Slightly less than 24 hours before their latest catwalk show, fashion designers Vivienne Westwood and Andreas Kronthaler were holed up in an uncharacteristically contemporary building beside their Paris boutique. They were making fashion. Not clothes – the clothes were made, mostly anyway. There were rubber dresses and tweed suits and ballgowns and corsets and platform shoes, quotes from an aesthetic vernacular established by Westwood over almost a half-century of work, almost 30 years of which have been spent alongside Kronthaler. Their latest models were complete, bar a few tweaks, changes and alterations to make sure they fitted in the exact way required for the presentation – which may be normal, distorted or twisted on the body, falling off or rolling down. The final outfits were coming together organically, as lace and taffeta and leopard-print fake-fur garments were interchanged to arresting or amusing effect. Journalists are normally never permitted to watch this period of the creative process at Westwood. It’s a rare privilege – and I was very much an interloper. I stayed out of the way. Westwood stood on the sidelines, watching intently, the process mostly handled by 52-year-old Andreas Kronthaler and stylist Sabina Schreder, who studied alongside each other at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. That was also where Westwood met Kronthaler in 1989. She was a guest professor of fashion; Kronthaler, a 23-year-old from the Austrian Tyrol, was in his first year. Their age difference of 25 years was much commented on when Kronthaler and Westwood’s relationship came to wide public attention following their discreet marriage in May 1992. (Westwood’s own mother only
found out about it in 1993 from newspaper articles.) There is less note paid of it today – now Westwood is 77 – than when they were in their 50s and 30s.

Yet theirs remains an unusual partnership, in every sense of the term. It is unusual not for trite, traditional reasons of age – Westwood loathes orthodoxy, quoting Bertrand Russell in decrying it as ‘the grave of intelligence’ – but on many levels, not least its depth and generosity. Westwood and Kronthaler are both romantic and professional partners, living and working together in scenes of striking, yet cosy domesticity, which journalists generally see when they are invited to the label’s Battersea studio. The couple live nearby in Clapham Old Town, and both cycle to work, as Westwood did for our meeting a month or so after the show. Perhaps due to the early April British weather, she was late.

Andreas doesn’t speak very much, and he doesn’t tell me when I’ve got an appointment,’ she says, by way of explanation, later. ‘He did probably tell me this morning. He just
came in and mumbled something and went out, and I didn’t know. I did know that he was doing an interview, but I didn’t hear him say that I was, too. He’s going to Italy on Monday – and I don’t find that out from him. Somebody else tells me. You can be in mid-conversation with Andreas and he will walk out… Or rather, you can say something to him, wait for a reply, and just sort of keep on waiting, and then he might just walk out the room and you don’t see him again for five hours. He’s a horse. He’s always off.’

The studio space Westwood and Kronthaler share is small, dominated by a large pattern-cutting table strewn with the debris of collections past, with a small kitchenette in a larder cupboard to one side. The carpet is a tartan of the clan MacAndreas, a pattern Westwood designed with tartanmakers Lochcarron of Scotland in 1993 and named after
Kronthaler. It featured heavily in that year’s Autumn/Winter Anglomania collection.

MacAndreas tartan was a tellingly visible acknowledgement of Kronthaler’s influence on Westwood’s collections – his name is keyed into the very fabric – but only one of the
first. While Westwood was the public face – and voice – of the company, she continually credited Kronthaler for work that she termed, then and now, as a collaboration, albeit an
unorthodox one. Another significant shift took place in 2016: the collection shown biannually in Paris, Vivienne Westwood’s main brand, until then known as Gold Label and often termed ‘demi-couture’ by Westwood given the complexity of ideas and execution (as well as its price point), was rebranded Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood. In the Westwood studio, a month after the latest Paris show, I asked her about her reasoning. ‘I definitely wanted Andreas Kronthaler to be acknowledged by everybody for the genius that he is,’ she said, with emphasis. She refers to him, often, as a genius, as well as the ‘greatest designer in the world’. ‘And I absolutely wanted his name to be as well-known as mine. That’s what I want. Because it should be. I wanted the public to know that.’

Was she also thinking about the future?

‘When I die?’ Westwood deadpans, one eyebrow raised, then smiles.

