Vivienne Westwood

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 10:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety two, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:28

My Castaway this week is a fashion designer. She was born in Cheshire but moved while still young with her family to London, where in the mid sixties she married a dance hall manager and worked as a teacher. Her marriage broke up and she began a long relationship with Malcolm McLaren. Together they founded the punk movement, inventing the anarchic and often sexually explicit style of dress which became its emblem.

Presenter0:51

Fashion, which had started as a by product of punk, became her main concern, and during the eighties she staged a series of successful shows. Avant garde, surprising, even shocking, her designs are highly influential, and at least one fellow designer has hailed their inventor as a genius. Named Designer of the Year in nineteen ninety and ninety one, she is Vivian Westwood.

Presenter1:14

Were you flattered, Vivian, to be named Designer of the Year, or did you think it was about time?

Vivienne Westwood1:20

Well, I s I didn't expect it at all.

Vivienne Westwood1:24

Because um I had expected it before, and so I was quite sure that I never would get it.

Presenter1:30

But why do you think it took so long for you to be formally recognised here? Because over these over the twenty years between the early seventies and now the early nineties

Vivienne Westwood1:35

Please

Presenter1:40

So many of your things I said earlier on you'd been influential so many of your ideas had actually

Vivienne Westwood1:42

Been influenced.

Presenter1:45

to put it crudely, been nicked by other fashion.

Vivienne Westwood1:48

One of the explanations of this is that my designs aren't commercial and therefore they have to be watered down by other people later on. It's not that they're they're not commercial, it's just that they're new and so it sometimes takes a little longer for for them to for people's eye or fe sentiments or anything to to get.

Presenter2:10

get used to them. But what that often means is that somebody else will take the credit. I mean your your minnie crinnie, the the short crinoline, became the puff ball, which everybody else took credit for and made a commercial success of, didn't it?

Vivienne Westwood2:16

The

Speaker 12:16

Uh

Vivienne Westwood2:16

Yeah.

Vivienne Westwood2:19

Which

Vivienne Westwood2:23

Mm-hmm.

Vivienne Westwood2:24

No, no, there are there are very many things that that that I have done, even things in menswear, even s small details, even things like a lapel that's sort of a bit dropped and clothes that don't quite fit and all this kind of thing and asymmetrical things and things that are a bit oversized and all those kind of things and even something like um a simple sort of jersey skirt that you just pull up, whatever length it might be, ankle length, knee length, that's just sort of pulled up, which I called a tube skirt. It's really odd to think that nobody actually made a sort of knitted or sweatshirt or

Vivienne Westwood3:00

jersey sort of skirt before um I did it because it seemed so obvious. So tell me what's the first record that you'd play when you were cast away alone on your desert island?

Vivienne Westwood3:10

It's Le Beuf sur le Troie and it's by Mio, who was a friend of Cocteau, and Cocteau made a ballet towards it. It was in the time of American Prohibition, and it was a funny thing of this speakeasy club where people were illegally drinking and all kinds of things were going on. And the high point of the thing is when the policeman gets decapitated. I think he gets his head back eventually, but anyway, it's it's full of irony and I I use this a lot in my fashion shows, especially when I when I don't want people to take what I'm showing too seriously and I want it to be sort of urbane and slick.

Presenter4:45

Miot's Le Beuf sur le Troi, a ballet after Jean Cocteau, played by the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Valek.

Presenter4:54

The hallmarks of uh punk, Vivian Westwood, which you and Malcolm McLaren invented together in the early seventies, was was anarchy and destruction. How did you arrive at that invention? What was the thinking behind?

Vivienne Westwood5:07

Behind

Vivienne Westwood5:09

Punk rock was essentially an exercise about rock and roll.

