The Barmy One

Vivienne Westwood in a brilliant world of her own.

The Guardian, 1997

Last month in Milan, Dora Swire, a small, fit 83-year-old, talked of how her daughter really hadn’t changed much over the years. ‘When she was a girl she was like she is now, only small,’ she observed. ‘She’s become cleverer. She was always stubborn, inquisitive and bossy. I have two other children, just as important’.

Her other children are not quite as famous or influential as Vivienne Westwood, 57, and they do not invite their mother to catwalk shows or perfume launches. Indeed that very morning Dora Swire had sat among fashion buyers and press as Westwood unveiled next year’s spring/summer menswear collection, the usual dynamite parade of grandeur, farce and painted flesh inspired by paganism, the rustic idyll, Aristotle and the commedia dell’arte: in other words, men with very big penises wore straw shirts and jerkins with holes in.

Dora Swire loved it all, and it helped her forget that British Airways had lost all her own clothes the previous day. Consequently she was wearing a Westwood-branded teeshirt, and talked of how she’d like to wear more of her daughter’s gear but was now too fat.

She sounded like Vivienne: Derbyshire vowels pushed as flat as they go, and then pushed softly through a slightly mean mouth – a good combination for ticking people off. She said she wished people would just forget about the Sex Pistols and her ‘rubberwear for the office’, and would remember that her daughter had done things since, by which she meant pirate gear, ethnic wear, the mini-crini, the rocking-horse shoe, the immaculate tartans and tweeds, the kilts and ballgowns – creations that now hang in public galleries and have been ripped off by any designer with even half a sense of what’s good for them.

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