VIVA VIV:

Was just reading up about Vivienne Westwood for my dissertation topic. Discovering more about her work and views has given me a new found respect for Viv. This is an extract from an article written about her in the Guardian.

Fashion is not art because it is ephemeral. She is quite firm about this. You design what you consider to be the perfect pair of trousers, and then three seasons later you are required to design another pair. "It's annoying." Big claims for the symbolic value of fashion annoy her, too. Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue, says that you can tell as much about the world from the fashion of the day as you can from the front page of the New York Times - Westwood thinks this is just silly.

"It's not a microcosm. It's not a view of the world. It's just an item, really - more or less like the urinal, perhaps, for all I know." She pauses. "It's an expression, an applied art. It's life-enhancing. It's not culture. It's not what Anna Wintour says."

Couldn't agree more.