Vivienne Westwood: An Unfashionable Life

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At the end of the war, Gordon Swire senior took work at the local Wall’s ice-cream factory. He supplemented the household income with odd jobs, such as collecting holly from the hedgerows to twist into Christmas wreaths which he sold to the neighbours. The whole family enjoyed the make-do-and-mend habit, turning their hands to simple crafts such as dressmaking or utilising domestic ephemera for decoration. Their Christmas tree, for example, was adorned with the perforated silver tops from salt and pepper pots.

Dora, who now worked in the grocery shop, not only made her own ballroom dresses but clothes for all the family, perhaps using remnants bought from the mill where she had worked. Times were good. In the second half of the 1940s the textile trade continued to thrive as the government fostered an export drive to finance war debts. Production was focused on long runs of cheap cotton prints for the African and Far Eastern markets. Workers were secure in their employment, and took patriotic pride in the posters displayed throughout their communities which assured them that ‘Britain’s bread hangs on Lancashire’s thread’.

Vivienne’s parents provided for their family and were loving and kind, but they were not remotely scholarly: Dora took the view that reading was a waste of time. They encouraged physical pastimes instead, such as dancing and rambling. The children kept hamsters and guinea-pigs in the back yard and crafted toys and games out of discarded objects. Describing her childhood, Vivienne was to say: ‘what we didn’t have at home was any literature. I remember my mother once buying some encyclopaedias but they weren’t the right sort where you could look things up.’

What her mother, in particular, did give Vivienne was a forthright bearing, a confidence that invited comment and a sense of style. She chose unusual Christian names for her children, and made a point of dressing them well, buying good-quality clothes at C&A in Manchester or making them herself. Childhood friends recall Dora as ‘houseproud’, something Vivienne would never be, and caring about her appearance, a trait she retained into her seventies and which Vivienne did inherit. A school classmate, Bob Noton, remembered Vivienne as ‘meticulous about her clothes and well-turned-out as a schoolgirl. That’s what a lot of people found attractive about her.’

By the standards of the time, the Swires were relatively liberal parents. The three children were often left unsupervised, since both Dora and Gordon worked by day, and in the evening they were frequently left with a babysitter while their parents went ballroom dancing (a hobby they pursued into old age) at the Tintwistle and Hollingworth school halls, Glossop’s Victoria Hall and in Ashton-under-Lyne, six miles away. They relied on their eldest daughter to take responsibility for her siblings from an early age. Vivienne has described her parents as being ‘in love all their life and devoted to each other’. Perhaps she felt that this love excluded her. A former employee of Vivienne’s says: ‘Her mother and father were so close. He was star-struck by her right to the end of his life. Dora always came first. She was the star of the family.’

Vivienne was required to walk her brother and sister to the Hollingworth village school each morning and to St Mary’s Anglican church on Sundays. Although her parents were not zealous members of the local church – they would assure her that they would attend the evening service, but rarely did – Vivienne was captivated by religion. On learning, aged four, about the crucifixion, she remembers being so horrified that she vowed to challenge oppression: ‘I felt I had to become a freedom fighter to stop this sort of thing going on. I really did want to do something to change this horrible world.’

Making defiant stands became an early characteristic of this confident and independent girl. On her first day at nursery school in Hollingworth, she saw a queue outside the girls’ lavatory. Reasoning that there was no point in waiting, she used the boys’ instead. She claims that this was her ‘first confrontation with tyranny’, and it earned her a slap from the teacher. By the time she was five she was questioning the teacher’s example, preferring ‘to do my “r”s round and round like a snail because it looked prettier’, rather than copying exactly from the blackboard. Even though she was slapped again, she refused to conform. She had already developed an independent view of mores and manners: ‘I have an inbuilt perversity, a kind of inbuilt clock which always reacts against anything orthodox,’ she said thirty years later.

At the age of eight Vivienne progressed to the Tintwistle church school, where her mother had been educated, and joined a class of variously-aged pupils of both sexes. Her parents took only a distant interest in their children’s academic development, neither harbouring grand ambitions for them nor, according to Gordon junior, discussing what they wanted to do when they grew up. ‘We never showed our parents our school reports,’ Gordon remembers, though Vivienne’s consistently acknowledged her ‘creativity’: ‘It wasn’t that they didn’t care, they just assumed we were bright and let us get on with it.’

