A model of this text was printed on 6 March 2018:
For a lady who has altered the course of trend so inexorably, Vivienne Westwood is surprisingly disinterested with the trimmings of the business that made her identify. Or, if disinterested is too robust a phrase – in spite of everything, her collections, created each below her personal identify and thru the road which is now helmed by her husband Andreas Kronthaler, proceed to reverberate along with her defiant power – then it’s honest to say she is preoccupied with larger issues. And one factor specifically: saving the world.
It’s a job she has approached with a steely decision, her uncompromising outlook belying the general public notion of the designer as Britain’s amenable, eccentric dame; memorable moments embody impersonating Margaret Thatcher on the duvet of Tatler, driving a white tank to David Cameron’s constituency in protest of fracking, and shaving her head as a reminder to the world to get up to local weather change. Behind the theatre, nonetheless, is a bedrock of help for quite a few charities, NGOs and moral trend initiatives.
“I’m all the time making an attempt to guard the underdog,” Westwood advised Susannah Frankel within the A/W17 concern of AnOther Journal. The surroundings, although, is her chief concern. “It was after I learn this interview by James Lovelock the place he mentioned there’ll solely be 1,000,000 folks left on the finish of this century,” she says. “Then I checked out this map printed by NASA which confirmed a line the place the world can be uninhabitable. The inhabitable is barely 1 / 4 of the world! We gained’t have time emigrate. The animals can be lifeless. It means mass extinction.”
Fortunately, although, Westwood has a plan. Right here, in her personal phrases, as advised to Frankel, six methods we will start to push towards the methods of energy that encompass us – and save the planet within the course of.
1. Know your enemy
“That’s my job as an activist; to analyse issues. In an effort to see what we have to do we have to see the enemy. And to me, we have to do away with the rotten monetary system. I do it shorthand: R-O-T-$. Rot $. The rotten monetary system we’ve acquired is designed to create poverty.”
2. Flip the financial system inexperienced
“The one factor to exchange the rotten monetary system with is a inexperienced financial system. The inexperienced financial system is definitely designed to create wealth alternatives; it’s truly designed to create liberty, equality, fraternity. What nature provides you is free, and nobody ought to privately personal. That’s the tip of it.”
3. Begin along with your power supply
“To begin with we have now to modify to a inexperienced power provide. That’s what we’re making an attempt to do. I’ve acquired this marketing campaign, SWITCH – we’re going to get half the nation on to a inexperienced power provide, beginning with the style enterprise. They’re all on board; they’re all going to do it.”
4. Redistribute wealth
“When you get again land in your personal use, as an alternative of all being on the housing ladder the place each man is for himself, you truly get group – folks serving to one another out. That’s fraternity. Then equality is simply the equal distribution of wealth and alternative.”
5. Have fun tradition
“If we had tradition as an alternative of consumption – which is all people for himself, not referring to folks – we might not have local weather change. We might not have allowed the Nationwide Well being Service to be wrecked; it simply wouldn’t have occurred. Tradition makes folks suppose. It’s good for folks. And now we have now consumption, not tradition. We don’t have artwork anymore.”
6. Query who’s in energy
“What Theresa Might’s been brainwashed to imagine is that you just’ve all the time acquired to help the social gathering. You’ve all the time acquired to get the identical folks into energy who will run that system. I don’t know why they imagine that, as a result of when she thinks about it she should know what she’s doing – she’s wrecking the NHS, promoting it off.”
