Hasta La Ideas

(Photo: Juergen Teller)

“See that book on Halston on the table? I’ve never looked at his work, and I was just looking at it now. His stuff is very ’70s, and maybe if he hadn’t lived, you wouldn’t have had the clear ’70s look that influenced other people. So I do think that my fashion is qualified by the age in which I live. It’s all very eclectic, and I can tell you how it got to be that way. In the ’70s, when Malcolm [McLaren] and I opened that shop [Let it Rock], he was very fed up with hippies, and he was looking at ’50s rock ’n’ roll. He never was a hippie, anyway, because he hated authority, and as a young person he wouldn’t have liked all the people dressing in a certain fashion. But it was the beginning of an age of nostalgia—the ’30s, Saint Laurent’s ’40s collection—and the way I analyzed it in hindsight is that we wanted to be rebels, and therefore we went back to the ’50s, our own lifetime’s culture, because we thought that was rebelling against the adult world. I knew the Teddy Boys the first time around. Anyway, people didn’t like it; they were still into this hippie, ’70s feeling at the time. But that was the beginning of the age of nostalgia. And so now they’ve been through everything, and there’s nothing really left to invent, and it’s just become very, very eclectic.”

-Fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, in an interview with Tim Blanks that appears in the August issue of Interview

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