Dame Westwood is not happy. Seated in a plush armchair and more posh-looking than we are accustomed to, she grumbles, “I just need to talk and get it over with.” The “it” is “Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist,” the documentary by music video and promo veteran Lorna Tucker, tracing the rise of Vivienne Westwood from post-World War II working-class child to punk queen of fashion and then “dame,” the equivalent of a knighthood.
Tucker’s eye-popping portrait uses the style and colors of Westwood’s work over the decades — a style combining signature British patterns and fabrics with the aesthetics of punk, sci-fi, steampunk, thrift shop and S&M — as its palette. Watching “Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist” is to be immersed, not only in Westwood’s life and her mood swings, but also to be dipped like a candy apple in her eclectic and provocative mode.
Like Alfred Hitchcock, Westwood was the daughter of a greengrocer. After attending Harrow School of Art and earning a teaching degree, Westwood was a primary school teacher who also made and sold jewelry at a stall on Portobello Road. At 11 or 12 years old, Westwood tells us, she could make her own clothes.
Her fashion designing career began after she met and moved in with Malcolm McLaren, whose surname is never mentioned in the film, and who went to great lengths to stymie Westwood’s career. She designed with McLaren the clothing worn by the punk phenomenon the Sex Pistols, a band McLaren managed, and she and McLaren sold them in a London shop named SEX, taking an unhappy British fashion establishment by storm.
Some time after she and McLaren split, Westwood took up with a young, tall and handsome Austrian fashion student named Andreas Kronthaler, who is arguably the new Malcolm. He designs with her. In some ways she is the muse and he is the designer. On camera, Andreas is likely to hold his head and mutter, “I dunno.” One of the workers in their inner circle refers to Westwood as “Drunken Auntie” and Andreas as “Gay Uncle.”
The Westwood empire has never gone corporate like so many other fashion lines. Westwood is the queen of her kingdom, and she is unhappy about its global expansion (120 shops and counting) because she cannot exert the control she feels she needs. Westwood has also become an ardent environmentalist, something that Tucker makes clear is a natural extension of Westwood’s punk-era anti-establishment fervor, which remains a constant inspiration. Even as a dame, Westwood, who at 70-something gets around London on a bicycle, is likely to label something “a load of bollocks.”
At intervals, a white-gloved museum archivist gushes over a Westwood line on display and tells us exactly what makes it an important stage in modern fashion history.
Most fun of all are montages of decadent, champagne-drenched and raucous runway shows, featuring such luminaries as Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. Even Andre Leon Tally, the subject of his own current documentary “The Gospel According to Andre,” shows up to sing Westwood’s praises. Like “Gospel,” “Westwood” is a reminder that fashion is wearable art and history and that its giants are often self-made culture warriors.
(“Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist” contains nudity and profanity.)