Synopsis
Making use of more than 30 years of interviews with Westwood herself, Fred Vermorel looks at the origins of Vivienne Westwood's witty and erotic sensibility, which launched a fashion empire and secured her the title of the Queen of Punk Rock. Vermorel also explores her stormy and bizarre relationship with punk impressario Malcolm McLaren, and places Westwood in the context of the 1960s, throwing light on the dynamics of punk and on Westwood's later ability to tap into the inner logic of fashion--a Romantic perversity that is at the heart of mass consumption itself.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 1997-11-01 |
| Size | | Height: | 8.8 in | | Width: | 5.8 in | | Thickness: | 0.8 in | | Weight: | 12.8 oz |
Publisher's Note
Vivienne Westwood was the Queen of Punk Rock and her fashions have scandalized and fascinated the world since the Sixties. Parading models bare-breasted down the catwalks of Paris, posing pantiless outside Buckingham Palace -- she has an insatiable appetite for anarchic outrageousness. She has never lost her power to shock, and her continued innovations make her one of the most talked about fashion designers in the world. Fred Vermorel, the iconoclastic critic and "aesthetic terrorist" who "reinvented biography by treating the Sex Pistols and then Kate Bush as case studies in consumer passion" (i-D Magazine) uses the same atypical approach in this electrifying biography of Vivienne Westwood. Gleaned from more than thirty years of interviews with Westwood herself, Vivienne Westwood describes for the first time in detail Westwood's childhood and early years; it also exposes the inside story of her stormy and bizarre relationship with musician and fashionista Malcolm McLaren. As a dirty history of the Sixties shared by Westwood, McLaren and the author, and as a story of the triumph of a mad, bad, outrageous girl, Vivienne Westwood succeeds brilliantly.
Industry Reviews
As much about the author as it is about avant-garde fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, this book seems most concerned with trying to explain the origins and philosophy of Punk culture in England. In the first half of the book, an imaginary biographical interview with the designer, the reader is faced with sinister subcultural ramblings from the rock historian who wrote The Sex Pistols: The Inside Story (Omnibus, 1983). Throughout Vermorel dwells on the rebellious social climate of the 1960s and the Westwood/ Malcolm McLaren partnership, which he credits with the invention of Punk. American readers unfamiliar with Westwood would never guess from this book that she is still a major figure in the fashion world, nor would they get an idea of what her past and present designs look like, as the 17 black-and-white photographs from Westwood's early life and career fail to convey the scope of her work. The definitive book on Vivienne Westwood is yet to be written; this attempt will be of marginal interest only to academic popular culture collections. Therese Duzinkiewicz Baker, Western Kentucky Univ. Libs., Bowling Green
Breitman
London fashion designer Westwood's "impishly erotic couture" won her international acclaim in the '80s and '90s, but she made her first and perhaps most indelible mark on popular culture in the '70s, when she, along with her notoriously Svengalian partner, Malcolm McLaren, was instrumental in shaping both the ethos and the iconography of punk rock. Operating under the philosophy that "You can never go too far," the two used their SEX boutique to launch outrageous fashion trends that became the most visible markers of underground chic. Rock critic Vermorel (The Secret History of Kate Bush) here parlays a decades-long acquaintance with Westwood into an intriguing biography that is noteworthy for its focus on its subject's engagement with the intellectual currents that seized the countercultural imagination at various stages in her career. He also charts her stormy but creatively fertile relationship with McLaren and explores the evolution of her philosophy of fashion. Utilizing an unusual technique that works surprisingly well, Vermorel devotes the second half of his narrative to an account of his own coming-of-age under the auspices of countercultural ideologies. Westwood becomes a disappointingly peripheral figure in this section, but Vermorel's self-scrutiny permits a sustained and highly insightful examination of the kinds of ideas that fueled Westwood's own creative imagination. "The secret which McLaren and Westwood learned by heart," Vermorel concludes, is "how to paint your subjectivity in the codes of culture and foment an insurrection of like-minded solitudes." Photos. (Sept.)
Lopate
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