My Take | Vivienne Westwood and punks were the true moral force of modern Britain

No future no future for you. – “God Save the Queen”, Sex Pistols

Banksy says everything is art when you put a frame around it. Dame Vivienne Westwood made the same statement about fashion when she sent frayed, discarded and worn-out clothes down the catwalk. “Distress” wear suddenly became a fashion statement. Britain’s social rejects and jobless youths were magically transformed into avant-garde rebels.

I just read a headline on a fashion webpage on my daughter’s computer screen: “Distressed, Worn-Out Clothing Trends for Fall/Winter 2022”. What, 2022 still? Westwood, who has died aged 81, did all that four decades ago and had long moved on. “Ahead of her time” does not begin to describe this extraordinary woman.

Let me confess I care and know nothing about fashion. But Westwood and her old mate Malcolm McLaren have always fascinated me since I was a teen for their sheer force of personality and piercing insights into the cynicism and hypocrisy of modern Britain. With ironic wit, they turned their own “exploitation” of disaffected youth into an artistic and moral statement against the exploitation and (mis)appropriation of Western capitalism. A greater power couple there never was. Westwood gave punks the looks, McLaren their attitude, and the Sex Pistols their legitimacy.

I still love McLaren’s greatest creation, the Sex Pistols. For four guys who couldn’t play the instruments of which they were supposedly players, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, their one and only full album, remains one of the last century’s greatest, for many worthy critics. Lead singer Johnny Rotten might have been the first to publicly expose Jimmy Savile when that monstrous serial rapist and paedophile was being celebrated as a national treasure by the BBC and Margaret Thatcher. For that, Rotten was turned into a media pariah, a status from which he never recovered even after the truth came out.