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Vivienne Westwood: An Unfashionable Life
Why did Vivienne, for no stated reason, decide not to cooperate with the author she had originally asked to write her own autobiography? While I have been researching this book, some possible explanations have suggested themselves. Firstly, and understandably, she is probably apprehensive. To her mind, she has consistently been misrepresented by the media. And even apart from the risk of misrepresentation, nobody likes to have their character and weaknesses laid bare. What will I find out, and what will I write about her? Secondly, I discovered that many years before I set about my task, another publisher commissioned an autobiography from her. To date, they have seen no manuscript. Thirdly, Vivienne’s professional survival is founded on her working relationship with her manager Carlo D’Amario. In return for her complete creative freedom, he runs the business. D’Amario might not wish her to cooperate with a project which did not bring profit to the company nor guarantee favourable coverage. No matter what relationship Vivienne strikes up with an associate, it will ultimately be subjected to the sanction of D’Amario’s approval or disapproval. She remains indebted to him and him alone, as attested by the long line of friends and loyal colleagues who have been discarded or summarily dismissed over the years.
Vivienne is a difficult, exceptionally talented and fascinating woman. Her relentless creativity is irrepressible, and its mainspring is her busy curiosity. Her visual inquisitiveness is unusual in its intensity and its scepticism. She dissents in order to reinvent. Although ours is dubbed a ‘visual age’, with images being instantaneously transmitted around the globe, few today take the time to look and to really see; we consume instead not only soundbites, but vision-bites. What distinguishes Vivienne is that she inspects, questions, dismantles and reassembles – as a teacher she would march her young pupils down to the local fishmonger to study the fish before they drew them. My aim in this biography has been to shine some light on her character, and on the way in which her relentless creativity works.
Jane Mulvagh
London, March 1998
1 THE GIRL FROM THE SNAKE PASS
1941–1965
‘As a child, I was in waiting.’
Vivienne Westwood, 1995
‘She puts her mother on a pedestal.’
Bella Freud, 1997
Just before Christmas 1938, twenty-three-year-old Dora Ball, a flush-cheeked flirt with a determined gait and a passion for ballroom dancing, journeyed from her home village of Tintwistle, on the border between Cheshire and Derbyshire, to the nearby market town of Glossop, to buy material for a new dance dress. Missing the last bus home, she started to walk to another stop on the outskirts of town, passing St Mary’s Dance Hall. There, lolling in the doorway, stood the smooth-faced, dapper Gordon Swire, four years her senior. Dora, wary of his reputation, refused his offer to escort her to the bus stop. He insisted, and they struck up a conversation.
On 19 August 1939, two weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War, they married in Tintwistle’s Christ Church, in the county of Cheshire. Gordon was described on the marriage certificate as a fruiterer, living at 96 Market Street, Hollingworth, the son of the late Ernest Swire, a boot and shoe repairer. Dora’s address was 25 West Street, Tintwistle, and she was the daughter of Edward Ball, a labourer. The young couple honeymooned in Scarborough, Yorkshire. Their first marital home was number 6 Millbrook, a two-up-two-down labourer’s stone cottage in a terrace of twelve, between Tintwistle and Hollingworth on the A57, the major road that leads from Sheffield through the Pennine pass to Manchester. Like most humble British homes of the time, the house had an outdoor lavatory in the back yard. The couple washed in a tin bath filled with water warmed on an open fire.
The Swires’ first child, Vivienne Isabel, was born on Tuesday, 8 April 1941. She was a first-born war baby, brought up in the English cotton country; circumstances that were to mark both her character and her interests.
The arrival of a sister, Olga, on 14 January 1944 so infuriated Vivienne that she vowed to ‘dead her and put her in the dustbin’. Vivienne recalled over fifty years later that when Olga arrived home from the hospital, ‘I was outraged. I didn’t know I was going to get her. I was three and from then on I decided I wanted to be grown up as soon as possible.’ Vivienne’s resentment of the interloper went far beyond the sibling jealousy common in young children; indeed, it was so strong that it may have contributed to the competitive suspicion of other women she was to show in later life. As a child she would rarely mention her sister, and few of her friends even realised that Olga existed. Two years later, in 1946, a brother, Gordon, arrived, further thwarting Vivienne’s desire to be the centre of attention.
