Original subtitles

[dog barking]

[light jazz music]

- I think what you'll have to let me do

is not ask me, is that the first time you went to America?

Or anything like that,

I think you just let me just talk

and just get it over with, I think that's it,

and um cause if, you know if you stop and I think

oh I've got to think about that part of it now,

have I can't I just?

Do we have to cover every bit of it, you know?

Anyway you know I will get into it but it's so

boring to say all the.

[soft orchestral music]

I've got spacial intelligence.

As a child of five I could have made a pair of shoes.

It's for a pocket, that's why I drew me hand on it first.

Sometimes the question is put to me, will you ever retire?

What I say is, if people retire they do what they like,

and I'm doing what I want in the sense

that I feel I ought to do it,

but if I really could do what I want,

what I would do is I would learn Chinese.

I mean I think that that blue on there

is quite good actually, I think just for a change,

I think it's fine but the multi-color,

no not so good is it? Okay.

- And the hair, Vivienne?

- Sorry?

- And the hair, the black girl?

- No the hair looks lovely.

I like the hair.

And let's just try, how with her hair taken back,

just to see if I like that better?

I think she looks better, yeah.

- Just pushed back a little bit further?

- Yeah, no I don't like that at all.

No, take it off.

I don't remember doing this.

Fuck them, they're just disgusting,

we did such a nice thing.

What's with this tiny hem?

How did that happen?

We decided we wanted a small hem?

- Yes.

- Are you sure?

Why did I want a small hem?

- That's what I had taken in my notes, saying here.

- [Vivienne] I actually told you, put a small hem there?

I would never have said that.

- Just in the drawing it was, so I just judged.

- Well next time you make a judgment,

don't make a judgment.

Just get it into your head, I like a big rib.

I don't like this tiny rib.

It's crap, I really don't like it.

Anyway, so I don't know if I want to show any of this shit,

and I don't know what the fuck this is.

[soft acoustic guitar]

I don't know what I'm doing, it's a mess.

It's my fault, it's just not good.

- [Andreas] I think you should not do this thing.

- I don't want to do it anymore, but what do we do?

What do we about it?

Who does do it?

Let's just close the company.

It's quite interested at doing it next season but,

when I look at that,

I don't know why it turned out not good.

I like the princess coats.

Anyway I'm just totally bored talking about this,

but you need it, so I'll tell you.

From the age of 11, 12, I made my own clothes.

When I was little I saw a picture of the crucifixion,

and it really did change my life.

And I thought to myself,

my parents, they've been deceiving me.

They've told me all about baby Jesus but they

never told me what happened to him.

And I just thought, I can't trust the people in this world,

I've got to find out for myself,

this kind of thing can't happen.

I did feel that I had to be like a knight to stop

people doing terrible things to each other.

And I think that that's had something to do with

my fashion clothes as well, it's always got to be that.

You know you've got to cut a figure

and be prepared for action,

and engagement, with things.

[solemn orchestral music]

And just before I was 17, my art teacher Mister Bell,

he had the idea that I should go to art school.

I stayed at art school for the term only,

because we were so working class,

it was like, how am I going to earn my living?

And so then I thought, I know,

I will go to teacher training college

and take art as my main subject

and I'll try to be an artist.

And then if I can't be an artist I can be a school teacher.

And that's what I decided to do.

We had bee hives then, 60's was coming,

white shoes, oh God I loved them.

With little lace-ups, like a nurse.

Oh they were, they were fantastic.

Rock and roll was just starting,

and as a teenager and wanted to do what

all the other teenagers were doing,

that's where I met Derek Westwood in the end, yeah.

He was a great dancer, that Derek, a very good dancer.

- [Announcer] Back from their honeymoon,

she and Tim are headed for a life

of wedded bliss, they think.

- I grew up with the idea that you're

supposed to stay with one man,

you're supposed to find the one man.

What we were actually living was the American Dream,

the housewife all smiling, all lovely little hair style

and crisp with an apron on and everything,

and hubby comes home,

and he's got ideal family and somehow that's it,

that's all you see.

But the American dream stops there.

I just realize, no no, it's all a load of old rubbish,

what a lot of old bollocks that is.

Somehow I had to explore, I had to get out.

I got married when I was 21, and had Ben at 22,

and Derek and I split up and mostly because

I was not my fulfilling my potential to

understand something about the world.

- I remember Malcolm turning up.

I sort of remember my and mother and Malcolm

from when I was about five.

I remember,

we used to live in a flat in The Oval,

near the cricket ground.

And Malcolm was very hot-headed and quite young,

and he didn't want children around him,

he didn't have much patience for us.

- I stopped teaching, I had two children, Joe and Ben.

