantic context of this talent where it can thrive and show how Vivienne has absorbed and made it her own.

To bring it all up to date I wrote , which traces a line of vignettes up to October 1995, when I observed the scenes behind Viviennes Paris show at the Grand Htel. Ive also tried here to give a sense of that curious organization, Vivienne Westwood Ltd.

The funny thing was, everyone assumed that because we were at the centre of punk Malcolm and I were incredibly debauched and perverted.

There were stories, for instance, that I used to lock Malcolm up in a cupboard all day, and that our Clapham flat was the scene of wild orgies, some of them lesbian, featuring me and young punk girls. In fact we were probably the straightest couple on that scene. Though the rumours were good for business.

Of course, theres always been a dominant side to me, and Malcolm sometimes liked to enact his childhood traumas. But all that is very private to us, and I would never tell anyone anything that might hurt Malcolm. Whatever he has said about me since our break-up, I still feel very loyal to him. In any case we were usually too busy with our projects and our business to do anything very exotic. In fact, I dont recall either of us having very much sex around that period straight or kinky.

When did Malcolm and I split up? Perhaps it really started around the time of my Pirate collection, 1979-80. Adam Ant around then.

I had known Adam for some time as someone who used to hang around SEX, our boutique in the Kings Road. I thought him a nice boy, very polite. Adam had been pestering Malcolm for ages to manage him. Eventually Malcolm gave him advice about stage presentation, like painting a big white stripe on his nose. He charged Adam 1000 for this advice. That was probably the best advice Adam ever got.

But Malcolm needed a band himself at the time, since he was thinking of starting Bow Wow Wow. So he got talking to Adams backing band. He explained that Adam was basically a no-hoper. Malcolm suggested they should leave Adam and form another band with another lead singer, and he would then manage them as Bow Wow Wow. He was thinking they might front the pirate look Id been designing.

That band were all such craven boys really. They had no loyalty to Adam, and caved in pretty quickly. So Malcolm put them to work, sending them to recording studios to record demos.

Hed tell them to go into a studio, work there for several days, and once the engineers back was turned, steal the tape and do a runner. Then they would take the same tape to another studio and start all over again. That way all the demos were made for free another kind of piracy, plus he sent a buzz of notoriety around the industry in advance of any sales pitch.

Then Malcolm came up with Annabella. She was fourteen then, with a high, shrill voice and a manic presentation. I thought she was crap to start with and the first time I heard a tape of her I smashed the cassette machine! But then Malcolm got a deal with EMI, of all companies, which was a surprise to everyone.

At the time Malcolm was also writing a film script. He wanted to fuse this with the band he was creating. The script was about the Mile High Club, a group of kids who meet in the ruined fuselage of a plane and use it for meetings which turn into sex orgies which get more and more elaborate and outrageous. I thought this was quite a promising idea.

You see, Malcolm thought the rock industry was really about kids having sex and wanted to rub its nose in the fact. So the idea was to get the industry involved in some aspect of supposedly underage sex, and then say innocently: Oh, but whats the problem with that then? Its what you do all the time! Its what makes the wheels go round!

While this was going on, a BBC film crew headed by Alan Yentob was making a documentary about Malcolm creating this band. They were filming meetings inside EMI, with EMI people solemnly checking out pictures of kids in sexy poses, and listening to Annabella having an orgasm on Sexy Eiffel Towers. They were all making judicious comments about the whole thing and acting as if it was business as usual. They didnt realize that Malcolm was setting up a crafty trap. But then everything started to go wrong.