Vivienne Westwood5:13

And Malcolm once said that rock and roll is the jungle beat that threatens white civilization. And it is essentially the idea that youth wishes to attack authority. Of course, youth will always wish to attack authority. But I think that punk rock was a a really fantastic and heroic attempt

Vivienne Westwood5:34

to um understand whether there was such a thing as an establishment that like a kind of door that you could almost sort of kick and and have some sort of effect on. So you began if you

Presenter5:46

Like to to dress these ideas, to put clothes on these kinds of ideas, and and you ended up.

Vivienne Westwood5:49

Yeah.

Presenter5:54

Um well, you describe it. I mean, if if someone had never seen punk, what would you say were the hallmarks of it in fashion terms?

Vivienne Westwood5:57

And had no

Vivienne Westwood6:02

It was built up from all the motifs that we'd been sort of exploring in terms of what this rebellion, this youth rebellion, would be.

Vivienne Westwood6:11

And the first thing was the Teddy Boys, and then then we got bored with the Teddy Boys because they seemed to be more interested in having loads of records and collecting all the right ones and having all these sun label records and everything. And we got more interested in rockers with their their slogans, and we renamed our shop Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die.

Vivienne Westwood6:35

which was a rocker slogan, and we started to get all these T-shirts with chains on and all these black things and um

Presenter6:43

And leather that was where the leather came from, said the Rockers.

Vivienne Westwood6:46

Yeah, it was. Right, that's right. And uh then the next thing that we did, because we weren't satisfied enough with that, is that we uh got arrested for doing this T-shirt which was supposed to be pornographic of two naked cowboys and somebody was wearing it in Piccadilly at the same time as the programme about Johnny Go Home and it was all about rent boys in Piccadilly and the police were in there and they saw a man wearing this T shirt and they arrested him.

Vivienne Westwood7:19

And we we got done for that. Well, because the cowboys

Presenter7:22

Yeah.

Presenter7:23

Yeah.

Vivienne Westwood7:23

Yeah.

Presenter7:23

The penises were hanging out at the time.

Vivienne Westwood7:26

Yeah, the the I tell you I can remember the verdict of the judge in saying why it was pornographic. It was that they were too close together in that in the respect that you've just mentioned, that their penises were too close together and that also they were over large, so he said, and also one of them was tying the other's necktie.

Vivienne Westwood7:48

Uh anyway, that was the clincher.

Presenter7:50

And then on from there came th th the whole fashion of of bondage and

Vivienne Westwood7:55

Yes, so we so we decided to just go all out for that then and we called the shop sex and started to sell more pornographic T shirts and also to to put all this rubberware in there.

Presenter7:55

Drafts.

Vivienne Westwood8:08

Uh

Vivienne Westwood8:09

And then also the other influence on on the punk was the fact that we had the shop walls had been at one time in our first shop been covered with all these little pictures from fifties pin up magazines with girls in all this torn clothing.

Vivienne Westwood8:24

And um so we w started to rip clothes in that way as well. And and so more or less we had uh all the things that we needed and we and we made this um

Vivienne Westwood8:35

Cult of our own, this punk rock.

Vivienne Westwood8:37

Record number two.

Vivienne Westwood8:39

It's Petrushka.

Vivienne Westwood8:40

Um Stravinsky's Petrushka.

Vivienne Westwood8:43

um which was the first ballet that I went to see. And it's the first time that I really got terribly excited by classical music. You see, I I wasn't brought up to um

Vivienne Westwood8:59

to listen to classical music.

Vivienne Westwood9:02

And I think when I did try to listen to classical music, I think I made the mistake of trying to listen to people like Beethoven, who's terribly heavy and boring, and I still have that opinion. And um I just thought, well, I'll start with the one who's supposed to be the best, and I certainly don't think he is. And um so then when I heard this, then sort of like, you know, my the light came on.

Presenter10:28

Part of the Shrovetide Fair from scene four of Stravinsky's Petrushka, played by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Bernard Heitink. Tell me about you as as a child, Vivian. I mean, were you were you always unorthodox? Were you perceived to be?

Presenter10:42

unconventional or did you challenge things or?