Despite her comparatively uncultured background, Vivienne remembers finding stimulating companionship in books, which nourished her imagination and led her beyond the restricted world of her family. One can imagine her escaping the confines of the small bedroom she shared with Olga and Gordon, spending winter evenings huddled in front of the hearth, or sneaking into her parents’ room and, propped up against the door under the scratchy tulle layers of her mother’s dance dresses, losing herself in the pages of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five stories, the brothers Grimm’s fairy tales and Walter Scott’s ‘Lochinvar’. These first writers were soon followed, according to Vivienne, by Dickens, Buchan, Chaucer and Keats. On summer mornings she scrambled over the wall behind the cottage, passed through a disused quarry and climbed up to the high meadow to read: ‘I remember sitting in this meadow in the sun with the dew still on the grass, and I could smell May blossom, and even at that early age I remember saying to myself how lucky I was.’

Vivienne’s childhood was secure and happy. She enjoyed exploring the lyrically beautiful nearby peaks and dales. Finding hideaways in the wooded terrain of the Snake Pass and Devil’s Elbow towards Cut-Throat Bridge, she would read adventure stories or tuck into a picnic of treats from her aunt’s greengrocers, washed down with home-made dandelion and burdock lemonade. It was during these solitary, free-roaming days in this gauzy, rain-softened terrain that she developed what she has called her ‘country heart’; her subsequent nostalgia for the English rural idyll and her knowledge of its flora and fauna. Two decades later, money being short, she used her knowledge of edible plants to feed her family; as a designer she would refer back to country pastimes – fell-walking, riding, fishing, shooting – to create clothes that, even though they were worn by the hurried city-dweller, conjured up the unhurried, idealised Arcadia of her childhood.

From 1951, a recession developed in the British cotton industry as competitively priced imports from Hong Kong, India and Pakistan began to flood the home market. Large numbers of jobs were lost in Glossopdale’s mills, and while some of Vivienne’s neighbours found employment in the new chemical and plastics firms that moved into the area, many joined the ranks of the unemployed or the economic migrants. The hardships Vivienne witnessed left their mark on her: it would be many years before she placed what she saw as the indulgence of higher education above her anxiety to earn her keep.

Almost effortlessly, Vivienne won a place at Glossop Grammar School in 1952. According to her maternal aunt Ethel Mitchell, who owned a sweet shop in Tintwistle: ‘Before her eleven-plus I remember Dora suggesting that Vivienne should be swotting. Vivienne simply said, “Why?” She knew it all, and passed with good grades.’

Glossop Grammar School was three miles from the Swires’ home, and was reached by a bus that travelled across Woolley Bridge, which separated Cheshire from Derbyshire, past several cloth mills, under a viaduct and into the market town of Glossop. The handsome stone building, erected in 1899 by Francis Fitzalan, the second Lord Howard, as an art and technical school for mill apprentices, stood on the corner of Talbot Street and Fitzalan Street. In 1903 it became a grammar school, with the brightest local children competing for places. Reginald Barnsley, who was at the school at the same time as Vivienne, recalled that ‘science, maths, English were important. Music, PE and woodwork didn’t count for much … it was a learning school with seven lessons a day.’

Formality and propriety characterised this proud grammar school, which is now an adult education centre. Only teachers and sixth-formers could pass through the main entrance, under a stone-carved plaque bearing the school’s motto: Virtus, Veritas, Libertas (Honour, Truth, Liberty). Juniors had to use the back door, where they changed from outdoor shoes into indoor pumps. The boys, dressed in grey trousers and maroon-and-navy striped blazers, crossed the black-and-white-tiled hall and climbed the left-hand arc of the rosewood staircase to assembly, while the girls, in grey skirts or gymslips, blazers, white blouses and grey stockings, filed up the right. The staff room and offices had long casement windows which overlooked The Nab, a substantial hill at the back of the building, but the classrooms had high windows to prevent pupils from being distracted by daydreams.

A memorable event of Vivienne’s youth was the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on 2 June 1953. It rained that day, and the Swires attended a celebration tea party at Tintwistle Sunday School, which was hung with patriotic bunting and banners. Waving their Union Jacks, the party then proceeded to a neighbouring cottage where they crowded into the front room to watch the event on television. The image of the royal family and all its tradition and pageantry must have had an impact on the visually alert twelve-year-old Vivienne, for she was to exploit them, both positively and negatively, in her creative life many years later.

