Vivienne Westwood: An Unfashionable Life

In 1957 Vivienne and a schoolfriend, Maureen Purcell, went for a holiday at Butlin’s camp in Skegness, a popular working-class resort. The camp had a libertine atmosphere, and many young boys would work there as ‘Redcoats’ for ridiculously low wages, in the virtual certainty of sexual encounters with female campers. The holiday opened Vivienne’s eyes to the sexiness of shoes: ‘There were these Essex girls who were really stylish and wore stilettos. In Manchester I saw these amazing high-heeled stilettos in a shop window and I bought a pair … I wore them to school with a tight-fitting pencil skirt,’ much to her headmistress, Dolly Greenwood’s, dismay. Maureen Purcell recalled that when Vivienne stayed overnight on the family sofa ‘she’d bring a collection of her winklepickers and line them up near the skirting board’. ‘Clothes make you the centre of attention,’ Vivienne said in 1995. ‘It’s like when I was a girl, I thought the difference between jive and rock ’n’ roll was that you stuck your bottom out, so I would stick it right out and the boys would really laugh at me. But I didn’t mind because I thought, OK, I know what I’m doing.’

Vivienne reached adolescence in the mid-1950s, right at the beginning of a dramatic social change – the emergence of the teenager. The urban, middle-class teenage girl disdained adult fashion, preferring casual dress that reflected her own age and musical interests, such as separates inspired by Italian fashion, and full cotton skirts and bobby socks from America. Vivienne, though, was born into the conservative provincial working class, which valued the smartness, ‘good taste’ and hauteur of its social superiors. Retaining the romanticism of the New Look and its glamorous Hollywood exaggerations, a fashion-conscious adolescent from this background would have aspired to the image of an elegant and well-married thirty-year-old woman in neat dress or suit and matching accessories. (One contemporary marvelled at how Vivienne was ‘so smartly turned out … it was always the complete outfit, the shoes, the bag always matched’.) She would have been unlikely to risk looking casual, which might give the impression of poverty.

Her sartorial icons were the aristocratic mannequins who graced the pages of the upmarket glossy magazines like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Vanity Fair, such as Barbara Goalen, Fiona Campbell Walter (later Baroness von Thyssen) and Bronwen Pugh (later Lady Astor), and Hollywood stars like Lana Turner, Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell, Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn. The big American film studios spared no expense in the grooming and marketing of these female icons, employing the considerable creative skills of costumiers such as Edith Head, William Travilla and Orry-Kelly, and French couturiers such as Christian Dior, Pierre Balmain and the Paris-based Elsa Schiaparelli. The celluloid goddesses reached Vivienne and her friends through the cinema in Glossop, which they typically visited once a week.

Wherever she went, even to school, Vivienne aimed to dress like a woman, not a girl; she ‘could not think of anything more exciting’, and was convinced she looked better than anyone else – ‘a sensation’. The first items of clothing she chose for herself were a fashionably tight pencil skirt, which she later described as ‘so sexual’, and a pair of high-heeled shoes. She experimented with her image, dying her hair red one week and bleaching a badger streak in it the next. Her mother recalled that ‘even at sixteen she would wear unusual clothes’. In an effort to attract attention, when the fashion for delicate daisy earrings hit Glossop, Vivienne made a pair out of huge marguerites. She was thrilled when, as she entered the dance hall, the trombonist took his instrument from his lips, pointed at her and hissed, ‘Look at that girl!’ On another occasion, when the other girls were wearing net petticoats, stiffened with sugar, under full skirts, ‘she came in a slinky black Suzy Wong dress that she had made – but then, she could carry it off.’

Keenly aware of the limitations of her background, Vivienne determined to elevate herself above it. Quite unfairly, she later boasted: ‘I am very happy that I didn’t need my family. They were not sceptical or questioning enough for me – too conforming.’ Despite her apparent self-confidence, she felt she was ‘stupid … I thought that nobody around me had enough information to give me.’ This conviction never left her, and to it one can perhaps trace her intellectual insecurity and her drive to seek out – usually male – mentors.