Vivienne Westwood10:46

I I've been thinking about this a little bit recently, especially because of wearing this see-through dress. Because in fact the dress wasn't see-through and it was only when the flashlight got on on it that suddenly all was revealed.

Presenter11:03

Yeah.

Presenter11:05

Do you have much on our

Vivienne Westwood11:08

And I it it really is typical of me and I think it as much as anything it comes from a sort of joie de vivre. I'm thinking, Can you see through this dress? Well, don't think you can really and just loving it so much and wanting to go off and rush out into it. So is that what you were like? Spontaneous like that? I think I was really spontaneous and I used to feel just so full of fun a lot of the time when I was doing things. But also as well, I um

Presenter11:24

So is that what you would like to spot?

Vivienne Westwood11:36

Well, let's just say perhaps I should just say this silly thing that on my first day at school I got slapped for going to the boys' toilet instead of the girls' and this is just sort of typical of me that we all queued up very nicely. I was queuing very nicely in the morning in the girls' queue to go to the toilet the same time at lunchtime and in the afternoon I thought why do we have to do this? I want to go to that toilet for a change. And then I got branded as a sex maniac at the age of four. I mean

Presenter11:59

The H

Vivienne Westwood12:01

I'm quite innocent in about a lot of the things, but um

Presenter12:05

This this was all in in Cheshire, where you were born during the early years of the war. So you'd have been a a teenager in in the fifties. What did you look like then as a teenager, as a sort of fifteen year old?

Vivienne Westwood12:07

Yeah.

Vivienne Westwood12:12

What did you look?

Vivienne Westwood12:16

Um

Vivienne Westwood12:18

Well, now then, I had stick out teeth before I and like when I was fourteen, that was really my best time. I had trouble with girlfriends and always getting upset about those girly things going wrong.

Vivienne Westwood12:34

And suddenly when I was about fourteen oh, by the way, and I always thought that I was going to be terribly pretty anyway.

Vivienne Westwood12:42

I always sort of had confidence in that. And and my sort of teeth got straightened and and then I started to

Vivienne Westwood12:50

Put on makeup and

Vivienne Westwood12:52

wear high heel shoes and bras and things and it was just absolutely brilliant. And um oh, it was just so wonderful.

Presenter12:58

Which is I

Vivienne Westwood13:02

To be able to do that. I I I I mean

Vivienne Westwood13:07

Pencil skirts, the pencil skirt, was was not a common thing, it was quite new. It hadn't been around, I don't think, for very long, and to put that skirt on, which was just such a symbol of sexuality, it was just grey. It did have a pleat at the back, yeah, and I remember my friend the headmistress told her off because her petticoat was showing, she said, Oh, we've got to show a bit of lace.

Speaker 113:20

Within kicks, it kicked it.

Vivienne Westwood13:31

Record number three.

Vivienne Westwood13:32

This is De Bussie and it's the prelude to it's La Prémidie d'Eun Fon. This is a favourite piece and I'm sure that all the people listening will like it very much. I'm sure it's a favourite because the subject matter is so obvious once you know that it's this erotic afternoon in pagan Greece. I mean it is very very sexual piece of music.

Presenter15:03

Part of Debussy's Prelude à la Prémidie d'Enfon, played by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Herbert von Carrion.

Presenter15:10

So you and your parents moved uh south to Harrow. They'd uh bought a post office in Harrow uh and then you went to art school, but you dropped out there, you trained as a teacher, and eventually you you got married and you and you had a baby. Malcolm McLaren says that when he met you um you were, and I quote, desperately looking for something to do, you wanted an escape, he said. Is that how you felt?

Vivienne Westwood15:33

He said.

Vivienne Westwood15:36

I I ag I agree. I don't know I wouldn't call this an escape. I desperately wanted to

Vivienne Westwood15:43

Get into a world where there would be some ideas.

Vivienne Westwood15:47

I just I needed brain stimulation, and I didn't know how to find it.