Anyway Joe was Malcolm's son and he was born,

Malcolm was ill,

and I looked after him and that's how

it all began, I didn't want him at all,

but I felt that I've misled him by being too kind to him,

and when I had Joe I wanted to have an abortion,

and I really wasn't happy at all,

and one day I suddenly realized,

this man is gold, what am I doing?

We went to Compendium Book Shop.

We went to the Marxist shop in Chinatown.

He came from a Jewish family,

they knew the world.

I was really a woman on a mission.

Because I knew I was stupid,

and I had to discover what was going on in the world.

[rock and roll music]

Malcolm had the idea of buying up

these old rock and roll records,

and he thought that he could sell them to trendy people.

My favorite shop, Mister Freedom,

was at 430 Kings Road, that's still my shop.

That shop has got really a lot of history,

it was the first this, the first that.

Anyway, it wasn't doing very well,

so the shop manager invited us

to have the back half of the shop,

to sell our records in.

I borrowed some money off my mother,

a hundred pound.

And um, that's when we started also making clothes.

We called it, Let It Rock.

Every time we changed the name of the shop,

we changed the clothes, you know?

It's like doing a new collection each time.

Malcolm had the idea that we were going to

confront the establishment through sex,

because he said, England is the home of the flasher.

His slogan was, Rubber Wear for the Office.

Was very clever, Malcolm, literarily and everything,

except he never read anything.

Why the hell does anybody need this?

Can't you get a bit of old footage or something?

No you can't, no you can't, I know that.

Anyway,

he was interested in those 50's pin ups,

where you've got girls who are just there,

they've just been washed up by a ship wreck on the beach,

and they're all torn, you know?

I'm wearing something torn right now,

it's really great this,

I'll get up later on, it's all got this torn edge, love it.

- [Interviewer] Shall we jump to the Sex Pistols,

and how they came about?

- No no, I can't be bothered with them, either.

I don't know what we're going to do.

Really, if I've got to talk about the Sex Pistols.

- Have you finished?

- This is the Destroy Muslin tee shirt.

It's one of the most important pieces

that Westwood and McLaren created.

The, the garment is made from muslin.

The sleeves,

are very long and they fold back and then,

this would clip on to here,

so making it

more wearable, but the notion of distortion

of the sleeves,

it reminds one a little bit of a straight jacket.

But it's really all about the imagery.

So here you've got a swastika,

an inverted crucifix,

the word 'destroy', and then lyrics for Sex Pistols,

I'm an Antichrist.

And what Westwood and McLaren were doing

with these punk garments was confronting society.

- We invented punk.

Malcolm had just come back from America.

He'd been managing The New York Dolls,

and he put together a group, a pop group,

from our Saturday boy Glen, and a couple of our costumers,

and Johnny Rotten was quite a phenomenon,

and he hasn't changed

from being that phenomenon unfortunately.

He should have changed to something else by now.

Now then, my favorite shop is the World's End Shop,

and we still sell stuff we designed at the time of punk.

- Actually they look good on you.

They do look good on you.

- [Vivienne] And every time I design something,

it has to have a story, it's got a character.

I think that that story is part of a kind of a nostalgia

that people can tap into.

I mean things like this are reminiscent

of Greek peasant costumes, this little kilt,

and um, like the tartan,

for this jacket and everything,

and it's got, it's got an old sort of feeling to it,

a little bit to do with rather sort of bandits

in the countryside, that kind of thing,

something that you might have seen

at the Battle of Culloden, something like that.

And I just think that 'cause it's got such content in there,

and such a way to connect with the human expression,

you know, how you walk, how you talk,

you know, how you attract people,

and I just think that that's why my clothes are timeless.

- [Woman] Dame Vivienne Westwood.

This is a lady whose global popularity knows no bounds,

a Dame who personifies the powerful and subversive

originality of British fashion.

Ladies and gentlemen, may we present,

Dame Vivienne Westwood.

[upbeat orchestral music]

[audience applauding and cheering]

- There's Vivienne, you know,

the fashion designer,

there is Vivienne, the campaigner,

and there is Vivienne the person, you know.

I like them all, ever such a lot.

But I really like Vivienne, the person.

I don't know why.

I'm so,

there is this word love, you know?

In love with her?

I really don't know.

I really don't know.

I just, I don't know,

you know you speak about the love of your life and,

I don't know is it,

was it lucky?

Was it not lucky, I don't know.

- [Photographer] Nice, yes.

- [Andreas] It has never changed.

If anything, it became stronger and stronger, the bond.

I like everything about her,

the smell, the way the hair falls,

to every millimeter of her little body, everything.

- The best compliment I can pay Andreas,

is that I actually like living with him

as much as being on my own.

I accepted a teaching job,

first in Austria,

because I did need the money.

The line is under the bust,

and then, it's coming up here, in between.

And it's where I met Andreas.

And then Andreas came with a group of students

from Vienna to England,

at the time when I was doing a fashion show.

