Requiem for an Environmentalist
Lord and everybody else knows I have absolutely nothing to say about fashion, but Vivienne Westwood passed and she deserves a nod. Westwood first became famous with the whole London punk scene. She helped dress it. Without her and partner Malcolm McLaren’s clothes store, the Sex Pistols would never have come together.
The Sex Pistols were a funny band. They put out the last culturally impactful rock and roll album, — a very fine headstone it is — afterwards rock and roll as any sort of cultural power petered out. In their short existence, the band played maybe a hundred gigs to probably not many more than ten thousand people total, creating one album which didn't sell a million copies until over a decade after its release — a band a lot of people heard of but never heard.
In 2000, “The Filth and the Fury,” a documentary of the band was released. Chicago film critic Roger Ebert, who funnily enough was briefly in London working on a film with the Sex Pistols in 1977, commented how 25 years later the band’s fashion “looked contemporary, unlike the dated, polyestered, wide-lapeled and blow-dried creatures interviewing them.”
Westwood went on to become a renown couture, more interestingly she later became a real environmentalist. The only way you can be an environmentalist is by going straight at hyper-consumption culture. In a 2007 interview she began advocating people quit buying so many clothes,
“I don't feel very comfortable defending my fashion except to say that people don't have to buy it. You do have to consume. You have to live. If you've got the money to be able to afford it, then it's really good to buy something from me, but don't buy too much.”
The reporter then writes,
“I can't believe that anyone can pack up a lifetime's worth of possessions in a couple of hours but apparently Westwood did. It turns out that she's had more practice in the art of non-consumerism than you might imagine. When I ask her what she spends her money on the only things she can think of is 'books'. Isn't there anything else? 'I'm not very acquisitive. I don't have any art objects or anything like that.’”
If you think that ain’t radical, you'd be wrong, it literally is the thread to pull to remake the future.
God love Vivienne Westwood.