Vivienne Westwood15:53

And um in analysis, this is a something of a put down. It was terribly exciting at the time, but I do think that what Malcolm introduced me to were all the sort of approved

Vivienne Westwood16:04

supporters of the sort of alternative establishment.

Presenter16:09

But Malcolm was a

Presenter16:11

I suppose, was he an orthodox? Oh, but you might say he never could have been. But he was living in the back of your brother's car when you met him, wasn't he? Yes. He sort of set up home, and he says you used to walk past pushing the pram. Yeah, that's true. Um but what he said eventually was that that you would follow any whim that he had, any any fancy that he had. You seemed to you fundamentally believed in him. Did you feel that you had

Presenter16:34

arrived, as it were, at something

Vivienne Westwood16:36

that you'd been looking for.

Vivienne Westwood16:37

I really was very keen to listen to Malcolm, and at first when I met him, he was almost like a god. I mean, he really did have the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow as far as I was concerned. He did know so many things that I wanted to know.

Vivienne Westwood16:52

I certainly didn't do everything he wanted me to do. One of the things I remember that he asked me to do that I certainly didn't do he wanted me to go to he wouldn't do these things, you see. He wanted me to go to Madame Tussaud's and set fire to the Beatles.

Vivienne Westwood17:07

The wax works. And I just had at the back of my mind that somebody might get killed and it was too dangerous. I approved the idea. I thought it would be a wonderful publicity. You didn't approve of the Beatles?

Presenter17:17

But

Vivienne Westwood17:17

Bye.

Presenter17:17

Trendy

Vivienne Westwood17:18

Mm-hmm.

Presenter17:18

Welcome.

Vivienne Westwood17:19

Well, n n no, no. I think that um the Beatles' music, the more you hear it, the more dreadful it seems as time goes by. I think it's really terrible stuff. Do you think he he tried to use you in many ways? Did he use you?

Vivienne Westwood17:32

I don't know. I've certainly um I uh I certainly thought I got my money's worth out of Malcolm. That's a b I shouldn't say money's worth, that's that's a horrible expression. I was very pleased to to have that relationship and I I learnt an awful lot from being with him. Record number four.

Vivienne Westwood17:49

This is um

Vivienne Westwood17:51

Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty.

Vivienne Westwood17:54

And it's the little bit that's called the panorama. And from what I remember, this is when the prince has a vision of the sleeping beauty before he gets to the castle through the thorns and rose bushes. And it has this wonderful feeling of somebody sleeping. It's the most perfect belly ever done because he worked with the choreographer on it, and it's a perfect work of art.

Presenter19:22

Part of the panorama from Act Two of Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty, played by the National Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Richard Bonning. The other thing that's happened to you over the years is uh from time to time that the general public have laughed at your creations. W d does that hurt? Do you resent it? How do you feel when that happens?

Vivienne Westwood19:39

Let's see.

Presenter19:39

Yeah.

Vivienne Westwood19:40

Well, um, on the particular show when when you were um standing in for Terry Wogan and the audience laughed at my fashion show, I learnt something from that. There is a a wider audience out there. I mustn't just relate to the thing in front of me. I've got to remember that there are some people who might actually think the clothes are wonderful.

Vivienne Westwood20:02

And so I learnt from that particular experience.

Presenter20:05

Had had it only ever happened there, or has it happened before or since?

Vivienne Westwood20:08

Oh, people used to laugh at me, of course. I mean, I had terrible things shouted after me when I was a punk, of course. Sometimes lovely things, but um, a lot of the time not very flattering things, I won't tell you what, but um

Vivienne Westwood20:22

I always feel quite heroic in my own clothes as well because they're.

Vivienne Westwood20:28

But they have this wonderful Joie de Vivre also that

Presenter20:32

We have to have great confidence.

Vivienne Westwood20:32

You have great confidence to wear them, don't you? I always say that the best fashion accessory is confidence.

Vivienne Westwood20:40

Next next piece of music.

Vivienne Westwood20:42

This is the piece on Dean.

