The first biographical portrait of one of England’s great eccentrics and leading fashion designers – the outrageously controversial fashion anarchist, agent provocateur and sacred cow of the international fashion world, Vivienne Westwood.

For two decades, Vivienne Westwood has been Britain’s most consistently original, outrageous and controversial designer. In that time she has evolved from an iconoclastic outsider to an internationally revered figure, with two British Designer of the Year awards, an OBE, her own successful fashion label and an unrivalled reputation for leading where other designers follow.
Yet Westwood has never ceased to excite passionate feelings, both for and against. The extravagance and even scandalousness of her designs, together with her sometimes bizarre pronouncements on life, culture and fashion, have firmly – but perhaps erroneously – established her in the public mind as an outlandish eccentric. Her lifestyle could scarcely be in greater contrast to the opulence which surrounds other leading designers: she continues to live in a modest council flat in South London, and travels around the capital by bicycle, dressed in her own flamboyant creations, with a plastic bag protecting her hair from the elements. What was it that drove an awkward girl from a conventional and provincial background to become – comparatively late in life – one of world fashion’s most influential and respected designers? How has she managed to remain true to her own idiosyncratic vision, refusing to conform to the fashion
industry’s, and society’s, expectations? And how important to her career have been the men in her life: Malcolm McLaren, with whom she originated the punk movement that was to change British popular music and youth culture for ever; Gary Ness, her shadowy intellectual mentor; and Andreas Kronthaler, her current husband, almost twenty-five years her junior?
Now, in the first full biography of this extraordinary and complex figure, Jane Mulvagh reveals the truth behind the bizarre and often contradictory public image. Speaking to Westwood herself, her friends, lovers, colleagues, rivals, admirers and detractors, and drawing on her own expertise as a fashion historian, she has created a portrait as rich, distinctive and constantly surprising as her subject’s character and work.