Of course I gave them seats to watch this fashion show,

they were my students.

And at the end of it, Andreas,

I thought he was really cheeky,

he didn't say it was great,

he gave me the idea that there was

a lot of room for improvement.

He stayed and he worked on the next collection.

- It was the old studio,

and she just let me live there.

Dirty old place.

Every night when once they left,

I would, you know, get out this piece of leopard fur,

under a table, and sleep on it on the floor,

you know, all this mess.

I even had fleas at one point.

But it was very romantic and it was,

and this place was full of cardboard boxes,

and in these cardboard boxes

was all the archive and clothes,

and I would study them and you know,

soon as everybody was gone I would open them up

and look at these things and

you know I sometimes would actually wear them,

and go out in them.

It was fantastic.

Yeah, it was heaven, it was the real thing,

it was the thing I always wanted, I just felt so happy.

I never went back.

- What is it?

It's changing before me eyes anyway

I don't know what--

- It's a square, the back, the front is a simple square,

which is just draped a little bit.

On the front, just a bit of nothing,

it's just thrown on you a bit of cloth.

- [Vivienne] He straight away started telling us what to do.

- Here, or it can just be here, it's just a little square.

- It's an apron or a dress?

- It's an apron, but if I pin it in the back.

- [Vivienne] He's so passionate about things,

that you just have to do what he says.

The people who had worked with me for quite a bit

were very suspicious of him

and he had to be careful and they're just thinking,

who does he think he is?

Telling us to do this that and the other.

But they soon began to realize how talented he was,

and so we all went along with it.

- I suppose I have to be honest and say

I think in the beginning I was quite suspicious of

Andreas because, who's this fucking guy?

I mean he looks a bit kind of gay and he's,

I don't know, he kind of wants to marry my mum

and he's half her age and,

you know what's all this about?

But all I can is that,

over the years that they've been married,

it's been a huge relief to me,

that has allowed me not to have to worry

about my mum at all, because I know that he's,

he's absolutely besotted by her,

and um, you know thinks of her and her wellbeing,

and looks after her in many ways.

And that was a really nice relief, actually.

- People didn't like you for being a punk.

We wanted to undermine the establishment.

The swastika, all these things meant we don't

accept the values of this older generation.

We hate it, we want to destroy it, we don't want it.

We were, it was youth against age, that's what it was.

But it had affected fashion such a lot,

the hair styles even,

my spiky hair was in vogue one one month later.

And I realized that you weren't really

attacking the system at all.

It was being marketed all the time.

I just realized that the real marketing opportunity

was that the English society could claim

how democratic and how free they were

that somehow kids could revolt as much as that.

In fact we weren't attacking the establishment,

we were just part of the distraction.

- So this fantastic ensemble is from the pirate collection,

and it's one of the first pieces that the

V and A acquired from Vivienne Westwood.

It was from a time when the shop

had become known as World's End,

and Vivienne was experimenting with historical dress.

- Like the snake print tunic,

or the square-toed shoes.

She'll take an idea and then chew it over,

and shake it and shake it,

and come up with the most extraordinary results.

- The whole collection was absolutely joyful,

it was a kind of repost to the darkness of punk.

She was introducing color and pattern,

huge voluminous shirts,

clothing that was worn by both men and women,

clothing that was not about sexual identity,

but was simply about enjoyment of life.

[funk rock music]

- I didn't consider myself a fashion designer at all,

but I realized that I was very talented,

and I felt that I wanted people to know

that the stuff that was on the Paris catwalk

had come from me.

And I just thought I must get the benefit of this,

I must enter this business world

and start to really sell the clothes

and present them to journalists

and be a fashion designer.

I realized that I could be.

- [Interviewer] What is a self-confessed fashion anarchist

doing in bourgeois Paris anyway?

- You have to go where you have to go,

you have to do what you have to do,

and I certainly don't want to be underground,

I want to be at a place of the most focus that I can find.

Malcolm became very jealous of me,

when I did fashion and he went into the music business.

And he used to always pretend that everything was him.

And I stayed with Malcolm

because I respected him

and had an incredible loyalty to him,

but there came a point where I sort of completely

outran Malcolm, he'd stopped really.

His thinking had kind of stayed where it was.

So I got intellectually bored with Malcolm.

- Malcolm split from my mum,

and he was horrible when he left.

He was all full of tension, jealousy and,

I don't know, just wanted, he was just one of them sort of

people that when they, something changes like that

in their life, particularly I think because Vivienne

had decided that it was over.

She couldn't bear it any longer,

and so he just turned into a really horrible, spiteful

phase in his, trying to smash everything up,

which he sort of did.

At a certain point it all sort of turned to dust,

you know.

