The odd couple; interview with Vivienne Westwood and Giorgio Armani, fashion designers
Christa Worthington
January 16, 1985
LONDON -- Designer Vivienne Westwood, the protagonist of intrigues, rifts and rumors surrounding the demise of Worlds End, the label that launched London's fashion renaissance, is in the clear.
After a season out of production, she has signed a seven-year licensing agreement with Giorgio Armani, which she says will make "underground overgound for sure." In westwood jargon that means she can take her talents out of the King's Road "ghetto," as she sees it, into the world.
"I find more surprises on Savile Row than I do on the King's Road," says the former High Priestess of Punk. "There's a snobbery in England that there is something bona fide about being poor and tough, but those people are deluding themselves."
The first and foremost of England's "alternative" design talents to defect, citing a lack of funding and "incoherent" production facilities, Westwood says, "I can now exploit my own ideas instead of watching them diffuse and evolve in the fashion world."
The rebel who set London alight with clothes that combined rock, street and ancient cultures has wanted for some time to work to greater commercial advantage. But the past seasons have been a struggle. She has been embroiled in a messy custody battle with her former partner, music producer McLaren, over the Worlds End name. (The Worlds End shop in the King's Road has been allowed to stand "as a tourist attraction," says Westwood.) And tentative Italian production deals failed to materialize.
The turnaround came with the aid of her Italian business manager and friend of the past two years, Carlo d'Amario, a former buyer and PR man for Fiorucci and an exporter of Afghan carpets until the Soviet invasion interrupted business. D'Amario says the unlikely marriage of Westwood and Armani made immediate sense to Serio Galeotti, Armani's business partner, who tied up the deal in two days.
According to Galeotti, what he calls "the Armani group" has a seven-year contract with Westwood, with an option to renew for five more, that gives Armani the exclusive right to Westwood's name worldwide. Westwood will receive royalties, will have complete creative control over her collections and will manage all promotional matters such as fashion shows. The "Armani group," which includes Armani, Galeotti and some of their Italian manufacturers, will produce and market the collection.
Galeotti is said to have sought the Westwood contract in order to establish a presence in what one observer labeled the "avant-garde" fashion market. "Armani and Galeotti have a prestige, high-priced ready-to-wear with the Giorgio Armani line and they also have a younger audience with Emporio (Armani's lower-price line)," he says. "What they lacked was a collection that appeals to those people, especially in Italy, who want the very latest thing whether it's from England or Japan. They didn't have the trendiest stuff. Westwood will provide that."
"It's a purely economic formula. There will be no involvement of Armani in the Westwood image," insists d'Amario. Indeed, the extreme dissimilarity of the two designers has helped clinch their commercial union. Says Westwood: 'We both have very clear formulas. Armani gives status to relaxes clothes. He will always look like Giorgio Armani, and I will always look like Vivienne Westwood." She has only met him once.
While the world regards her as a fashion revolutionary, Westwood's esthetic vocabulary has changed considerably since the days when she clad the punk movement by creating the costumes of its loudest exponents -- the Sex Pistols. Now her buzz words are "tradition" and "Savile Row," where she finds "surprises more electrifying than florecents." She even claims her favorite English designer is the late Sir Norman Hartnell. "He did such beautiful dresses for the Queen, "Westwood says.
She is also convinced that street fashion, per se, is redundant, replaced by the more vibrant energy of the designer image that the hippest kids will go to any length to purchase or approximate. "I know someone who spent his university grant on a Yohji Yamamoto jacket to wear with jeans every day," she says.
Westwood maintains that her fascination for tradition is perfectly in keeping with everything she has done before. "English tailoring and tradition has been a big influence on me. It's my mark, my roots. It's not possible to have a technique without tradition. Technique is always a borrowing from what other people have done," she says.
"I do take influence from the street, but I give more influence than I take," she adds, perhaps in delayed retort to McLaren's old allegation that "Vivienne has lost touch with the street." He has gone on to merchandise pop opera while she is heavily into "Harris tweed."
On London streets today, she says. "Most of the lively kids have a hint of punk rock about them," but the energy of punk has long since fallen into the Westwoodian category of the cult. "It's a crystallizing of an earlier wave of energy. Punks now are copying the feelings and making a caricature of all the punk's motifs with longer Mohicans but with less variety. Then there is the second decade of quaint historical looks incorporating tribal messiness which is typically English and doesn't say anything new."