Aways alert to an opportunity, at grammar school Vivienne selected as her best friend Maureen Purcell, who came from a slightly higher social level – her family owned the Glossop general store just off the main square. During lunch break the two teenagers would look for sheet music in the town, going back to the Purcells’ to sing along to the hits they played on Mrs Purcell’s record-player. After school, if she did not take the bus straight home to the dull village of Tintwistle, Vivienne could loiter at the Purcells’ or join friends, such as Anne Shaw, and the boys in the café in Glossop. Her mother did not like her to be out late, so she began to stay over at the Purcells’, which she still describes as being ‘like a second home to me’.

Maureen Purcell was Jewish, which distinguished her from most of her classmates, and she possessed ‘a much stronger personality than Vivienne’. Looking at photographs of the two friends in their mid-teens, it is striking how knowing and slickly-turned-out they are compared to their contemporaries; any vestige of innocence is artfully disguised. According to Eileen Mellish, ‘the boys thought a lot of Vivienne – she was great fun to be with.’ Their confidence probably stemmed from their relative worldliness. The Swires and the Purcells allowed their daughters to go to Manchester on Saturdays to shop or visit the dance halls, something which, Eileen Mellish remembers emphatically, ‘my parents wouldn’t let me do, full stop!’ The two girls were even permitted to go for a holiday at Butlin’s; Vivienne claimed that she ‘got off with over a hundred blokes’.

In the pre-Profumo era, when moral standards were strict and social ordering was precise, the two girls’ antics might have been expected to invite comment. However, it was often the case that the working classes were less hidebound by propriety than the ‘respectable’ and aspiring middle classes. Furthermore, there was in some urban Jewish circles a progressive, tolerant and playful spirit. Frequenting such circles in Manchester, where some of Maureen’s relatives were in the tailoring business – and where both of her parents had worked as machinists in a clothes factory in the thirties – would have given Vivienne a glimpse of glamour. As a contemporary saying (at least among Mancunians) asserted, ‘What Manchester thinks today, London thinks tomorrow,’ and the city’s King Street was proudly claimed to be ‘the Bond street of the North’. Vivienne and Maureen also socialised with the Purcells’ cousins, the McCofskis, who were Jewish tailors in Leeds.

Vivienne did not excel as a scholar in the competitive environment of the grammar school; she was socially rather than academically precocious. By the time she left the school in the summer of 1957, aged sixteen, she had only once visited an art gallery – in Manchester – dismissed the theatre as belonging to the past, and had read only storybooks and the set texts of her curriculum rather than ranging wider or deeper. Though she claimed to have been ‘intellectually curious’, she admitted to being unaware that what she called ‘the vast lake of knowledge’ existed, and never entertained the idea of going to university, which she associated with ‘the snobby lot … the boys all carried umbrellas, which we considered effeminate’. Her horizons were limited: ‘I just wanted to leave and earn my living. If someone had told me I could train to be a librarian, I would have thought, “Great!” But I didn’t know. How could I have been that stupid?’ Eileen Mellish remembered Vivienne observing that nursing or hairdressing were her only options – both Maureen Purcell and Anne Shaw pursued the latter career: ‘I think she wanted to do something different, but I don’t think she had any idea.’

In July 1957 Vivienne took a six-week holiday job at Pickering’s cannery with Maureen and Eileen. The factory’s female employees – dubbed the ‘pea pixies’ because of their green overalls and caps – worked from 7.30 in the morning until 5.30 in the evening. ‘It was horrendous because your hands got really sore with the juices,’ Vivienne remembered. ‘It was just money.’ At first the three girls were employed on the fruit-salad conveyor belt, but they soon irritated the regular staff by working faster than them and creating logjams. They were moved to the pea section, and Vivienne’s mother would get angry when her daughter came home with her clothes stained bright green.