Vivienne Westwood’s appearance is always noteworthy: today, her lips are outlined in green, matching a fine mohair sweater from the 2017 winter collection designed by Kronthaler; it is painted with a pair of breasts, like a Neolithic cave drawing. It references Westwood’s past, her interest in primitive cultures, explored in early 1980s collections with names like Savage or her punk ‘Tits’ T-shirt of 1975, provocatively printed with a photograph of female breasts. The latter was from when Westwood’s shop at 430 King’s Road in London was called SEX, a name writ large in capital letters wrapped in spanked-flesh-pink rubber above the door. It was conceived in collaboration with the late Malcolm McLaren, her first creative partner with whom she worked between 1971 and 1983, roughly. McLaren didn’t really wear their wares back then, but Vivienne did. She served customers in the boutique dressed in a translucent Rubber Johnny bodysuit. Named after a British colloquialism for condom, her breasts were clearly visible behind the powdery latex membrane. I try not to look too intently at those printed on her sweater. But it’s striking how, even in the hyper-sexualized cultural landscape of today, Westwood’s explorations of the body can continue to draw attention, and even shock.

Westwood’s barefaced candour is frequently shocking, too. Our conversation isn’t one you generally have with a fashion designer; it’s certainly not a conversation fashion designers have with themselves, even today in a landscape littered with ‘legacy’ labels, of brands established on the precedents and ‘codes’ created by their founders in the early to mid-20th century (Chanel, Dior, Schiaparelli, Balmain) or inherited more recently from founders under various circumstances (Alexander McQueen, Oscar de la Renta). Westwood’s approach is closer to that of Christian Dior – greatly admired by both Westwood and Kronthaler – who unofficially anointed his design assistant Yves Saint Laurent his heir presumptive in 1957, shortly before his death. In effect, Westwood is preempting the inevitable, passing her company along to a new generation and ensuring it will be run in accordance with her wishes. It’s understandable, but it makes it no less extraordinary. Other designers of similar ages – Giorgio Armani, Karl Lagerfeld – steadfastly refuse to discuss succession. When Azzedine Alaïa unexpectedly died in November, there was no plan for how his maison would continue.

It wasn’t about death, not necessarily, she points out. Rather more about the idea that Westwood may simply decide, as she says, that: ‘I don’t want to do any of this anymore; I don’t want to be involved in fashion at all.’ But, I guess, the point is that she has made the decision about who she wants to do it, as opposed to leaving the power to make that decision to somebody else.

Vivienne Westwood: Well, there may have been something in that, but I really wanted to separate the lines so that somehow we could be… it could be… he would be on his own.

I’m sorry, it’s a bit of a difficult question.

Vivienne Westwood: No, no, I’m just thinking. Was I really thinking that? I don’t think I ever did think of it, but…

Westwood has always been pragmatic, practical and direct. Her frankness is often disarming. Kronthaler is softerspoken, less at ease in the spotlight, possibly more romantic. He is dressed more quietly, in striped trousers and a Westwood sweater with an embroidered crest, his hair slightly dishevelled. In the past, Kronthaler had been perceived as a dandy – he modelled in Westwood’s menswear shows in the mid-1990s, wearing a juste-au-corps, the wide-skirted, deepcuffed 18th-century coat favoured in the court of Louis XV, with knee breeches. He often wore a kilt, a stylistic proposition Westwood made many times for men. It reflects a shared love of historical costume, which bonded them together during Westwood’s tutelage of the fledgling fashion designer. ‘When I met Vivienne,’ he remembers, ‘she was somebody who taught you to examine history. In those days, it was unusual, but I could relate to it.’

In the early months of his time at the company, before he and Westwood became romantically involved, he would also wear Westwood’s archives. Kronthaler slept in the Westwood studio, then located in Greenland Street in Camden. ‘I got to know her work very quickly, because of course when you come here, you’re surrounded by it,’ he says, in a soft voice still heavily accented by his native Austrian German. ‘I always tell this story: I used to live in Greenland Street, in the design studio. I lived there for months. I actually slept in the studio. So once they left at seven or whenever, I was in this place on my own and there were all these clothes. In those days, even the archive was there. It was just in some cardboard boxes, falling to pieces, and things would stick out. And I’d pull something out. God knows what came out… I used to dress up in it and go up the street, to a gay bar.’ Kronthaler pauses. ‘So I suppose I studied all this stuff, I put it on dummies and looked at it. I got to know her work, very, very quickly, because I was in the midst of it. You suck it up, like a sponge.’