On the night of Vivienne’s birth London suffered the heaviest air raid of the war to date. The Blitz had escalated, and the German bombers were targeting Britain’s industrial cities as well as its capital. The Swire family would have watched the night skyline during the blackout for the explosions that pockmarked Manchester, ten miles to the west. During the war Vivienne’s father served as a storekeeper in the aircraft manufacturers A.V. Roe at Trafford Park, twelve miles from Manchester. This was an extremely important factory during the war – Lancaster bombers were made there – and the Luftwaffe made several attempts to bomb it. The Dam-Busters’ famous bouncing bomb was tested at the Derwent Dam at the far end of the Snake Pass, where Vivienne would wander as a child. Dora, meanwhile, took employment as a weaver in a local cotton factory of the sort typically requisitioned by the government to supply materials for the war effort: for uniforms, tents, camouflage, webbing, parachutes and balloons.
With both parents in employment and the wartime rations supplemented by Vivienne’s paternal grandmother’s grocery store, the Swires were well fed. Later, Dora and Gordon were to run the store for a time. Gordon could drive the family car – a considerable luxury at the time – to Manchester to stock up on supplies, and would bring home news of the city. Thrift was a pervading feature of Vivienne’s formative years, which were circumscribed not only by the modesty of her working-class background, but by the austerity of wartime and immediate post-war Britain. Rationing was to be in force until October 1951, and the Attlee government demanded self-sacrifice to rebuild the nation, deploying slogans like ‘make-do-and-mend’ as an exhortation to frugality.
Meanwhile, Britain’s wartime allies enjoyed a post-war consumer boom, epitomised in France by the fabric-consuming lavishness of Christian Dior’s New Look, which most British women could only admire, not wear. Thriftiness, inculcated early on as a necessity, would remain intrinsic to Vivienne’s character, serving her well during periods of considerable financial hardship, and even when she found relative affluence in her fifties, she never indulged in conspicuous consumption.
Vivienne has always been reluctant to talk about her childhood. In 1994 she told the local newspaper Derbyshire Now! that this was because she ‘feared people would find it boring’. Until she was sixteen, the Swires lived in or near Tintwistle, in Glossopdale, which is cut off from Lancashire and Cheshire by steep hills and a river gorge, and lies in the western lee of the Pennines, the spine of hills which divides the North of England in two. To the west of the Pennines, in Lancashire, the nation’s cotton industry flourished. To the east, in Yorkshire, the woollen industry was established. Exploiting the fast-running water that flowed down the peaks, textile mills and factories were built in the area from the mid-eighteenth century. Immediately after the First World War, the cotton industry had employed nearly 80 per cent of Glossop’s working population. Following severe unemployment during the Depression, when the Hadfield Tintwistle labour exchange recorded a devastating 67 per cent rate of unemployment, the local economy revived once again. The mills which surrounded Tintwistle provided a livelihood for many of Vivienne’s relations, and she was to retain a sentimental but informed appreciation of the qualities of traditional English textiles: starched cottons, worsted pinstripes, fine-gauge knits, satin-smooth gabardines and hairy tweeds. They were to inspire the nostalgic strand of fashion that would become one of her signatures.
At the end of the war, Gordon Swire senior took work at the local Wall’s ice-cream factory. He supplemented the household income with odd jobs, such as collecting holly from the hedgerows to twist into Christmas wreaths which he sold to the neighbours. The whole family enjoyed the make-do-and-mend habit, turning their hands to simple crafts such as dressmaking or utilising domestic ephemera for decoration. Their Christmas tree, for example, was adorned with the perforated silver tops from salt and pepper pots.
Dora, who now worked in the grocery shop, not only made her own ballroom dresses but clothes for all the family, perhaps using remnants bought from the mill where she had worked. Times were good. In the second half of the 1940s the textile trade continued to thrive as the government fostered an export drive to finance war debts. Production was focused on long runs of cheap cotton prints for the African and Far Eastern markets. Workers were secure in their employment, and took patriotic pride in the posters displayed throughout their communities which assured them that ‘Britain’s bread hangs on Lancashire’s thread’.