Later that year Vivienne’s life changed dramatically. Her father was unemployed, and the family, at Dora’s instigation, moved to the more affluent South, her parents taking over another post office in Station Road, Harrow, in North-West London. ‘We had to move,’ says Dora. ‘there was no work.’ It was a great culture shock for Vivienne. In Cheshire, as Malcolm McLaren says, ‘she dominated her brother and sister, left and right, and was very much in control of her life. When she came to London she lost control. She thought they were not kind, easily accessible people and would cry, “I want to go back up North, I can’t stand it here.” It was tough on her.’ Her horizons were broadening, but she was finding it hard to cope.

The social status of Harrow’s residents was clearly defined by the position of their homes on the gradient that led up from Wealdstone, past Harrow town centre and on to the leafy heights of Harrow-on-the-Hill, where the well-heeled lived above the persistent urban smogs of 1950s London. Gordon and Dora’s sub-post office and small general store at 31 Station Road was virtually at the bottom of the hill.

Station Road was a main thoroughfare, flanked with terraces of three-bedroom Edwardian houses. Some of the ground floors had been converted into shops, including tobacconists, funeral parlours and bakeries. Number 31 was a modest but adequate home. The Swires lived above the shop in three bedrooms, a sitting room/diner, a kitchen and a small bathroom. After a year Gordon took over another post office and grocery business in nearby Stanmore, while Dora continued to run Station Road.

Vivienne, the bombastic sixteen-year-old schoolgirl from Glossop, was temporarily cowed by her new surroundings, and she felt insecure. She enrolled at the local grammar school but found it difficult to integrate, a fact that she put down to her broad Northern accent. After leaving school she attended a silversmithing and jewellery-making course at Harrow Art School, but she left abruptly after one term, took a secretarial course at Pitman’s and began to earn her own living as a typist for a local firm, having seen an advertisement on a tube train. Her favourite pastime was still dancing, and she attended many local dances. At one of them in late 1961 she met a young man called Derek John Westwood, two years her senior. Vivienne was instantly smitten by the handsome Westwood, who was confident, ardent and shared her love of rock ’n’ roll: ‘When I met Derek he was very lively and ever such a good dancer,’ she said later. His family lived on Belvedere Way in Kenton, the next suburb, and his father was a checker in a factory. Derek was working as a toolshop apprentice in the local Hoover factory, supplementing his wages with casual work as a manager at bingo halls and hotels. He longed, however, to be an airline pilot, and not long after meeting Vivienne he secured a job as a steward for British European Airways. His prospects looking up, Derek proposed marriage. Vivienne, who had left her typing job and was now working as a primary school teacher in Willesden, North London, accepted, although she later said: ‘I didn’t want to marry him actually, but he was such a sweet guy and I couldn’t give it up.’

Though the young couple planned to marry in a register office, Dora forcefully insisted that they have a white wedding, in a church. Vivienne made her own dress, which was not unusual in those days, and the wedding took place on 21 July 1962 at St John the Baptist, Greenhill, a large Edwardian stone church half a mile up the hill from the Swires’ home. The couple were married by Reverend J.R. Maxwell Johnstone, and honeymooned in North Devon. Vivienne and Derek moved into 86 Station Road, three hundred yards from the Swires’ sub-post office. On 3 September 1963 a son, Benjamin Arthur Westwood, was born at Edgware General Hospital in Hendon.

To contribute to the household expenses, Vivienne took a menial job chopping up rolls of print with a guillotine at the nearby Kodak factory (‘I was the fastest chopper in the factory,’ she later boasted). Despite Derek’s kindness and great love for his new wife, she was bored. She felt that her life was frustratingly circumscribed, and she watched with envy as her younger brother Gordon moved into a new and exciting circle at Harrow Art School. It was through him that she was to meet the man who would entice her away from working-class family conformity for ever.

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