"Confront the Rotten Status Quo Through the Way I Dressed and Dressed Others"

"The key to Westwood’s enduring success, apart from her brilliance at 'making', seems to be her almost unnatural sense of her own charisma and authority: her sense that wherever she was, those were the barricades at which everyone else should be fighting. At fifty, she admitted that she thought any man who didn't desire her more than everyone else in the room was 'mad or stupid'. In 1989, she famously posed for the cover of Tatler dressed as Mrs Thatcher, complete with pearls, cravat and tailored jacket. The power of the image is in the uncanny facial similarity between the two: how can the woman who helped invent punk look so like the Iron Lady? But for Westwood herself, it wasn't a stretch. All she had to do was 'put a little doubt' in her eyes and she looked just like Thatcher. It's worth dwelling on the implications of this statement: the real Vivienne Westwood looks like a less self-doubting version of Mrs Thatcher."


Bee Wilson in the London Review of Books reviews Vivienne Westwood and Ian Kelly's Vivienne Westwood.