Vivienne Westwood
I just use fashion as an excuse to talk about politics. Because I'm a fashion designer, it gives me a voice, which is really good.Collection: Good
Britishness is just a way of putting things together and a certain don't care attitude about clothes. You don't care, you just do it and it looks great.Collection: Attitude
Everybody looks like clones and the only people you notice are my age. I don't notice anybody unless they look great, and every now and again they do, and they are usually 70.Collection: Age
I wish you didn't have to design so often. Try to do quality and cut down on quantity. I think fashion is very, very important.Collection: Design
You've got to invest in the world, you've got to read, you've got to go to art galleries, you've got to find out the names of plants. You've got to start to love the world and know about the whole genius of the human race. We're amazing people.Collection: Amazing
The age in which we live, this non-stop distraction, is making it more impossible for the young generation to ever have the curiosity or discipline... because you need to be alone to find out anything.Collection: Alone
The reason why I am proud of my part in the punk movement is that I think it really did implant a message that was already there. The hippies told it to me, but punk made it something cool for people to stand up for, which is that we do not believe government, that we are against government.Collection: Cool
I eat only vegetables and fruit, and to me it's the most aspirational diet because it's so easy. It's quite simple, the cooking I do.Collection: Diet
I think that feminists have definitely underestimated the role that women have had historically. I think I would be insecure if I were to be a man; there's so much pressure on you.Collection: Women
When I first saw a picture of the crucifixion, I lost respect for my parents. I suddenly realised that this is what the adult world is like - full of cruelty and hypocrisy.Collection: Respect
Feminists wish women to seem like men. They're not men.Collection: Women
The thing that makes my clothes really different is that, number one, they are really great designs; they're not tacky; they are very professional; the design is made from lots of decisions.Collection: Design
I really don't like women who try to be men. All these politicians, I think they're horrendous. We could have a brilliant future, but we have this terrible male vision of destroying everything. They'd better sort themselves out and become more womanly.Collection: Future
I've got a real sense of three-dimensional geometry. I can look at a flat piece of fabric and know that if I put a slit in it and make some fabric travel around a square, then when you lift it up it will drape in a certain way, and I can feel how that will happen.Collection: Travel
I design things to help people to hopefully express their personality.Collection: Design
Our economic system, run for profit and waste and based primarily on the extractive industries, is the cause of climate change. We have wasted the earth's treasure and we can no longer exploit it cheaply.Collection: Change
Economists treat economics as if it is a pure science divorced from the facts of life. The result of this false accountancy is a willful confusion under cover of which industry wreaks its havoc scot-free and ignores the environmental cost.Collection: Environmental
I always thought we had an environmental problem, but I hadn't realized how urgent it was. James Lovelock writes that by the end of this century there will be one billion people left.Collection: Environmental
I have too much product, and I'm trying to rein it in and sell more of my main collection. I wish you didn't have to design so often; it would be good if you could keep on selling the same things for a few years and not have to do new things all the time.Collection: Design
If you see everything from the point of view of women being victims in some way, you don't see the wood for the trees. It is better to be a person than a woman.Collection: Women
I'm frugal. I'm not a very acquisitive woman. I never waste food. If you prepare your own food, you engage with the world, it tastes alive. It tastes good.Collection: Food
I was born during the war and grew up in a time of rationing. We didn't have anything. It's influenced the way I look at the world.Collection: War
It's a philosophy of life. A practice. If you do this, something will change, what will change is that you will change, your life will change, and if you can change you, you can perhaps change the world.Collection: Change
The arts have only ever interested a small minority of people, which acted as a kind of nursery to support artists.
In Italy they take cheap cloth and make it look expensive, but I take expensive cloth and make it look cheap. They just don't understand.
The main message we want to get out there is that climate change is caused by the rotten economic system.
Fashion has become so whatever. I don't think there are any stones left to unturn.
The hippie movement politicized my generation. When it ended, we all started looking back at our own history, looking, in my case, for motives of rebellion.
Real art has been... what's the word? Kidnapped? No, that's not it. But, OK, kidnapped by business.
I've got a terrible memory; it's probably because I'm always concentrating on what I'm doing now.
The best night of my life was watching the Japanese Noh theater. I've only seen it once, but even saying it now, I think, 'How can I ever have this experience again?' It was so mesmerizing, so complicated and so primordial; I could not believe it.
People have never looked so ugly as they do today. We just consume far too much.
We are so conformist; nobody is thinking. We are all sucking up stuff; we have been trained to be consumers, and we are all consuming far too much.
To me, reading a fashion magazine is the last thing I need to do. I've got books I need to read.
There is no hierarchy of values any more. Real progress is due mainly to human genius, and that's rare, and usually stems from a real elite, from a hierarchy.
I'll tell you what I was like as a child. I was a good person. I was high-spirited but I was a big reader.
I'm very lucky. The public happens to like me. Maybe they like me because I use every opportunity to talk about injustice.
I think feminists are unaware of the tremendous extent of the role of women in history.
Fashion is here to help make people look very important. If they have good taste and choose what suits them, I give them options on how they can do that. It's always sexy, and it's always with the same result: making women look fantastic.
I've always felt heroic about my life... As a child, I remember little girls in the playground moaning about how boys could do more than they could. I didn't think that was the case at all. My parents didn't treat me as a girl.
I own my own company, so I've never had businessmen telling me what to do or getting worried if something doesn't sell. I've always had my own access to the public, because I started off making my clothes for a little shop and so I've always had people buying them.
I'm different from any other designer, businesswise, in that I've built this company up and I own it. I never had business hype behind me to promote my image... My image is real... I have never had marketing people telling me what to do.
I think dress, hairstyle and make-up are the crucial factors in projecting an attractive persona and give one the chance to enhance one's best physical features.
However, because Britain is young and exciting, I did show my second line here once or twice.
I didn't do anything at the Queen, whom I admire.
My son has followed fashion since he was a punk. He and I agree that fashion is about sex.
I think it's important to vote.
My clothes are very popular in Japan.
The young Japanese, especially, love to wear the latest thing and when they come to London they head for my shops as part of what they want to find in Britain.
I don't have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I'm left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct.