Farewell, Vivienne:, you made us Northerners in London so proud

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Evening Standard
Paul Flynn17 February 2023
WEST END FINAL

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I was first made dazzlingly aware of the power of Vivienne Westwood via a fabulous trio of young nightclubbers who used to attend the same dingy Manchester gay club that I cut my teeth in as a callow teenager.

They were quite the wow, arriving in tandem at 12.15am precisely every Saturday, strutting to the centre of the dancefloor as if starring in a Deee-Lite video, decked top-to-toe in Westwood finery — skin-tight catsuits, orb jewellery, clobber heels and the ultimate finishing touch, felt crowns to ordain themselves true disco royalty. They looked 10 feet high, embodying a regal gay boldness I was yet to quantify.

At yesterday’s deeply moving Vivienne Westwood memorial service in Southwark Cathedral, I spotted plenty of other Northerners touched by the hand of Viv over the years. A friend that scored a Saturday job at her Conduit Street store when he came to City University and once lent me a pair of her plaid bondage trousers for an album launch party in the mid-90s.

By this time, some of the osmosis of how fashion bravery works, a point purposefully made at yesterday’s celebration of the designer’s life in many eulogies, had begun to stick.

The Westwood memorial was testament to her as a visionary, political firebrand, uncompromised woman and beloved family member. There was information dotted into the pews of the majestic Bankside cathedral, beyond the fame and fabulosity.

She was a unanimous hero to young Northerners landing in London wanting to leave their imprint, however slight.

Her hometown of Tintwistle, from whence a nearby brass band played Abba’s Slipping Through My Fingers as the loving band of admirers assembled yesterday, is 20 minutes as the crow flies east from Manchester city centre. It’s now premium Brexit belt, Red Wall territory.

The League of Gentlemen filmed there as an apogee of crumbling colloquial weirdness. But Westwood claimed until her deathbed that it was her honour to have been brought up there.

Northerners in London treasured Westwood dearly, not just because of her blanket refusal to soften flattened vowels. It was the tenacity to own exactly the person you are and turn that into the best, most powerful version of itself. There was something obdurately messianic about her.

One eulogy called her ‘Boadicea’ without it even sounding glib.

She bent fashion to her will, as a new metric system for the propulsion of hopeful, radical ideas. That legacy will live forever.

Nan Goldin’s masterstroke

This week I had the honour of watching All The Beauty and The Bloodshed, the feature-length Nan Goldin documentary which manages to wind 10 distinct stories of art, addiction, corporate corruption and trauma into one hard, focused punch. It is a biography of the photographer set against her successful campaign to bring down the name of the Sackler family, the billionaires who are synonymous with America’s opioid epidemic.

I implore you to watch this vital, brilliant piece of work. Goldin is a hero of exactly Westwood’s stripe, drawn to art for the wider purpose of self-examination than bettering the world. She is year dot for a kind of photographer I’ve always loved, from Corinne Day to Wolfgang Tillmans. For the second year running, the best film in the Oscars race is a documentary. Last year, Flea didn’t even win its own category. In 2023, this feature should walk it.

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