Vivienne’s parents provided for their family and were loving and kind, but they were not remotely scholarly: Dora took the view that reading was a waste of time. They encouraged physical pastimes instead, such as dancing and rambling. The children kept hamsters and guinea-pigs in the back yard and crafted toys and games out of discarded objects. Describing her childhood, Vivienne was to say: ‘what we didn’t have at home was any literature. I remember my mother once buying some encyclopaedias but they weren’t the right sort where you could look things up.’
What her mother, in particular, did give Vivienne was a forthright bearing, a confidence that invited comment and a sense of style. She chose unusual Christian names for her children, and made a point of dressing them well, buying good-quality clothes at C&A in Manchester or making them herself. Childhood friends recall Dora as ‘houseproud’, something Vivienne would never be, and caring about her appearance, a trait she retained into her seventies and which Vivienne did inherit. A school classmate, Bob Noton, remembered Vivienne as ‘meticulous about her clothes and well-turned-out as a schoolgirl. That’s what a lot of people found attractive about her.’
By the standards of the time, the Swires were relatively liberal parents. The three children were often left unsupervised, since both Dora and Gordon worked by day, and in the evening they were frequently left with a babysitter while their parents went ballroom dancing (a hobby they pursued into old age) at the Tintwistle and Hollingworth school halls, Glossop’s Victoria Hall and in Ashton-under-Lyne, six miles away. They relied on their eldest daughter to take responsibility for her siblings from an early age. Vivienne has described her parents as being ‘in love all their life and devoted to each other’. Perhaps she felt that this love excluded her. A former employee of Vivienne’s says: ‘Her mother and father were so close. He was star-struck by her right to the end of his life. Dora always came first. She was the star of the family.’
Vivienne was required to walk her brother and sister to the Hollingworth village school each morning and to St Mary’s Anglican church on Sundays. Although her parents were not zealous members of the local church – they would assure her that they would attend the evening service, but rarely did – Vivienne was captivated by religion. On learning, aged four, about the crucifixion, she remembers being so horrified that she vowed to challenge oppression: ‘I felt I had to become a freedom fighter to stop this sort of thing going on. I really did want to do something to change this horrible world.’
Making defiant stands became an early characteristic of this confident and independent girl. On her first day at nursery school in Hollingworth, she saw a queue outside the girls’ lavatory. Reasoning that there was no point in waiting, she used the boys’ instead. She claims that this was her ‘first confrontation with tyranny’, and it earned her a slap from the teacher. By the time she was five she was questioning the teacher’s example, preferring ‘to do my “r”s round and round like a snail because it looked prettier’, rather than copying exactly from the blackboard. Even though she was slapped again, she refused to conform. She had already developed an independent view of mores and manners: ‘I have an inbuilt perversity, a kind of inbuilt clock which always reacts against anything orthodox,’ she said thirty years later.
At the age of eight Vivienne progressed to the Tintwistle church school, where her mother had been educated, and joined a class of variously-aged pupils of both sexes. Her parents took only a distant interest in their children’s academic development, neither harbouring grand ambitions for them nor, according to Gordon junior, discussing what they wanted to do when they grew up. ‘We never showed our parents our school reports,’ Gordon remembers, though Vivienne’s consistently acknowledged her ‘creativity’: ‘It wasn’t that they didn’t care, they just assumed we were bright and let us get on with it.’
Despite her comparatively uncultured background, Vivienne remembers finding stimulating companionship in books, which nourished her imagination and led her beyond the restricted world of her family. One can imagine her escaping the confines of the small bedroom she shared with Olga and Gordon, spending winter evenings huddled in front of the hearth, or sneaking into her parents’ room and, propped up against the door under the scratchy tulle layers of her mother’s dance dresses, losing herself in the pages of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five stories, the brothers Grimm’s fairy tales and Walter Scott’s ‘Lochinvar’. These first writers were soon followed, according to Vivienne, by Dickens, Buchan, Chaucer and Keats. On summer mornings she scrambled over the wall behind the cottage, passed through a disused quarry and climbed up to the high meadow to read: ‘I remember sitting in this meadow in the sun with the dew still on the grass, and I could smell May blossom, and even at that early age I remember saying to myself how lucky I was.’
