The shock of the nude
Vicki Woods
FASHION AND PERVERSITY: A LIFE OF VIVIENNE WESTWOOD AND THE SIXTIES LAID BARE by Fred Vermorel Bloomsbury, £16.99, pp. 256 This is a deeply shocking book; an out- rage, a scandal. I thought once I'd lived through a labour ward I'd never be shocked again, but this book shocked me. The cover shows a woman in her fifties, laughing. She is neatly dressed in hat, gloves and calf-length grey flannel coat- dress. The copious skirts of the dress are swirled about her waist; she is 'twirling' for photographers at the gates of Buckingham Palace after an investiture at which she was given the OBE. On her feet are ludicrously high platform-soled Minnie Mouse shoes, on her white, veiny legs are fine, sheer pantyhose and girded around her sturdy loins is — nothing. No knickers. Her dramatically visible pubic triangle is the dead central focus of the picture: a beauti- fully snatched shot by one luckily placed Photographer who fell to his knees, gave thanks for the opportunity and angled upwards.
The woman is Vivienne Westwood, the brilliant British designer who is consistently idolised abroad and ridiculed at home (Westwood, OH! said the tabloids next morning). It's always the way with local heroes in the poovier areas of British life. Frocks. Art. Poetry. She is idolised because of her genius: she is an original and a revo- lutionary and her ideas are relentlessly plundered and copied. (Actually, you don't use terms as crude as that in the fashion business. No one 'copies' anyone else's idea. It's rude. It's unethical. It's action- able. But they can . . . pay homage to someone's genius by cloning a single idea: Fragonard corset-bodices, for example, and sending them down the catwalk in dozens). She is ridiculed as much for her life as her work: it's been an undoubtedly rackety and bohemian life — but what do we expect of artists? She has a handsome young hus- band two decades younger (always grist to a tabloid mill), she left a 'decent' husband to live a noisy, punky life with Malcolm McLaren, the svengali of the Sex Pistols, and she tends to wear her own sexy clothes of an evening whether or not her fleshy bits are exposed.
Despite its title, this is not a life of Vivienne Westwood, more's the pity, but a meretricious hack-work, horribly badly written by a man who seems to have been earning a living (throughout 16 years of Tory education policy) by lecturing on media studies at art colleges. He is current- ly 'working on' a Guide to Researching and Writing for students, which no doubt some foolish publisher will get into print for him: there's a vast market in media studies, as every parent knows.
He divides his apology for a biography into three parts. The first section is a sort of life of Westwood, the second is a sort of life of the demented author and his Sixties friend Malcolm McLaren. The third part is a stringing together of everything in the author's word-processor (he says `vignettes' but I say the hell they are) that wouldn't fit into parts one and two, ending with a brief glance at one of Westwood's Paris shows.
The bit about Westwood's life is called 'An Imaginary Interview' — it makes the blood run cold. The author says that this is
me taking liberties with everything I can recall Vivienne saying to me over 30 years, plus what she's said in her many published interviews.
It is, he says,
in a sense 'factional', as it has some 'drama- tised' sections, but is based on what I know and on what has been documented by others. In other words, I didn't make any of it up, though you might be tempted to think so.
I wasn't tempted in the least. Out of the 40,000 words of 'imaginary interview' I recognised 1000 or so from a 1993 very real interview with Vivienne Westwood, written by Yvonne Roberts and published by Harpers & Queen in October that year. Since the magazine only bought first British rights to her article the 'quoted mat- ter remains Miss Roberts' copyright, and I urge her to hire a lawyer and sue. Do it, Yvonne, do. Somebody's got to take Bloomsbury to task for this ghastly book, and we both know poor Vivienne would never get it together. She's a genius, an inspirational revolutionary, a great design- er, a nonpareil, but her heid's full of wee motors, as they say in Glasgow.
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