Documentary profile of British iconoclast Vivienne Westwood, who gained notoriety from her association with Malcolm McLaren during the punk era, found success as a fashion designer and businesswoman in the 80s, and spent her later years campaigning for political change.
With unprecedented access to Britain's best-known fashion designer, Dame Vivienne Westwood, at home and at work, film-maker and former model Lorna Tucker presents an intriguing portrait of the artist that captures the poles of her personality: sufficiently animated in her mid-70s by her latest collection that she leaps out of bed and starts sketching at the breakfast table in her pyjamas, she's also wracked with self-doubt ("I don't know if I want to show any of this s**t"). Adolescent awkwardness greets the chore of telling her incredible story to camera ("It's so boring!"), but while her biography is now rote - invents punk fashion with Malcolm McLaren, goes knickerless to collect her OBE - Tucker's fly-on-the-wall advantage captures the workaday warp-weft of a work-intensive garment company that's a victim of its own global expansion ("I don't know anything about the marketing people or what they do," a bamboozled Westwood complains). Sympathetically scored using Henry Purcell and electro-punk duo Suicide, there are occasional tonal ironies, such as a white-gloved V&A Museum curator dryly contextualising Westwood and McLaren's swastika-emblazoned "Destroy" shirt ("It reminds one a little bit of a straitjacket"), and the subject's apparently sincere later-life conversion to Green issues, punctured somewhat when an employee says: "The most sustainable thing you could do is to shut the company down," which is, ironically, quite punk rock.
| role | name |
|---|---|
| Vivienne Westwood | Vivienne Westwood |
| Kate Moss | Kate Moss |
| Christina Hendricks | Christina Hendricks |
| role | name |
|---|---|
| Director | Lorna Tucker |