Vivienne’s childhood was secure and happy. She enjoyed exploring the lyrically beautiful nearby peaks and dales. Finding hideaways in the wooded terrain of the Snake Pass and Devil’s Elbow towards Cut-Throat Bridge, she would read adventure stories or tuck into a picnic of treats from her aunt’s greengrocers, washed down with home-made dandelion and burdock lemonade. It was during these solitary, free-roaming days in this gauzy, rain-softened terrain that she developed what she has called her ‘country heart’; her subsequent nostalgia for the English rural idyll and her knowledge of its flora and fauna. Two decades later, money being short, she used her knowledge of edible plants to feed her family; as a designer she would refer back to country pastimes – fell-walking, riding, fishing, shooting – to create clothes that, even though they were worn by the hurried city-dweller, conjured up the unhurried, idealised Arcadia of her childhood.
From 1951, a recession developed in the British cotton industry as competitively priced imports from Hong Kong, India and Pakistan began to flood the home market. Large numbers of jobs were lost in Glossopdale’s mills, and while some of Vivienne’s neighbours found employment in the new chemical and plastics firms that moved into the area, many joined the ranks of the unemployed or the economic migrants. The hardships Vivienne witnessed left their mark on her: it would be many years before she placed what she saw as the indulgence of higher education above her anxiety to earn her keep.
Almost effortlessly, Vivienne won a place at Glossop Grammar School in 1952. According to her maternal aunt Ethel Mitchell, who owned a sweet shop in Tintwistle: ‘Before her eleven-plus I remember Dora suggesting that Vivienne should be swotting. Vivienne simply said, “Why?” She knew it all, and passed with good grades.’
Glossop Grammar School was three miles from the Swires’ home, and was reached by a bus that travelled across Woolley Bridge, which separated Cheshire from Derbyshire, past several cloth mills, under a viaduct and into the market town of Glossop. The handsome stone building, erected in 1899 by Francis Fitzalan, the second Lord Howard, as an art and technical school for mill apprentices, stood on the corner of Talbot Street and Fitzalan Street. In 1903 it became a grammar school, with the brightest local children competing for places. Reginald Barnsley, who was at the school at the same time as Vivienne, recalled that ‘science, maths, English were important. Music, PE and woodwork didn’t count for much … it was a learning school with seven lessons a day.’
Formality and propriety characterised this proud grammar school, which is now an adult education centre. Only teachers and sixth-formers could pass through the main entrance, under a stone-carved plaque bearing the school’s motto: Virtus, Veritas, Libertas (Honour, Truth, Liberty). Juniors had to use the back door, where they changed from outdoor shoes into indoor pumps. The boys, dressed in grey trousers and maroon-and-navy striped blazers, crossed the black-and-white-tiled hall and climbed the left-hand arc of the rosewood staircase to assembly, while the girls, in grey skirts or gymslips, blazers, white blouses and grey stockings, filed up the right. The staff room and offices had long casement windows which overlooked The Nab, a substantial hill at the back of the building, but the classrooms had high windows to prevent pupils from being distracted by daydreams.
A memorable event of Vivienne’s youth was the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on 2 June 1953. It rained that day, and the Swires attended a celebration tea party at Tintwistle Sunday School, which was hung with patriotic bunting and banners. Waving their Union Jacks, the party then proceeded to a neighbouring cottage where they crowded into the front room to watch the event on television. The image of the royal family and all its tradition and pageantry must have had an impact on the visually alert twelve-year-old Vivienne, for she was to exploit them, both positively and negatively, in her creative life many years later.
A few months after the coronation, the Swires rented a new council house for a year in nearby Hollingworth, and then, in 1954, Dora was given the opportunity to become the Tintwistle village postmistress. The family moved into the building which housed the post office in its flagstoned basement at 36 Manchester Road, at the end of a terrace of five. Dora, exhibiting the distinctive independence of the women of her family, boasted proudly that the post office was ‘in her name’. All three children inherited this ‘supreme self-confidence’ which their maternal aunt, Ethel Mitchell, observed and shared. Vivienne’s early role models were matriarchal. Power resided with the women in the family, and Vivienne soon displayed their strident determination.
