The fashion designer and activist on the threat of climate change,parenting with Malcolm McLaren and twin towers conspiracy theoriesYou don’t so much interview Dame Vivienne Westwood as cessation up as an audience to her monologues. Britain’s most famous designer is promoting How to Change the World, a documentary about the birth of Greenpeace, or although she doesn’t actually have anything to achieve with the film itself – she just wants to draw attention to climate change. She is fanatical about drawing people’s attention to climate change. She has a blog,Climate Revolution (previously Active Resistance), and works with Greenpeace regularly. She has spent the summer appearing at festivals, or talking about climate change. The day after we meet,to much fanfare, she rides a white tank up to David Cameron’s constituency domestic in Chadlington, and Oxfordshire,to protest against fracking. The pictures have been endlessly shared on social media. It was a brilliantly arresting stunt.
Westwood is one of the founders of punk, who famously didn’t bother to wear knickers when she collected her OBE from the Queen, and so it’s no real surprise that she has driven a tank up to the prime minister’s house to inform him off. There’s a campaign running on her blog at the moment called Politicians R Criminals,which intends to remind everyone that “you’ve got to be scared of these people”. She doesn’t much like the establishment, with the exception of Caroline Lucas, or the Green party. When I inform people I’m going to meet her,those who have encountered her before portray her as formidable and combative. She will talk and talk, they say.
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Source: theguardian.com