The Autumn/Winter 2018 Andreas Kronthaler collection was a homage to that time, that experience, that work – and to Westwood herself. It was titled Vivienne, and after collections exploring his own childhood, this was inspired by Vivienne’s heritage, and their relationship, ‘as my collaborator, my friend and partner, my teacher and of course, as
my muse’, to borrow from Kronthaler’s handwritten collection notes. Prior to the show’s presentation, Westwood herself pawed through the rails of garments. She asserted she
hadn’t seen the collection before that day. A model was wearing a georgette dress, gathered at the shoulder, with platform shoes. They were crosshatched with a photographic print of hair, a Surrealist-inspired idea originally used to decorate the interior of the Vivienne Westwood store on Mayfair’s Davies Street.

‘Do you know that dress?’ Westwood says, softly – the opener to a statement, rather than a question, her eyes trained on the ankle-length, hair-printed gown. ‘When I first met
Andreas, he was a student and it was he who introduced the idea of that dress, as a student. It was a long time ago. And it’s a circle, it’s a big circle.’ She means the pattern of the dress itself – referred to as the ‘Circle’ dress in Westwood’s sphere, cut around the body to give an undulating hem and a soft fall to the fabric. ‘It’s only belted,’ says Westwood, of the shape created by drawing the dress in at the shoulders. ‘Andreas demonstrated that by getting a girl to climb up a ladder and then put these belts on to show.’ The ladder was emblematic, she later states, of Andreas’s showmanship, even then as a student. ‘I’d never seen anything like it, the way he showed his clothes,’ Westwood recalls. But more than the presentation, Westwood was intrigued by the garment itself. ‘I had never noticed it before – in 1500, 1400, the influence of Greek costume on the medieval idea of this shape… It’s like a Greek statue. It was all pulled through, like that.’ Westwood sometimes speaks and assumes you understand her references. That ‘that’ wasn’t referring to the dress in front of us, in Paris, but the chitons of the Ancient Greeks, belted, with the cloth manipulated to create different effects. Westwood is familiar with their styles through Ancient Greek statuary – her studies of these, and her love of the period and the philosophical ideals tied up in the drapery of ancient dress, led her
to create a series of collections around them in the late 1980s – when she designed nude tights with mirrored fig-leaves, and corsets swung with ‘Grecian’ drapery. She’s been referencing Ancient Greeks in her clothing ever since, including this dress. ‘You see it,’ she earnestly emphasises. Westwood’s original training – as a teacher – comes through often when she talks, hammering an idea home, encouraging everyone to look. The ‘Circle’ dress, she asserts, is a reflection of the styles seen in Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, painted in 1434. This dress also marked the first major collaboration between Westwood and Kronthaler, presented in the Spring/Summer 1992 Cut and Slash menswear collection in Florence and worn by its only female model, Susie Bick. Other outfits referenced in Autumn/Winter 2018 were the short, bubbly skirts of Westwood’s Mini Crini collection of 1985, and her Harris Tweed collection of 1987. (‘I always use Harris Tweed. She has used it since 1985,’ explains Kronthaler.) The latest collection is
divided, he says, into five categories, each representing a different decade of work: ‘The 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, the 2000 generation or whatever you call it. I can’t remember what it was called.’ There is an entire subsection physically labelled ‘Punk’, featuring hand-knitted, matted mohair with holes poked through. A second model tried these on, an oversized, distorted mohair sweater over a drawstring skirt. Westwood herself played with the drawstring, tugging at the skirt and the flaps of fabric layered over the buttocks uneasily. She then took the outfit to Kronthaler, questioning it. He listened intently, then pulled simply at the drawstring, allowing the skirt to drop to the floor. The model stepped out. Problem solved. Later, when I mentioned this to Westwood, she frowned and said: ‘I don’t even do anything. I don’t get involved in putting it together. I don’t remember putting it together at all.

Although Westwood has now passed control of this line to Kronthaler, I wonder about how the collaboration worked before this period, between these two larger-than-life personalities. Although softly spoken, Kronthaler has always been a forceful presence in the Westwood studios. ‘There was a collection to be done,’ Kronthaler now says, pragmatically, of his beginnings at the company in 1989. ‘And there were decisions to be made and I started… Not maybe that many business decisions at the beginning. I wasn’t actually involved in that, but other decisions I was very much aware and I helped in making those decisions.’ He shrugs. ‘This way of seeing things had a certain force.’