And so he went off to Los Angeles to be

this kind of movie producer, kind of thing,

you know and Mister Big Bollocks,

and we were left in Clapham trying to pick up the pieces.

[dog barking]

- Andreas and I work together.

We both work on the fashion.

And he's been amazing.

There's an awful lot of work needed

from a fashion designer, and Andreas does the half of it.

When you do a dress you've got to work out

how to do everything, there's every little decision.

You do it more than once.

Make her bust smaller, I always keep asking.

Maybe it's got so small because she's losing weight.

You do one first, then you make it up in the real fabric.

- Yeah, a little bit of padding is nice.

- [Vivienne] A little bit of what?

- Shoulder pads.

- Then you decide how you're going to sew it.

All the time you're trying it on people.

- What do you think, Vivienne?

- [Vivienne] It's really good now that you've done that.

- There is something here.

- He needs me all the time.

I consider myself at this point in time, as his reference,

call it muse, I'm there to say yes or no or,

I don't think we should be doing that.

I think it would be much better if we,

if we tried it this way or whatever, this kind of thing.

- Honestly, everybody knows Vivienne.

Vivienne, Vivienne, Vivienne.

My real first shock

when I first met them back in 2010,

was the way that she was working with Andreas,

at that time, 2010, or even before, since he arrived,

nobody knew.

That was my real first shock.

It was like, wow, I thought that she was the designer,

she was deciding everything, no.

She was working like 50-50 with him.

- Good.

- [Vivienne] Do you think so?

- Yeah.

- 'Cause it needs something in the back.

I don't like it all see-through.

- [Andreas] She can have knickers on.

- Well she's got knickers on,

I just don't like to see the knickers.

- [Andreas] I think there's a tiny bit of cotton taff.

- [Vivienne] I mean that's what you want,

that's exactly what you need, a bit of cotton taffeta.

- Vivienne and Andreas work in a very particular way,

and I think it's a very old fashioned way,

but it's really how the great couturiers have always worked.

They work with their hands.

You know, they work on the body.

It's very physical, Vivienne's clothes really

have a rapport with the body as a result.

- She's really an old-style teacher.

He is a mess,

like a proper student art mess,

which from the mess, from the chaos, he can create.

[light orchestral music]

- I like to give my best and

I question what I do constantly.

Of course there are days where I'm quite content

and maybe happy with who I am or what I've done,

but most of the time, not.

I'm really,

it's hard work.

- [Vivienne] I don't know, I mean it quite suits

this sort of business suit she's got on to start with.

- But if something cleaner, then maybe?

- No I don't know, but what's her second,

I mean I quite like her hair scruffy as it is.

- I thought we did like a weird Marilyn version

in like the scruffed up be quite interesting

as well on her.

- Yeah I love that.

- A little cardigan and drapey trousers.

- Ah, if she's got that. - Like a jogging thing.

- All right that's nice,

then the clothes are all right with that.

No, that's her first look, that one.

Okay so we have to get this outfit for Grace

and what I wanted to do,

somebody should tell her, or I'll tell her,

I'm changing her outfit where is she?

I'll find her.

Oh and we've got to change your hair.

I'm going back to change your hair, where is he?

Changing the hair.

- Everyone in this area,

you don't need to be standing around here, move back.

If you're a dresser stand right next to your rail.

[soft jazz music]

[crowd cheering]

- Carlo is funny, I mean I don't know,

Carlo used to have a business that was selling carpets,

and second hand watches, and cars and things,

kind of hippy trader kind of guy.

- I just happened to need to stay in Italy

because that's where I was,

the producers were, and I was designing in a space there,

and working with this factory at, to begin with.

- When I was 22 I was living in Rome,

and then she was working in an Italian,

in a factory near Florence.

This factory was producing the Mini-Crini collection,

and then when she went to Paris to do the collection

I helped and I remember being on the train

with all the kind of final pieces

that had been done at the last minute,

and I was sleeping on the seats.

And then the show you know suddenly

there was this show in Paris and it was just mind blowing.

The most beautiful things.

And all the spot shirts and

it was unlike anything else.

it was so, really being part of that

you really felt like you were at the,

you know it was something germinating

and it just kept on and on.

And yes it was wonderful.

- Carlo had got a couple of

really good opportunities for me,

but they were destroyed by Malcolm,

saying, you can't work with this woman, she's my partner.

Your agreement with her is totally rubbish.

You're wasting your money, you know,

I'm going to take you to court.

It was that, I'd forgotten Malcolm by then.

- When those things fell through,

I found myself back in England,

and at that point I had to go and get social security,

I didn't have any money at all.

- I think we got a loan from my grandmother,

Vivienne's mother Dora,

because The World's End Shop had just been closed for

don't know, a year and a half, two years,

something like that.

But the landlords hadn't rented it to anybody else,

it was just still sitting there,

and even had a bit of stock still left in the back.

