Vivienne Westwood Is Remembered in London
How can you encapsulate the life and legacy of Vivienne Westwood—a chief genius in England’s fashion canon and much, much more besides—in a memorial service? As her granddaughter, Cora Corré, conceded in the last address of this afternoon’s event at Southwark Cathedral: “We can only really touch on the characteristics of the phenomenon that is Vivienne Westwood: a grandmother, a mother, a sister, a friend, a teacher, an artist, a designer—it will never be enough.”
From family to fashion via punk and protest, there was a lot of ground to cover in this 90-minute celebration of Westwood, who passed away in December. And yet there were also well-judged moments that served as reflective punctuation marks—allowing it all to sink in—provided via some particularly beautiful performances. One was from Nick Cave, who sat marvelously saturnine at the piano to sing “Into My Arms” with painfully emotional precision. Another was from Chrissie Hynde, who, accompanied by a guitarist, delivered Buddy Holly’s “Raining in My Heart” low and pure.
The attendees who came to remember Westwood reflected her rich and various progress through life. They included, in no specific order, Paul Smith, Kate Moss, Tracey Emin, Elle Fanning, Victoria Beckham, Pam Hogg, Lily Cole, Liberty Ross, Bianca Jagger, Georgia Jagger, Bob Geldof, Sadie Frost, Jade Parfitt, Mark Moore, Giles Deacon, Beth Ditto, Zandra Rhodes, Brian Cox, Richard E. Grant, Ellen von Unwerth, Paloma Faith, Erdem Moralioglu, Matty Bovan, Stormzy, Alexa Chung, Vanessa Redgrave, and Christina Hendricks. Hamish Bowles, Edward Enninful, and Anna Wintour were amongst those from this parish.
The service began and ended with performances by Arnfield Brass, a brass band local to Westwood’s birthplace near Tintwistle, Derbyshire, that had played at her funeral there in January. The welcome was provided by Reverend Andrew Nunn, the dean of Southwark.
Then came Andreas Kronthaler, Westwood’s husband. Movingly, he told two stories about his wife, one from either side of their time together. The first was from 1988, when he was a student of fashion in Vienna and she was his teacher and they began their relationship. He recalled taking her on an illicit early date to see the city’s best Old Master paintings. When he picked Westwood up, he recalled: “She looked a sensation. She wore a chocolate brown stretch-velvet catsuit. A scarf draped around her hip. Her rocking-horse shoes. A leopard fake fur in pink. And her curls, in orange.” At the Kunsthistorisches he showed her his favorite Velázquez and then a Rubens—an image of which was on the tie he was wearing as he spoke to us from the pulpit. As Westwood was looking at the painting, recalled Kronthaler: “I looked at her and realized that she was my darling girl and I would be with her forever.”
The second story was of how, in her later years, Westwood had read and reread a favorite book of Chinese poetry as part of her immersion into Taoism. The book had eventually fallen apart, and Kronthaler promised to stick it back into shape—before discovering that some of the pages were missing, despite all his searching. He only found them after her passing. Kronthaler closed by saying: “Vivienne brought us all together here today, and what she wanted more than anything was for each of us to do all we can to make the world a better place.”
Westwood’s younger son, Joseph Corré, came next and revealed some fascinating details about the formation of his mother’s iconoclastic spirit. He said that although Westwood was “not a religious person,” her shock at learning while a child in Derbyshire the story of Jesus Christ had aroused in her a burning passion to battle injustice. He added: “Back in the 1970s, affected by the horrors of the war in Vietnam, she became interested in the idea of chaos: a shout into the void, as a way of creating something that wasn’t there. That led her to develop ideas about anarchy, which she graphically demonstrated by putting the A into the circle.” After lamenting the enforced absence of Julian Assange, he added: “We should remember and never forget that she made the most beautiful clothes that made so many people feel amazingly fabulous…clothes that had a magical quality.” Part of that quality, he said, was that Westwood’s activist convictions were inherently ingrained in the garments. He closed by saying that his mother had left him with a to-do list: “Some things are quite challenging, like ‘stop the war,’ ‘stop climate change,’ and ‘protect human rights.’”
Then followed a film created by Westwood’s brother, Gordon Swire, that mixed footage from the Derbyshire and Yorkshire dales and moors of her childhood with footage of the designer speaking. Of her early life we heard Westwood remember searching for berries with her father and loving to skip on the street with her friends—“it felt like flying”—before becoming a confirmed habitué of local dances. She claimed to have kissed 200 boys—they would canoodle in air-raid shelters—and specially printed when 14 a bulk order of photographs of herself in order to be able to give each night’s beau a keepsake.