Vivienne Westwood with her husband Andreas Kronthaler at the Paris Fashion Week in September. Photograph: Gonzalo Fuentes /REUTERS
Vivienne Westwood's fashion career has taken her from the artfully stained T-shirts of the punk era to the jaunty pheasant feathers and ruched velvets of the English dandy look. And now her story is to be told by the man who has successfully interpreted the life of two of the greatest peacocks of history, Beau Brummell and Casanova.
Ian Kelly, the actor and biographer, has been working in secret with Dame Vivienne for some months on a version of her life story that, he says, will amaze readers with its frank revelations.
Speaking about his book this weekend Kelly said he believes the innovative, 72-year-old fashion designer's life is the perfect way to look at the influences that have reshaped postwar Britain. "There is an extraordinary story here, offering a person-shaped keyhole on British culture, on modern feminism and, of course, on fashion," he said.
Kelly wants his book, to be published next autumn, to dwell on the details of Westwood's early life in Derbyshire before he switches gear for "the rock star years". Born Vivienne Swire in Tintwistle in 1941, Westwood trained as a teacher before marrying and having her first son. She gained notoriety, and then fame, as the partner of the late Malcolm McLaren when the two set up their clothes shop, SEX, on Kings Road in London. Since then her unorthodox sense of style has led the transformation of the UK fashion industry from an international backwater into a major player.
"Vivienne was quite straight with me about the fact that Malcolm not being here any more allows her to say more. She is respectful of his memory though, and about what their collaboration meant. Until I spent time with her, I had not realised that Vivienne's work has been a series of crucial creative dialogues, leading up to the one she has now with her former student Andreas Kronthaler, her husband since 1992."
On the announcement of the book last week, Westwood said: "The living deserve respect. The dead deserve the truth; Ian and I are working together on this and I am excited this will be my story, the story nobody ever did before."
Kelly was approached to write the book because of his biographies of the Regency buck Brummell and the 18th-century lover Casanova, although he knew and admired Westwood, as a fan of the 2004 V&A exhibition that showcased her 18th-century tailoring. "I do come at her story from a dandy perspective," said Kelly, "but also from the point of view of the importance of the maverick, of the eruption of caprice.It is the kind of argument Oscar Wilde puts forward, about the way of getting serious points across while apparently being frivolous." Much of Westwood's sense of style is in the Brummell tradition, said Kelly, although he "recognises a disregard for convention that I saw in Casanova's life". The book was to have been a straightforward authorised biography but became a collaboration. Westwood has waived her right to censor the content, says Kelly, but will contribute passages.
"Vivienne is wonderfully candid. I sat there with my jaw on the table for a lot of it. Especially about what went on in the 1970s. It will be revelatory, I think," he said. "Vivienne is alive and very connected, and so I would be an idiot not to used her as a source for a lot of the material. Then I have been doing what I would normally do, looking at sources and archives and interviewing people who know her, from Jerry Hall and Pamela Anderson, to Shami Chakrabarti."
The book will link Westwood's passion for culture and her activism as a vocal supporter of Greenpeace and Liberty, the human rights campaign group.
via fashion - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNHISw6uFtBubtJ9ye4EUcsIWyNj9w&url=http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/nov/30/vivienne-westwood-life-story-will-shock
0 意見:
張貼留言