In 1990, Azzedine Alaïa invited them to stage the Autumn/Winter 1991 collection, Dressing Up, at his showrooms. ‘People were questioning that and I said, “Of course we have to go. Of course we’ll go to Paris and show in Paris”,’ he says. ‘To me it was, “Yes, of course, we’ll do it. Let’s not think about it. I know we have no money, but we’ll carry it there or we’ll make it ourselves there”. I don’t know, I had this attitude.’

‘When Andreas came, he really did start telling everybody what to do,’ Westwood told me in London, without Kronthaler. ‘He did it because he was so passionate about everything, and so he was saying things, that it has to be like this. He made me lengthen the skirts, and I was not very happy about that… and everybody is saying, “Who the hell is this guy?” But then they liked what he was doing. He was an amazing one-off.’

Westwood shares similar traits of single-mindedness and a certain didactic strain. The teacher in her can come out not only in conversation, but also sometimes, in her collections. Westwood seeks, constantly, to impart knowledge, to tell you something. When you speak with her, you ask few questions, receive long answers. This is not a criticism, just an observation.

Westwood and Kronthaler’s upbringings had certain similarities. Westwood was born Vivienne Isabel Swire and was raised and lived in Glossop in the Derbyshire countryside
until she was 17; Kronthaler’s upbringing in the Tyrol was similarly rural and idyllic. Westwood made her own clothes – she could, she says, create a physically, and frugally, tight pencil skirt from a yard of fabric with a skinny seam down the back – while Kronthaler’s mother had her wardrobe made by a local seamstress. ‘Clothes were important to the way I grew up,’ Kronthaler says. ‘My mother always went to the tailor every Saturday. She had 50 percent, 60 percent of her clothes made; it was quite intense. She used to do that in the 1960s, 1970s, anyway, from when I was a little boy. I would always go with her to this tailor or I would go and get lengths of fabrics. It was a complete thing; it’s like you go and buy bread, you went and bought a length of fabric for a jacket or a skirt or whatever. She always used to have a little piece of knitwear or a piece of wool in her bag, that she matched something to. So I think it is very ingrained, or engraved, in me. How clothes are part of life.’

‘I come from the north of England,’ Westwood says. ‘I got started a bit later than Andreas because until I was 17 and came to London, I didn’t even know there were art galleries
or anything. I was born in the countryside with a lot of freedom to roam, no cars around. Very, very safe. And parents who just let you do what you wanted. Andreas was the same in the Tyrol, because it was the mountains and everybody knew each other. But they were near to Italy and his family were far more cosmopolitan in their culture than mine.’

Partnership is important to Westwood. Not necessarily personal, but certainly professional, although both have wound up knotted together throughout her work, which has been dominated by collaborations with assertive males. Interestingly, as a teenager she loved to dance – where men lead – and in her professional life, Westwood has waltzed with a number of different partners. Her manager, Carlo d’Amario, has worked with her since the 1980s: they had a brief love affair early in their work together, but it only lasted a few months; and although her ‘intellectual personal trainer’ Gary Ness, who died in 2008, had a marked impact on her work and beliefs, he was homosexual. The relationship with Kronthaler is the longest sustained with a single man satisfying both demands, and for Westwood is the most rewarding on all fronts. She met Malcolm McLaren in 1965 and, six years later, opened a shop on the King’s Road with the name Let It Rock, creating clothes inspired by the revival of 1950s Teddy boy styles. McLaren was often seen as the ‘tapped-in’ one, connected with youth culture, specifically music, a dynamic oddly mirrored in Westwood’s relationship with Kronthaler. Westwood refuses to read newspapers, but Kronthaler reads a number of them every day. ‘I do rely on people sometimes giving me stuff that’s important for me to know,’ says Westwood. She worked
alongside McLaren for 12 years, although their personal relationship eroded sooner, and the final years saw a lessening of his creative impact: ‘Malcolm became less and less involved. The last time I gave him credit he had simply added one hat, and that’s all he did.’ Discussion of McLaren with Westwood has felt verboten for some years; today, however, Westwood seems, if anything, detached, slightly disinterested. ‘When I worked with Malcolm, he was not technical. He could not make things. He might have been able to, but he’d never tried. So it was always just cherry-on-the-cake ideas, really. I was doing all the construction and building the things.’