- My grandfather had just died,

and my grandmother was at a loose end,

so she came down to London, so this was 1985.

She came down to London and she worked here.

She'd worked in her own shop before

so she knew what she was doing.

- [Joe] And Vivienne also started to make a few things

on her old sewing machine again, to put in the store.

- I had a driving license and a car,

so I used to go and do, pick up the rolls of fabric,

and go to shirt-makers and go to,

the tailor up in Camden town.

- And we opened the store again,

and even when we opened the store

for the first three months it had no electric in it,

because that was all cut off and was trying to

light the store with candles and you know?

- I went back to London and then I started as her assistant.

Malcolm would behave really badly

and he'd made it very very difficult for her,

and she just carried on working,

she was working from her flat,

and it was just the two of us for a while.

Then Murray started working,

and all sorts of people came

but that was way before Andreas.

- I was 23 and I was a very young sort of 23, I guess.

And I was so honored to be, sort of,

it was a big deal for me.

It was in Camden town.

Carlo D'Amario used to call it Bombay.

It was really great, it was above an old carpet shop.

It was really rancid, really rickety and old,

and I loved it.

[soft jazz music]

- You know the people that were involved,

it was as if they discovered the meaning of life,

and it was the meaning of life

and it's funny how clothes can be so emotional,

the making of these, these things that you put on,

and they make you able to face the world,

and in a kind of you know spectacular way.

- I had a success to start with,

but the way it works is that when you are new

and you do something new,

then everybody's on to you,

of they've discovered this new thing,

and they all want to discover you all at the same time.

Then, you just get left,

and they want to know what's the next latest thing,

that's how the English press treated me.

I was always treated well in Italy.

- I know every time you do a collection they say,

crikey, Viv's blown it, don't they? [laughter]

They say Viv's blown it,

we don't know whether Viv's blown it this time

because this is the new collection, what's it called?

- Well I'd like to describe it,

it's called Time Machine.

- Time Machine, here we go.

Tell us about this one then.

When she started, people mocked her.

Are people supposed to laugh?

I mean they're laughing. [laughter]

- I remember when she was on the Terry Wogan Show,

everyone laughed, I mean they didn't show the audience which

was literally everyone was over about 80.

- If they don't stop laughing,

I shall tell the next person not to come on.

- [Host] Oh dear, you're not to laugh.

Is this a winter collection?

- Yeah,

and I've never met this response before.

- It's like Vivienne had been invited

on the show to be a joke.

It was like she almost had to justify herself.

- You design these clothes, not because they're witty,

but because you believe they are attractive

and they make people more attractive?

- Yeah, that's it, yeah.

- It was really made me furious,

but she didn't give a fuck.

She came out in the end and she said,

oh that was just the best

reaction I've had since punk.

- And on that note, we haven't upset you have we?

- No, no.

- Not in the least.

- Listen I don't mind, in fact I'm quite pleased,

but I usually don't get that kind of reaction,

it's a bit strange.

- Get this reaction, ladies and gentlemen,

Vivienne Westwood.

[audience applauding and cheering]

- But there was loads and loads of that,

where she was always considered this sort of joke, you know,

and in the end they couldn't ignore her anymore.

[classical orchestral music]

- I can't remember at what point the company

became successful, but eventually it did.

I'm still not happy with my company because

at this point in time,

it's actually expanded too much for me.

Just the stripes are wrong,

that's why it's not fastened.

I'm in danger of not being able to control

everything properly,

and I certainly don't need to sell anything I don't like.

I don't know who's in charge of this kind of thing.

Who's going to tell the factory that this is unacceptable,

that's what I want to know,

I don't even know who is going to tell them.

- Don't worry, I'll find out.

- It's very lucky we tried it on,

otherwise nothing would have happened with this.

I need to reduce my product,

and I'm having to sort of pull it back

and rework things all the time,

so that nothing gets left,

so it gets tacky or it's done

in not a good way, or something.

And therefore I don't want to expand because that,

that means I can't you know look after the problem

that's close to me, well enough,

'cause I've got too many things to deal with.

- This is Marcia who of course hasn't been

introduced properly.

- Yeah, hello Marcia, I see.

- So she now is responsible I've found for

selling this collection.

- Wait a minute Marcia, did you sell it to Gregor yesterday?

- Yes we did.

- 'Cause he said you didn't know anything,

the person who didn't know your name,

but he said she didn't understand the collection at all,

so that's you, so now I've interrupted.

What do you want to tell me, Murray?

- I just wanted to introduce you.

I mean I've been working with Marcia today,

she's getting a lot more informed now.

- Okay, and it's probably not your fault at all,

you know, I mean but because--

No no, it's not just that, it's just that

the connections aren't here.

- The company has grown, it has become very big

and she can't just press a button and undo all that.