Vivienne Westwood20:45

um from Gaspard de la Nui by Ravel and I've specially asked that it should be played by this man Louis Lauty. It's a very difficult piece to play and I I think that um he pulls it off.

Presenter22:00

A part of Ravel's Ondine from Gaspard de Lanui played by Louis Lourty.

Presenter22:06

Let me ask you a a blunt question, Vivian. Have you made much money out of fashion?

Vivienne Westwood22:11

No, is the is the blunt answer.

Presenter22:13

Um it's just you know, sometimes one feels that your shops aren't entirely there or or aren't there to sell really. They're rather like large stage sets sometimes and the uh and the clothes are part of that stage setting and it would almost be a sin to take them away.

Vivienne Westwood22:29

Yeah.

Vivienne Westwood22:30

Well, on the c contrary, my shops do very, very well and every year the takings just go up really quite dramatically.

Vivienne Westwood22:40

And um the point is that what I'm doing is spending all the profits on doing these fashion shows, you see. And it's a little bit like gambling because by that you hope to get licenses and perfume deals and all this kind of thing. But all the people the great

Presenter22:57

Great designers that you are compared with by the the the very influential Women's Where Daily have c put you on a par with with Lacroix, with Armagni, with Saint Laurent, with Karl Lagerfeld.

Vivienne Westwood23:00

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 123:06

It's sound.

Presenter23:08

I mean, the big difference between them and you is that they're multi-millionaires.

Vivienne Westwood23:13

Um yes, some of them are. Perhaps one or two of them are backed by multi-millionaires. And perhaps I've missed the boat because we are in this sort of recession time. There aren't the opportunities for people to get backing.

Vivienne Westwood23:29

But I did start at more or less the same time as Gianni Versace.

Vivienne Westwood23:33

And um I mean and he has just you know made an absolute fortune. And I I didn't and perhaps one of the things is that

Vivienne Westwood23:43

Being Italian, there are the opportunities in Italy much more than there are in England. There aren't the structures in England.

Vivienne Westwood23:51

To support a creative fashion designer. More music.

Vivienne Westwood23:57

The slow movement from Mozart's Piano Concerto in number twenty one in C major.

Presenter25:02

Part of Mozart's piano concerto Number twenty one in C major, played by Ilana Ferrod with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Laurence Foster. Tell me about you on your desert island. What do you what will you wear on your desert island?

Vivienne Westwood25:15

Perhaps one wouldn't wear anything at all, or just something quite practical. I mean, you might want to put uh some flowers around or something like that. I mean, this is true, but I think that essentially, although people dress for themselves, they wouldn't do that if they weren't the potential audience.

Vivienne Westwood25:33

So it it it's a perform

Presenter25:34

Performance in a sense. I think so, yeah. How would you cope, though? How would you feed your inner self? Could you keep going, do you think? Uh have you

Vivienne Westwood25:43

Yeah.

Presenter25:44

Um

Vivienne Westwood25:45

enough strength of your own? The thing that I could not cope with is not having enough to read. I c I would suffer terribly from not having enough books.

Vivienne Westwood25:58

Who advises you? Um what

Presenter26:01

Back.

Vivienne Westwood26:02

And told you.

Presenter26:02

Perhaps

Vivienne Westwood26:03

Someone who

Presenter26:03

Yeah.

Vivienne Westwood26:04

Yeah.

Presenter26:04

Make him

Vivienne Westwood26:05

Men's books to you.

Presenter26:05

Yeah.

Vivienne Westwood26:06

Literature.

Vivienne Westwood26:07

I my friend Gary has been directing my reading ever since I've met him, and I think that's about eighteen years that I've been talking to him more or less twice a week.

Vivienne Westwood26:20

And um

Vivienne Westwood26:22

He is an original mind, and I don't know how many more original minds there are, but I'm fortunate enough to have discovered somebody who has one.