I always get the impression Westwood is simultaneously weary and wary of interviews. She’s constantly and consistently misinterpreted, and her intellect undermined. She’s made out to be difficult, irascible. She is none of these things. Her environmental activism is her current fixation and has been for a number of years. ‘My main concern all the time is my activism,’ she states. ‘But it’s not about that we’re talking, is it?’ Westwood is aware of the impression she gives, contrary to popular belief, and the contrariness she is often perceived to embody.

It is interesting though that, often, the issues and ideas Westwood champions are initially dismissed before finding wider acceptance. It frequently happened in the case of her
fashion; her corset and crinolines, her platform shoes and rich, baroque-derived patterns set the pace for fashion at the start of the 1990s. Some criticized Westwood when she began to create clothes in the vein of mid-century couture, saying she was pandering to the establishment or creating vainglorious reflections of fashion history without contemporary relevance. Some have also criticized Kronthaler, in hindsight, citing his influence over Westwood’s aesthetic. Yet, she soldiered on, and the revival of true haute couture, and its reflected styles in ready-to-wear, became one of the major stories of late 1990s fashion. And no reminder is needed of fashion’s aggressive rejection of punk during its heyday, and its embrace of the style immediately after its demise. Westwood was first.

In recent years, she has become equally well-known for her polemics. From the mid-1980s, she espoused the death of culture in the 20th century: ‘Everyone knows we live in
an ecological crisis, but they don’t realize the cultural one is just as critical,’ she told the New York Times in 1993. Her collections, with their homages to Greek and Roman styles, the salonnières of 18th-century Paris and café society of the 19th, were palimpsests on which Westwood could scribble her thoughts on how we should think, not just dress. Her Autumn/Winter 1994 collection, On Liberty, was named after the John Stuart Mill essay and was conceived as a critique of the ‘tyranny of the majority’, succour to Westwood’s anti-orthodoxy ethos. Democracy, Westwood reasoned, made the masses fat, so the slender silhouette came into fashion. Westwood, instead, dressed her models up with extreme padding and bustle-pillows, with projecting cages of wire over the rear (and later, the ‘tits’, as she gleefully tells me), crafting a bombastic female form as an antidote to philosophical orthodoxy, not just to looking like anyone else. A decade later, her opinions had flipped 180-degrees (which isn’t unique, for Westwood). She became fixated with the horror of impending ecological disaster, devoting her collections to combating climate change. Observers sneered at both standpoints. But today, the contemporary obsessions of reality television and social media are regularly decried as ‘culturally redundant’, among other societal extremes, while climate change is real. And everyone now, it seems, is an activist. Westwood increasingly seems less and less out of place.

Even Westwood’s latest refrain, a sensible notion of ‘buy less, choose well, make it last’ – ‘the best thing I’ve ever written, really,’ Westwood comments – has raised the hackles of those who see it as inherently incompatible with the very identity of the industry she operates within. Which is, perhaps, the problem many have with Westwood’s trussing together of her medium with a message: fashion isn’t supposed to say anything. Fashion isn’t supposed to provoke thought. Fashion is supposed to be attractive, to perhaps communicate wealth or status or sexuality. You’re supposed to look at fashion, not think about it. To borrow the title of one of Westwood and Kronthaler’s mid-1990s collections, change and upheaval in fashion are supposed to be a storm in a teacup, nothing more. But Westwood’s fashion forces you to think, which is why so many people react so violently to it. It has been the subject of reams of newspaper headlines and at least one court case: the Naked Cowboys T-shirt, with its Tom of Finland-style illustration of two cowboys, naked from the waist down with their penises almost touching, incited the ire of the authorities in a way the later (photographic) ‘tits’ T-shirt did not. Westwood
and McLaren were fined £50 for ‘exposing to public view an indecent exhibition’ in November 1975. It is near-impossible to imagine a T-shirt evoking similar reactions today; in no small part, thanks to what Westwood did and does.

Vivienne Westwood is simultaneously one of the best known and one of the most overlooked fashion designers in history. Her face and name garner recognition from a public
to whom ‘fashion’ – as a rarefied, storied realm distinct from clothing – means very little; she was awarded an OBE in 1992 and made a Dame for her services to fashion in 2006. And yet what Westwood did, and continues to do, has never been fully appreciated for its power, for the way it has shifted the way we dress, but also the way we think.

In their small studio, in Battersea, Vivienne Westwood and Andreas Kronthaler drink tea and talk about changing the world. And then they do it.