Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1992,

and the presenter was Sue Lolly. 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-60s 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.

Fashion which had started as a byproduct of punk became became her main

main concern and during the 80s 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 1990 and

91, she is Vivian Westwood.

Were you flattered Vivian to be named designer of the year or did you think it was about time?

Well, I didn't expect it at all because I had expected it before and so I was quite sure that I never would get it.

But why do you think it took so long for you to be formally recognized here?

Because over the 20 years between the early 70s and now the early 90s, so many of your things, I said earlier

on you'd been influential, so many of your things I said earlier on you'd been influential so many of your ideas

had actually to put it crudely been nicked by other fashion houses hadn't they?

Mm. 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 not

commercial it's just that they're new and so it sometimes takes a little longer for them to, for people's eye or sentiments or anything to get used to them.

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