She's got a duty to support the people who are here,

who have worked for her.

And it's very difficult to just,

undo some of those decisions that have been made,

not by her, by the way.

- You know, I don't know anything

about the marketing people, as I've said,

I don't know what they do.

I don't know what information they need from me.

Maybe there should be some way that these people

start to understand early on

what they're doing with the collection.

I'm really really you know just so frustrated

as to trying to find out what the heck they're doing,

I mean they're wandering about doing I think, damage.

I really don't know and I'm still of that opinion.

I still haven't found out what they do.

They explain to me ever so patiently always

what they do, and I come away and I don't know

what they've been talking about really.

- I think some things were not exactly how she

had envisaged them.

And we are tweaking the concept,

which is a normal thing.

A company has to have some kind of growth plan,

but it's not about world domination.

It is about your visibility as a brand.

- [MC] We're honored ma'am that you are able

to be with us this evening,

to present the 1990 Designer of the Year award.

- That fashion industry was so against her from day one,

they never liked her,

and they didn't like to see her kind of come up.

You know it was embarrassing going to those

fashion award things where they kept giving out

the Designer of the Year to everybody else apart from her.

- Well, the winner, Vivienne Westwood.

[audience cheering and applauding]

- [MC] Designer of the Year couldn't have gone to

anyone else this year other than Vivienne Westwood.

The designers have made their thoughts known

over the last couple of days,

and the fashion press have positively demanded it.

- Good evening everyone.

- I think as a designer, she's a loose cannon really.

Fashion needs continuity, and an actual design philosophy,

which I don't think she has.

- [Interviewer] But is she good?

- Not in my opinion, no.

- [Joe] It just was a joke, you know.

And in the end they had to give it to her twice in a row,

because it was so fucking embarrassing for them.

- And it's my pleasure to announce that

the Designer of the Year is,

oh dear, Vivienne Westwood.

[audience applauding and cheering]

- [MC] So far no designer has been awarded

Designer of the Year twice in a row,

but Vivienne Westwood celebrated here tonight,

for her awesome contribution to the British

and international fashion arena.

Long may they last.

- The best thing about winning this award

is a personal thing, the fact that one is appreciated.

- It's regarded as something of a disgrace

in the fashion industry that it's taken

20 years for Vivienne Westwood

to be given wider recognition,

and now that she has,

that no financial sponsors had the courage to back her.

- Bring it up and perhaps above the head.

It's nice and happy.

- So I don't know at what point my company was a success,

and I think what it, I would remember when it,

when it did become a success it's true.

At one point we closed our Davis Street shop

to give it a coat of paint and we took a temporary shop

in Conduit Street,

but we really started to make a lot of money

because we were on the track where people passed,

we weren't out of the way.

And then sales increased and we we built it up

from the real business of actually selling clothes.

- [News Reporter] Designer and activist

Dame Vivienne Westwood joined Greenpeace today,

south of the North Pole, aboard the ship Esperanza.

Alongside scientists, she'll be observing

the impact of climate change on the arctic environment.

- About 6 or 7 years ago I read in The Guardian

an article by this amazing scientist, James Lovelock,

and he said he thought by the end of this century,

the 21st century,

he thought there would be one billion people left.

You know it just shocked me so much.

It just froze me and I was traumatized,

so I realized that this environmental problem

was of incredible consuming urgency,

the human race facing mass extinction,

and then of course the point is

what can we do to save ourselves?

Throughout my life all my motivation has been

because I've been so upset about what can happen

to people in the world and I've always been so lucky.

So everything became the urgent need

to save the environment.

- So Vivienne came down today.

We've got this big climate march on the 21st of September,

I know it clashes in with Fashion Week.

She wants banners done.

The deadline is the 18th and was wondering,

was wondering if you could kindly let your interns help us?

They need to be there by the 18th.

- [Woman] How many do you need?

- [Woman] Ten really big beautiful fracking banners.

- That's quite a lot.

- That is, that's what I mean, I feel really bad.

- I'm going to put democracy shining

over the top like rays of light,

because we don't have any democracy in England.

- We have a different approach in that she always

likes to give it this meaning,

and she likes when clothes have this message, which I

think is good or not good I'm not sure.

I'm sometimes bored by it but then she shouldn't hear that.

I'm not very much bothered about this you know?

It just needs to look good and and

and and I need to like it and I'm happy with it.

- She cares deeply whether she's going to be

able to change the world,

to make it a better place.

We're looking at everything we do and trying

to do less, but the most sustainable thing you could do

is shut the company down perhaps,

but actually of course we are employing a lot of people and

and it's you've got to do it in a more

sustainable way, that's the answer really.

- This is the most amazing thing

I've ever thought of or said.

The awful rotten financial system is the enemy,

it's like the hydra.