A few months after the coronation, the Swires rented a new council house for a year in nearby Hollingworth, and then, in 1954, Dora was given the opportunity to become the Tintwistle village postmistress. The family moved into the building which housed the post office in its flagstoned basement at 36 Manchester Road, at the end of a terrace of five. Dora, exhibiting the distinctive independence of the women of her family, boasted proudly that the post office was ‘in her name’. All three children inherited this ‘supreme self-confidence’ which their maternal aunt, Ethel Mitchell, observed and shared. Vivienne’s early role models were matriarchal. Power resided with the women in the family, and Vivienne soon displayed their strident determination.

As well as distributing the post, Dora also ran a little general store in which she sold a few of the cheaper magazines, such as Woman’s Own and Women’s Weekly, that disseminated the fashions of the time in a watered-down form, and provided dressmaking and knitting patterns. She also stocked a small selection of clothing, such as underwear from John Smedley, the Derbyshire specialists in fine-gauge knitwear, and traditional gymslips (both of which were to feature in Vivienne’s collections in the 1980s – when Vivienne’s school uniform changed to skirt and blouse, she insisted on keeping her gymslip).

Young Vivienne was determined to make her mark at her new school, to be ‘more extreme’ than the crowd. In her attention-seeking manner, she was always first to raise her hand in answer to a teacher’s question, to the annoyance of her classmates. One contemporary, Eileen Mellish, remembers Vivienne as argumentative, getting ‘a bit humpy’ when the biology teacher chastised her, and climbing out of the window when she had been locked into a classroom for detention. With her unusual cast of mind, Vivienne would find tangential solutions to set questions: when the class was given the title ‘Bats in the Belfry’ for a painting, Eileen Mellish recalls, ‘We all imagined a church, but she went psychological and did bats in the head. She was smart.’

Her maths teacher, Jack Holden, however, finds it hard to recall Vivienne: she was ‘an unremarkable girl, you didn’t notice her’. Vivienne was certainly not a distinguished scholar, though she did reasonably well at English, sports and art, for which she took lessons after school with the art teacher, Gordon Bell. She did come third in the high jump at the school sports day, and when she entered the annual poster competition at the age of fifteen, she was highly commended, ‘which, as you know,’ says Holden, ‘means she didn’t quite make it. Looking at Vivienne Swire and looking at Vivienne Westwood, I would just sit there in total amazement. How on earth the one became the other is quite beyond me. But you see, we are nice people. You didn’t do outrageous things.’

It was exactly this sense of propriety that Vivienne wished to challenge, with bold actions such as ‘always {being} the one who kissed the teacher under the mistletoe at Christmas’. Bob Noton, a primary-school sweetheart, was enamoured of her ‘striking’ looks, composed carriage and long dark hair neatly tied back in a ponytail. He found her direct and flirtatious. But when the pair went on to Glossop Grammar School, he was summarily dumped: there was ‘too much competition by the other boys for Vivienne – she was a hot date and knew she was a good-looking, bonnie girl’. Vivienne is also remembered for making a point of championing an unpopular and lonely boy, a moralising and self-publicising stance.

With the onset of puberty Vivienne, who claimed to have had a boyfriend from the age of ten, began to show an interest in sex which her mother would have dubbed ‘fast’. She went with her schoolfriend Anne Shaw to Sunday school dances, and looked forward to rainy days when games were replaced by ballroom dancing in the school gym. She boasted that she had a different boyfriend every week: ‘I was straight until I was fourteen. Then I went funny … boredom, bad boredom.’ Though she says she did not indulge in full sexual intercourse (something her parents had brought her up to believe was only to be enjoyed within marriage) until her late teens, her physical relationships were ‘quite heavy, lots of kissing and all that’. A former classmate remembers the fifteen-year-old Vivienne flaunting a ring and proudly announcing that she was engaged.

Thanks to protruding teeth (later straightened) and a flat chest, Vivienne did not judge herself to be pretty, though she anticipated that ‘I was going to be.’ Perhaps her lack of self-confidence was a result of having a pretty and vain mother. Seeing that Dora was always well turned-out, and the impact that had on her father, gave Vivienne an early belief in the power of beauty and clothes. She determined to make something of herself through her clothing. She would come home from school with a piece of material, cut out a dress, sew it up and wear it that night. At school she wore one coloured stocking and one plain one with her uniform, which she had customised by tightening the skirt round her haunches and cutting a provocative slit up the back. She started padding her bras, longing for the sexuality of a curvaceous female form – ‘big tits are what boys are interested in’. Her idols were the hourglass-shaped Sophia Loren, Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. The clothes she later designed would challenge sports-honed skinniness with a voluptuousness enhanced by corsets and high heels. She also took to curling her hair, leaving the curls so stiff that it looked as if the rollers had not been removed.

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.