As well as distributing the post, Dora also ran a little general store in which she sold a few of the cheaper magazines, such as Woman’s Own and Women’s Weekly, that disseminated the fashions of the time in a watered-down form, and provided dressmaking and knitting patterns. She also stocked a small selection of clothing, such as underwear from John Smedley, the Derbyshire specialists in fine-gauge knitwear, and traditional gymslips (both of which were to feature in Vivienne’s collections in the 1980s – when Vivienne’s school uniform changed to skirt and blouse, she insisted on keeping her gymslip).
Young Vivienne was determined to make her mark at her new school, to be ‘more extreme’ than the crowd. In her attention-seeking manner, she was always first to raise her hand in answer to a teacher’s question, to the annoyance of her classmates. One contemporary, Eileen Mellish, remembers Vivienne as argumentative, getting ‘a bit humpy’ when the biology teacher chastised her, and climbing out of the window when she had been locked into a classroom for detention. With her unusual cast of mind, Vivienne would find tangential solutions to set questions: when the class was given the title ‘Bats in the Belfry’ for a painting, Eileen Mellish recalls, ‘We all imagined a church, but she went psychological and did bats in the head. She was smart.’
Her maths teacher, Jack Holden, however, finds it hard to recall Vivienne: she was ‘an unremarkable girl, you didn’t notice her’. Vivienne was certainly not a distinguished scholar, though she did reasonably well at English, sports and art, for which she took lessons after school with the art teacher, Gordon Bell. She did come third in the high jump at the school sports day, and when she entered the annual poster competition at the age of fifteen, she was highly commended, ‘which, as you know,’ says Holden, ‘means she didn’t quite make it. Looking at Vivienne Swire and looking at Vivienne Westwood, I would just sit there in total amazement. How on earth the one became the other is quite beyond me. But you see, we are nice people. You didn’t do outrageous things.’
It was exactly this sense of propriety that Vivienne wished to challenge, with bold actions such as ‘always {being} the one who kissed the teacher under the mistletoe at Christmas’. Bob Noton, a primary-school sweetheart, was enamoured of her ‘striking’ looks, composed carriage and long dark hair neatly tied back in a ponytail. He found her direct and flirtatious. But when the pair went on to Glossop Grammar School, he was summarily dumped: there was ‘too much competition by the other boys for Vivienne – she was a hot date and knew she was a good-looking, bonnie girl’. Vivienne is also remembered for making a point of championing an unpopular and lonely boy, a moralising and self-publicising stance.
With the onset of puberty Vivienne, who claimed to have had a boyfriend from the age of ten, began to show an interest in sex which her mother would have dubbed ‘fast’. She went with her schoolfriend Anne Shaw to Sunday school dances, and looked forward to rainy days when games were replaced by ballroom dancing in the school gym. She boasted that she had a different boyfriend every week: ‘I was straight until I was fourteen. Then I went funny … boredom, bad boredom.’ Though she says she did not indulge in full sexual intercourse (something her parents had brought her up to believe was only to be enjoyed within marriage) until her late teens, her physical relationships were ‘quite heavy, lots of kissing and all that’. A former classmate remembers the fifteen-year-old Vivienne flaunting a ring and proudly announcing that she was engaged.
Thanks to protruding teeth (later straightened) and a flat chest, Vivienne did not judge herself to be pretty, though she anticipated that ‘I was going to be.’ Perhaps her lack of self-confidence was a result of having a pretty and vain mother. Seeing that Dora was always well turned-out, and the impact that had on her father, gave Vivienne an early belief in the power of beauty and clothes. She determined to make something of herself through her clothing. She would come home from school with a piece of material, cut out a dress, sew it up and wear it that night. At school she wore one coloured stocking and one plain one with her uniform, which she had customised by tightening the skirt round her haunches and cutting a provocative slit up the back. She started padding her bras, longing for the sexuality of a curvaceous female form – ‘big tits are what boys are interested in’. Her idols were the hourglass-shaped Sophia Loren, Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. The clothes she later designed would challenge sports-honed skinniness with a voluptuousness enhanced by corsets and high heels. She also took to curling her hair, leaving the curls so stiff that it looked as if the rollers had not been removed.