Don't start chopping off,

I shouldn't mention chopping heads now

but we've got to kill the machine that is destroying us.

The only way to kill the machine,

is to change to a green economy,

which is a rich economy, a fair economy,

so if we could get everybody to switch

to a green energy company,

it would be the first step in the green economy.

- Here, there is so many things going on here.

There is like meetings, meetings, and meetings.

Company meetings, the bags meeting, shoes meetings.

And Vivienne she keeps herself super-busy

with the climate revolution and all the appointments

and the meetings that she have, NGO,

blogs, website, so--

Maybe the collection can be done in three days.

- I don't know.

Let's see how.

- This is so important to realize,

to have a perspective on what is going on on our planet.

[crowd cheering]

- [MC] Thank you, Vivienne Westwood.

- To really hurry up now,

because now to cancel it is,

hari kari number five.

We work on it, we don't even look at it.

It's not good.

- Andreas has been having such a hard time.

He's so tired,

really and he's so upset.

Because it's just such a hard work and he

hasn't had much help from me and that's

made a big difference.

You know we used to do it together,

but now I'm depending on him to do it

mostly on his own really,

and it's too much for him.

It's really terrible anyway so he's,

he's getting exhausted.

- Everything, everything I asked you was not done.

They had no socks on.

I don't know why people don't go downstairs

and get some socks from the shop.

I mean it's just they're five people.

- No, that's true there was no socks,

and they were all-

- But they're downstairs.

One flight of stair down there are some socks.

- But they all mix from the gold label most of them.

- What do you mean mixed?

We had no socks.

You had 10 pairs of socks you tried all the fitting on.

- And they were spring/summer.

- This I don't care.

You just need to go downstairs in the shop

and get the socks.

I mean that's just thick.

Useless.

I do it myself next time.

- For the socks?

- For everything.

Anyway, you can go.

Do your washing.

- Okay.

- They're all in plastic bags.

Everything in see-through plastic bags.

- You've just to think, I've got a few seconds,

and I'm just going to look great,

and in your head it should be everybody loves me,

and I'm for today I'm being grown up,

because I'm wearing rather grown up clothes.

- Okay.

- And you can be a bad child if you want as well,

if you want.

- You see a fashion show and of course

you got the make up, you got the crazy hair,

but at the same time, we want to try to sell them.

So the day after,

we have what is that the presentation,

to all our managers from London, Paris, Milan,

LA, New York, and our partner which they come from,

Japan, Taiwan, China, South Korea,

and who else knows better the collection than

Vivienne and Andreas?

Nobody else.

- Excuse me,

either come or go please,

either sit down or fuck off yourselves.

Listen our shops,

I decided that

I want this company to be one that

sells only things that I like

and unfortunately it's expanded so quickly

and I'm awfully suspicious that our expansion

has been based more on quantity rather than quality.

I don't, I'm not interested in the money, sorry.

And I know you are but this is what I want,

I want people to buy the best that we've got

and build their customers and not expanding.

Anyway so,

that's not Andreas is it, Andreas?

- You continue.

- Sorry?

- [Andreas] You continue.

- No no, I won't, I was waiting for you.

- [Andreas] But it's not my job to speak

in front of all these people.

- Well I thought it was, that's what we've been waiting for.

Well, whose job is it then?

- The sales people.

- Okay.

- I don't know where the sales people are.

Who sells this collection?

- Well last season we did it ourselves and they're

probably expecting us to do it again so there we are.

Anyway, what I really love the feeling of

poverty about these things, the neutral color,

and it's not in your face

it's just the woman. - It's just not prepared.

Crazy.

- Looks absolutely great, sorry.

Okay, so there in the collection,

there were one or two things

we didn't show, because they didn't work.

I've just got to make sure that we take them

out of what's on the rails, and in the selling book.

Anyway.

- [Andre] She is a dress designer, and she's an activist.

She's passionate about other issues

other than just putting a dress on.

What I'm very surprised is,

and I think it's the height of elegance,

is that on this day

when she is opening a store in Manhattan,

Vivienne has chosen not to fly across the pond,

and she's sitting at home working her thesis

about global warming or capitalism.

She's very concerned about our planet.

- I'm having a rave of a time.

I've sorted the whole company out.

I've got everybody doing what I want.

The plan is we've got to work with the designers,

that's what's been wrong.

I can't believe when I'm looking into it,

there's shops worldwide.

How many pairs of fucking plastic shoes we sell

and all that stuff.

I can't believe it,

and of course I'm the designer

and I've got total control

because I cannot just say look,

if I don't like the design,

then you can't I do it if I don't like my own designs,

I can't give them to you, I've got artistic control.

I mean it's very very simple.

[dramatic orchestral music]

- I always wondered what it would have looked like

with a black ceiling.

I always wanted a black ceiling.

Andreas won't do it.

I always like to try it and see if it works.