Vivienne Westwood26:32

And so it's been the biggest advantage in my life to to have met this person. Um but anyway, I have always regretted the fact that I've never had enough time to read anyway. And um

Vivienne Westwood26:47

So I thought a few years ago, well, that's it. You know, I'm a certain age and I'm never now going to be able to devote the amount of time that I would need to to ever sort of get anywhere with my reading.

Vivienne Westwood27:00

And that's it. I'll have to settle for that. And then the idea came to me and my friend Gary that what I really should do is to try to create a salon.

Vivienne Westwood27:15

To endeavour to gather together a coterie of intellectual people.

Vivienne Westwood27:21

To discuss ideas and, of course, art, because art is the badge of ideas and the badge of civilization.

Vivienne Westwood27:29

And that I would try to reinstitute the institution of the salon that pertained up until more or less the First World War, but it's the kind of thing that you read about in Proust, and it was the place in which ideas flourished. And we in this century have lived off of those ideas that were formulated in those salons in France in the nineteenth century, even though the ideas have mostly become perverted or degraded in some way. But I do really feel that our age is a stagnant one and that that stagnation is directly related to the isolation of intellectuals.

Presenter28:13

Are you seriously saying that you would be prepared to sacrifice some of your fashion career, if not all of it, towards this end, towards the creation of this cultural salon?

Vivienne Westwood28:21

I think that

Vivienne Westwood28:24

You see, I shouldn't perhaps say this because I don't want people to think that things are easy, but

Vivienne Westwood28:30

It's reasonably easy for me to do fashion and um perhaps people set more store by the thing that's more difficult for them to do. Perhaps that's something there's something in that. But I'm so sure that people's that the genius of the human race is to use their conscious intelligence.

Vivienne Westwood28:52

that that I would feel that unless I contributed to that possibility, that I wouldn't have done anything. I if if I were to die only having done my fashion career.

Vivienne Westwood29:06

I wouldn't feel that I've achieved at all what what I would want to do.

Vivienne Westwood29:11

Record number seven.

Vivienne Westwood29:13

This is

Vivienne Westwood29:15

Chopin's Scherzo in B flat minor, opus thirty one, another piece of perfection.

Presenter30:26

Vladimir Ashkenazi playing Chopin's schizo in B flat minor, opus thirty one.

Presenter30:31

You're working, Vivian, at the moment, on the collection for the spring summer of'ninety three'. Can you say what it might be, what it might hold? Or is it all a secret?

Vivienne Westwood30:41

Well, my last collection was called Always on Camera, and it had a feeling of Hollywood in it, Hollywood in the great years of Marlene Dei Tri.

Vivienne Westwood30:54

I'm not mad about Hollywood, but it just happened by accident that it started to look like Hollywood because suddenly for the last couple of seasons I've been interested in twentieth century couture and I realized that it just looked like Hollywood because that's what those managers did, is that they sort of simplified and whatever French couture for their screen goddesses. Anyway, but um the the next collection will follow on from that because you don't get people today dressed like Marlena Datrix used to be dressed and it would be wonderful to see someone come in with all that attention to their accessories and everything. And so this the next collection will still have a feeling of Hollywood.

Vivienne Westwood31:39

But it'll be sort of Hollywood in the tropics. It'll be a little bit like Rita Haywis. You could be in Shangri La or Mexico City or somewhere like that. And um it's really sort of exotic. It's a lot of dark colour, but with very bright colour in with it.

Vivienne Westwood31:58

How do you relax? How do you switch off? How do you stop it?

Vivienne Westwood32:02

Well, I'm I look after myself very well. I I usually don't work in any sort of forced way.

Vivienne Westwood32:10

I usually manage to work in my own time and at my own pace.

Vivienne Westwood32:16

And one of the great perks of my job is that I don't have to have an alarm clock. I very rarely have an alarm.

Vivienne Westwood32:23

and um certainly don't have an alarm to go to work. So you wake up when you wake up and you cycle to work, don't you? Yeah, and often if I've got something to think about I just will carry on staying at home and thinking about it. I just won't even go in.