While she admires the work of London designers such as Leigh Bowery and Katherine Hamnett, she fears that unless "they can start producing, all that energy is going to dissipate."
For her onw part, the challenge is still to alter tradition ever so slightly in order to render it radically new. "An artist can always, by use of his materials, say something fresh," she explains.
"There is no mystique to street fashion. The great thing I've discovered is that all you have to do is follow your natural curiosity and everything's easy. I was reading anthropology books, so I started to do Third World clothes. It's as simple as that. The idea comes out of technique. It's almost personal and arbitrary what you use." She calls her own technique that of punk rock. "The idea of putting a hole underneath the armpit of a T-shirt was the punk rock mentality. That's the motif of my technique.
"I'm looking forward to putting my whole culture and heritage on an international level," she adds, defining her culture as anything from "Savile Row to the King's Road and back one thousand years to 1066." Although she is going international, as she puts it, she will continue to live and work in London and to use British fabrics.
"I was glad I couldn't find the fabrics I wanted in Italy. If the things I want are English and I can use them in an international way, then jolly good. That is something to be able to offer -- that English tradition in a high fashion way. When the French or the Italians try to do it, it always looks French or Italian. If I do it, it looks English."
England, she adds, is still a land of creative possibility. "I like to work in England for the tradition that people don't exploit. Because of its history of industry you can get things here that you can't get anywhere else, and at good value. For example -- Fair Isle knitting -- they don't do it in Italy because they work on more modern machinery. In Italy, every season they make a forecast and say we're going to do this and this, but it's possible to find more in England."
Her new collection for winter '85, already under way, will be bigger than any she has done before and will include men's wear, which she says, "I always knew I'd be good at." It will be shown in Paris and sold in Milan beginning two weeks prior to the Paris collections at prices D'Amario calls "not so cheap and not so expensive -- we don't want it to be snobby line."
Having always worked in what she calls, "such a narrow way under pressure," Westwood has had time to breathe with this collection, developing ideas conceived more than a season ago. "At the moment, every potential sort of customer is covered. It's all there; it's just a question of now one markets it," she says. D'Amario is keen to launch Westwood in the United States. "The market in the Midwest could be bigger than Japan and Europe but together," he says. He also dreams of producing a Vivienne Westwood perfume and a touring fashion show along the lines of a rock concert.
Westwood, however, is still philosophizing. She has just written an article for the London Observer on street fashion and is helping a friend write a book about the "art for art's sake movement."
"If could ever make money, I'd like to be a patron to one or two people. Any artist has to take 10 years before he has something to say," she says, returning to the importance of tradition and the working method. "Reynolds used to buy up Venetian paintings and strip them to see how they painted the light. It was a tradition, a method that had been lost."
And somewhere, in her heart of hearts, Westwood sees the Armani deal as a means to rock'n roll. "Rock 'n' roll is a universal expression. It's alive. It's alchemy, it's go Johnny go.' Elvis Presley was a truck driver by day, and he copied black rock 'n' roll by night. He changed the face of music by taking something out of the black ghetto and making it an overview, and he could do that because he was white. After that, there was no distinction between black and white Rock 'n' Roll. You couldn't put it in a box.
Fashion is about rock 'n' roll."
Paris: Vivienne Westwood.
Richard Buckley
October 25, 1985, Daily News Record
"Everything moves in cycles," designer Vivienne Westwood said during an interview last week. "Wehn fashion finally gets too bsroque, it is necessary to simplify and breathe again." To wit, her "fresh-faced," clean and tailored collection for spring/summer, which is being produced in Italy by Moditalia, a division of Ball. Shown with her women's wear, it was the run-away hit of the Paris shows last weekend. Her tailored suits and jackets must have come as a shock to the fans crowding the show, who remember Westwood as the designer, ho unleashed punk fashion on the world with her clothes for the band the Sex Pistols.
"Scruffiness is anonymous now," she explained with a shrug. "Fashion has reversed itself. The anti-establishment feeds the establishment, and to look nice and well-dressed expresses individuality now. I want them (Westwood's clientele) to look neat and proper." She said that although people may think of tailored clothing as conservative, she finds its subtleties challenging.
