Vivienne Westwood on why art is the “best education” one can get
The late Vivienne Westwood is largely credited for bringing punk and new-wave fashion aesthetics into the mainstream. The late legendary fashion designer ran a clothes shop on King’s Road in London and helped to style the UK punk scene in the 1970s.
However, interestingly, Westwood claims that the entire punk movement was “just a fashion that became a marketing opportunity for people”. Elaborating further, she once told The Guardian: “It’s great nowadays to see young people dressed as a punk because it’s entered into the iconography of ‘I am a rebel, and that’s what I look like if I want to be that kind of rebel.'”
Still, Westwood stopped short of claiming that 21st-century punks hold any sort of credibility. She said: “No, it hasn’t; it was just an excuse for people to run around without thought. The whole 20th Century was a mistake. Nobody was thinking. It was like, ‘We’re rebels; we’re against stuff. Break everything from the past’. Not an idea happened in the 20th Century.”
The fashion icon also premeditated the current climate of opinion spouting on social media. “You can’t have opinions unless you form opinions, and you need something to form opinions with,” she said. “Today, everybody’s got their opinion, but it’s not; it’s the first thing that comes into their head, and it’s worthless.”
The remedy to that, Westwood believed it was smart to invest oneself in art as it can create a worldview bigger than the sum of one’s “own lifetime”. She noted: “One truth is no more true than another. If you look at these windows to the past, it’s like going much further than your own lifetime. There are all these different points of view on the world, and that’s what art does for us.”
It’s that investment in art that provides one with the best possible education. “It tells the truth about a vision of the world from different points in time,” Westwood added. “We understand it because of our common humanity. I believe that art, music, reading the best stuff, going to the theatre, whatever, is the best education you can get because it’s self-education. You’re getting it for yourself.”
And the product of that self-education is that it provides the sense that one can think for oneself. “If you invest in art, if you study yourself art, you become a freedom fighter immediately,” Westwood suggests. “You’re life changes because you get off the consumer treadmill. You start thinking. Walk around with Catcher in the Rye under your arm, kids, because that’s status.”