Presenter32:27

A new cycle

Presenter32:34

And what about you on a personal level, in your personal relationships? You say uh you you have your friend Gary, whom you go out to see and and and obviously talk to, and he's an enormous strength and inspiration to you. Malcolm,

Vivienne Westwood32:41

The sea ended.

Presenter32:46

you parted company with a long time ago.

Vivienne Westwood32:48

Mm-hmm.

Presenter32:49

The bed

Vivienne Westwood32:50

There's no one else in your life, you live alone? Yeah, um, I do. I have this lovely young man lives with me at the moment, and um he's he's this assistant of mine, and so it's lovely to have this very, very young person around me. It's it's lovely. And I've got my Italian manager who gives me a lot as well, Carlo DiMario.

Presenter33:10

These are friends and colleagues and professional supporters and everything. What about you personally? Do you have any need for a male partner? They're in love.

Vivienne Westwood33:19

Life anymore.

Vivienne Westwood33:21

I I think that the disadvantages of being in love with someone to the point that you don't do what you want to do just to stay in their company is a disadvantage that I wouldn't consider offsetting by its advantages. I don't think so, no. But but oh nothing, I mean, I just think men are wonderful. Record number eight.

Vivienne Westwood33:53

All my relationships have a when I really care about somebody, I think that they really do have a sexual basis, even women. I think that.

Vivienne Westwood34:02

I don't know, I think there's something there. You have to like somebody in that sort of physical or organic way. I I I think I do. Even the people that I like intellectually. Right, now then um this is Prikofiev and it's one of his sarcasms from a piece of five sarcasms.

Presenter35:23

Barbara Nissman, playing part of Tempest Tozo from Brokofieff's Sarcasms, Number One, opus seventeen. So which is your favorite of the eight records, Vivian?

Vivienne Westwood35:31

Uh

Vivienne Westwood35:32

Um the Tchaikovsky is the one I would take. It's probably the most perfect piece of art when you consider that it was composed as a ballet.

Vivienne Westwood35:44

The Sleeping Beauty. Yeah. And your book, you

Presenter35:46

You've said that you want books, books and more books. You've got you've got The complete works of Shakespeare and you've got the Bible.

Vivienne Westwood35:52

People waiting. What's your chosen book?

Vivienne Westwood35:55

I would take Marcel Proust, his novel, his great novel.

Vivienne Westwood35:59

I haven't read it all. They say that it's the greatest nov novel that was ever written. They also say that if you

Vivienne Westwood36:08

Try very hard to understand every word that Proust is saying, that by the time you've read it, you would be changed.

Vivienne Westwood36:16

Because he would have demolished every one of your illusions.

Vivienne Westwood36:20

And uh I certainly think that that would be an experience.

Vivienne Westwood36:25

that I would like to undergo and your luxury.

Vivienne Westwood36:33

Well, now then I don't want to sound as if I'm

Vivienne Westwood36:36

Completely pretentious, but this is the honest truth that I would.

Vivienne Westwood36:40

Have the proust in French.

Vivienne Westwood36:43

And then I considered taking a French dictionary. What I first considered is taking it in English, because I don't read French well enough to be able to get through it without aid.

Vivienne Westwood36:55

And I think that's what I will settle for. I did consider taking a dictionary because then I thought I could go on to study Greek and Latin by use of the French dictionary. I don't know what I'd do without a dictionary anyway. A multilanguage dictionary is the request, is it?

Vivienne Westwood37:09

Well, it uh perhaps that would be if it if it wouldn't enable me to to do it. Yeah, okay. Yeah, that would be perhaps I've never heard of one.

Presenter37:17

Uh

Vivienne Westwood37:17

Now nudge

Presenter37:17

No, I'm not sure one exists, but we'll we'll see if we can find one. Vivian Westwood, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Presenter37:25

Thanks.

Speaker 137:33

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.