"By adding extra buttons or a quarter of an inch to the lapel of a jacket, it may seem that you are only changing little things, but, in fact, you change the jacket a lot." She said that her new tailored clothing takes inspiration from Dutch seamen and London Teddy Boys, while remaining within the cultural context of tailored clothing.
In speaking about her respect for the English tailored tradition of London's Savile Row, Westwood said that she examined that clothing the way you might study something in a museum case: "You can look to see how that object is made, but you can never really copy it properly because you don't have the same materials or the same technique. You can find something essential in that thing, take it, and use it to make something new. In the end, you have a vocabulary of ideas that becomes a technique."
Looking closely at Westwood's tailored garments, it is possible to see that her wacky sense of construction persists in the high rounded lapels, bit buttons and unsual shaping. She used two silhouettes for jackets and suits, which were shown in linen or printed airtex fabrics. The first was tailored close to the body with double vents. "I like that flappy feeling," she said, "like all those lawyers rushing around London with their jackets flappling behind them." The other was a flyaway skirted jacket that featured high lapels and was severely shaped at the chest.
Westwood also introduced a collection of denim and cotton jacquard jersey sportswear, sometimes combining the two fabrics in one garment that was printed in large overscaled stars and dots.
WESTWOOD WORLD
David Livingstone
November 19, 1985, Tuesday, The Globe and Mail (Canada)
THERE was a time when Vivienne Westwood, in partnership with Malcolm McLaren, was purveying, from a London shop called Seditionaries, T-shirts that depicted Snow White getting it on with the Dwarfs. In her recent Paris presentation of clothes for spring 86, Westwood sent out Snow White on her own. What gives?
If Vivienne Westwood were not who she is, a woman whose bold taste and prescience have made her perhaps the most influential designer to have emerged in the world thus far in the second half of the century, you might not be as inclined to ask. You might not suspect that in a collection, featuring frilly bloomers and short- sleeved dresses with Peter Pan collars and hooped crinolines, paraded to tunes by Stephen Foster, she was trying to get at anything.
And perhaps she wasn't. Though she contributed largely to punk, inventing the torn T-shirt as Malcolm McLaren was inventing the Sex Pistols, and though punk had in it a significant quotient of politics, Westwood has never espoused any aim larger than wanting to make people feel good.
Undeniably, the spring collection was bright and cheering. With so many other designers for spring advocating the late-night-show drag of glamorous gowns, so revealing and so fitted they would make a table dancer blush, Westwood's hooped skirts seem buoyed by fresh air. The clothes were really not reminiscent of Baby Doll, Tennessee Williams's study in retarded womanhood in which the 19-year-old bride had trouble with long division, slept in a crib, and created a collection of charming, humorous and sometimes daring garments in the hopes that some people will enjoy wearing them.
WESTWOOD'S PERCEPTIONS ON DESIGNING
David Livingstone
November 19, 1985, Tuesday, The Globe and Mail (Canada)
WHILE Vivienne Westwood is counted among the world's important designers, which she proved by presenting a spring collection more distinctive and thus more memorable than almost anybody else's, she also ranks as among the most human, an aspect that was more in evidence after the show.
At that time, among her well- wishers, Westwood is less exuberant than she appeared when, in taking her bow but minutes earlier, she did a cartwheel. Now, seeming more down to earth, she's dressed in work shirt, rolled jeans and work boots, ordinary clothes offset by the raw beauty of her brilliantly skinned, unmade-up face and hesitant smiles with which she accepts congratulations from Anna Piaggi, Italy's Vreeland, who is, in striking contrast, attired in wild skunk-like fur accessorized with shooting stars on her ears and checkerboard gloves for her hands.
In general, Westwood seems a different sort from the glamorous types who show up back stage, among them, hot illustrator/photographer Tony Viramontes; Sybille de Sant Phalle, who in the show had played superbly the curly-haired little girl but who is better known as publicist for milliner Steven Jones and a social celebrity who knows everybody; Canadian shoe designer Patrick Cox, who in the past has done shoes for Westwood but who this time performed as a model. Standing apart from the folks wondering where the party is going to be are Westwood's aunt and proud mother who, when she was a little girl, worked in a cotton mill in Northern England.
That she remains a Lancashire lass is something that admirers cite as being one of Westwood's chief charms, even now that she has won international recognition on her own.