Hello hello Simone.

I'm alright thank you.

I haven't made my mind up about the shop yet,

I'm just only--

- We just love everything here.

- I've got to make my mind up.

I'm in the process of absorbing it at the moment.

It must stop growing,

but it's very very difficult to do that.

But we've been trying to open a shop in Paris

for the last ten years.

That doesn't mean to say we're expanding,

that was in the plan before,

and there's no reason to break that,

but then Carlo my manager was planning

to open a shop in Beijing and I've stopped that.

- [Pepe] She wasn't happy design-wise,

even to say she hates it.

- I hate the music.

- [Pepe] It doesn't feel like Westwood, but at the same time

not even Vivienne Westwood or Andreas

even knows where they are now.

That shop, it reflect

maybe even the problem we got inside,

because we have a problem,

it's like being a family where you got the drunk aunty,

you got the gay uncle.

It go you know the crazy kids.

You have this big family

and you can't control them altogether,

but at least we're still working on it.

- It's very difficult but everything we do

has got to be solved in a different way,

in order to slowly get to this point and,

I don't know, it's, it's really really difficult

to get from here to there, that's all.

But we're slowly doing it.

- [News Reporter] The fashion world is honored

with an OBE going to the flamboyant fashion designer,

Vivienne Westwood.

- People were very impressed by it,

all the people who work with me,

are very pleased because they feel

that they share in it, really.

- There were a few things

that I thought were milestones I suppose.

One one was when we bought

the building for the head office.

That was quite a milestone because it felt like,

right, well we we kind of own that now.

I decided I couldn't work with Carlo.

It was had to be one or the other of us,

and my mum had decided that she needed him,

which hurt a bit, I but I also felt I was young enough,

and I was kind of at the time

when I wanted to go and do something for myself anyway.

But before I left, the one thing that I made her do,

was sign this license deal with a Japanese company,

'cause I know the minimum royalties on this contract,

she'll be okay.

Carlo hadn't wanted her to sign this deal,

and I made her sign the deal

in the lawyers in front of Carlo and everyone.

You've got to sign this, and after she'd done that

I felt she was gonna be all right.

- You're going to take this

and show it to Martina at whatever stage,

and get that sorted out,

and I've got to tell you which mesh to use.

There won't be any more pleats there,

because this one is the one that just comes anyway

in the way the fabric's cut, there's no folding there.

- It's very nice.

- Yeah, I think it's going to look great,

just going to put it on Kate Moss.

She'll look lovely in it.

Okay, so I'll give that to you.

- Thank you.

- Do you want to take this corset with you, as well?

- And the corset as well.

[audience applauding]

- Those shows, they were so outrageous,

you know champaign was flowing,

and we'd go out naked and lollipops and,

you know, just outrageous, but really

glamorous at the same time.

They were the ones that went,

ah oh my God, it was so exciting.

- That's part of my history,

which is fun, I've got the shoes.

There was a pair in the museum in London.

I got an insurance commercial out of it.

You know, it's done well for Vivienne and I, both.

- She's a rebel isn't she so,

which attracts me.

Coming from Croydon, we wanted to get out

and she was like our queen.

[crowd cheering]

[Ravel's "Bolero"]

- Provocative, beautiful, respectful.

It's hard to imagine that one designer

could be all of those things.

- I love her femininity, I love everything she do,

and she's not so young, and she still can wear fashion,

and she's never ridiculous.

She's one of the only one, I think.

- She's iconic,

and she's at the top of her game,

she's so authentic.

And you know she's on this planet for a reason,

to stir it up a little bit.

[crowd cheering]

[Ravel's "Bolero"]

- She's a punk rocker.

She's the only punk rocker.

- I can't be bothered.

Who wants to listen to all this stuff?

I mean the film's only a certain length,

I'm sure there's more interesting things to put on to it.

[jazz rock music]

- I remembered the shows,

but I can't remember which one,

and we were back stage and she went,

Kate, you know I've never been into girls,

I could have got into you,

and then like hugged me.

She was like, I could have been her only lesbian lover.

Kaching!

- You know Vivienne is very outspoken person,

sometimes too outspoken, silly outspoken.

She knows it,

but you need people like this,

these are the people who are changing things.

[jazz rock music]

- [Vivienne] What's his name?

- [Man] Tiny, Tiny Tempah.

- [Vivienne] Tiny Tempah?

- [Man] Yes.

- But I'm a quite well-known musician but.

- Yeah, I'm sure 'cause I just don't follow

pop things, you know. - Yeah, I understand,

I understand.

- Tiny Tempah is that.

- Tiny Tempah, correct.

- [Vivienne] I'm very good on lyrics you know and sound

bytes and that.

- [Tiny] Inspiration.

- [Vivienne] Yes, yeah.

[soft orchestral music]