To begin with, Westwood's initial stardom came to her as part of a pair. She and her partner, Malcolm McLaren, opened their first store in 1971 and called it Let It Rock. Eventually it was called World's End, by which time Westwood and McLaren had become English fashion's leading provokers. As McLaren grew increasingly involved with music and with managing rock performers such as Bow Wow Wow and Adam Ant, Westwood gained attention as the one who designed clothes, clothes with sufficient international following that in 1982 Bloomingdale's opened a World's End shop. However, by the end of 1983, Westwood and McLaren had parted ways personally and professionally and were involved in public squabbles over the future of their business. Westwood persisted in wanting to produce in Italy and worked as a design consultant for Fiorucci. Late in 1984 it was announced that Giorgio Armani and his partner, Sergio Galeotti, had signed a deal with Westwood to manufacture and distribute her collection. From this nothing materialized.
Galeotti, who died a few months ago, had optimistically signed the contract in hospital and was, in fact, too ill to proceed with the plan. Westwood's spring collection shown in Paris is being backed by the Italian manufacturers who also produce Ball Jeans.
This possibly explains why it could be thought of as a junior collection. This is not how Westwood herself sees it. The day after her presentation, sitting in a hotel suite that serves as showroom, Westwood, in jeans and work boots, explains that the only reason that she, at 44, is not wearing a crinoline is because the shoes for the collection (platform maryjanes) are too big for her. She says of the crinoline, "I think it's the best thing I've ever done really, and my hope for it is that this little crinoline really becomes an item, a fashion look. . . . I would really love it if it took off."
Though she has nothing against commerce, it is not simply for commercial reasons that Westwood hopes the crinoline will succeed. Although the spring collection is outrageously demure, it is a serious representation of how Westwood approaches design.
"I always like to take things that are human from the culture, but I always like to make it modern. . . . For instance, you've got these spots and stars and you've got these very giant checks. What I wanted to do was to get very, very essential things, almost cartoon things. I love Walt Disney anyway, and it's something that's so western and so much a motif of our culture, so I got very, very essential designs, the most ordinary things like a polka dot that Minnie Mouse might wear on her little skirt; but in order to make it modern I just made it giant-size, just put in space-age thinking with something that already exists, that's human. That's why it's always got a human touch, it always relates to people, and people do look strong in it, I think. . . . The wood print is also sort of like Walt Disney, and I love that dress that looks like a face with that wood print, like those trees in story books that have faces when somebody's frightened in the wood."
Indeed, the collection seems all the more light-hearted when considered in light of Westwood's many misgivings about the way of the world. Asked about British fashion, for example, she replies, "To be blunt, I think that they should look at the culture. What I think is that Britain is quite a snobby place, and that the young people there especially consider that they really are at the fulcrum of culture in England, because they think they're at the fulcrum of the rock'n'roll society and its ethic; and they think that is the culture. But in fact it's just a very young bit of something. . .
"They feel they have something to prove by being outwardly-seeming anarchic. I mean, the idea of the American image of the tough kid on the block is a very, very boring thing. It's just to put blinkers on oneself and a protection. I have no interest in that rock'n'roll culture. I certainly learned a lot about it living with Malcolm, because he really does typify it an awful lot. I think Malcolm is quite important in that way. He sums up exactly what I'm not interested in."
What Westwood does have an interest in is a definition "classic" as meaning that humankind exists at the centre of the world and in harmony with it. She regards it as an abuse of the word to use it as a synonym for conventional, an excuse for making clothes that are merely old-fashioned. For this reason, she criticizes the recent popularity of shoulder pads, popular particularly among women whom Westwood characterizes as "elegant dragon women, somebody who feels themselves more cool than Joan Collins and a little bit more understated." Because she has spent the past five months in a spa town, between Florence and Rome, she knows the type well.
"There are quite a lot of old ladies, because it's a spa, and they have these knitted sweaters, quite a lot with these paillettes and things embroidered on, and they've all got these shoulder pads in this knitwear, and the ladies are too thin, and the shoulders are kind of, you know, they shouldn't have them. Women must feel that they need to look tough in some way, even the old ones."
This is part of what Westwood considers to be the "wrong, bad thinking" of the twentieth century. Yet, for all that she sees what is dire, she believes in the power of clothes. And though she is not blind to those parts of the fashion business that are soul- destroying, dishonest and crude, she does not doubt the ideal. "Fashion must be used by people to try and demonstrate who they think they are. It's a point of contact and communication."