Quotes from Vivienne Westwood

My clothes have always got a very strong dynamic rapport with the body - they are very body conscious, they help you to look glamorous, more hourglass, more woman.

I very rarely watch my own fashion shows, but the makeup for my Fall 2011 show was just brilliant.

We moved into the back, made it into a little 50s sitting room and started to sell the records. We had an immediate success. For one thing, these Teddy Boys were thrilled to buy the records.

Every time I have to look up a word in the dictionary, I'm delighted.

Every time I hear that word, I cringe. Fun! I think it's disgusting; it's just running around. It's not my idea of pleasure.

I don't have faith in young people any more. I don't waste time trying to communicate with them.

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.

I am always trying to find fabrics that are more friendly to the environment - working with Virgin Atlantic, they managed to research into this and find more eco fabrics.

Even though it was the 70s, we found old stocks of clothes that had never been worn from the 50s and took them apart. I started to teach myself how to make clothes from that kind of formula.

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.

When we started to do punk, we put all of these things together to create the look of an urban guerrilla - a rebel.

Being part of a community with a church at its centre and singin' hymns is a great thing to do.

I have been asked what would I ban immediately if I could. Advertising.

I never look at fashion magazines. I find them incredibly boring.

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.

There's nowhere else like London. Nothing at all, anywhere.

I'm very lucky. The public happens to like me. Maybe they like me because I use every opportunity to talk about injustice.

I'm the proof - you can't throw away tradition.

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.

I just think people should invest in the world. Don't invest in fashion, but invest in the world.

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.

I used to always fight for human rights. I still fight for Leonard Peltier, who's spent 35 years in jail for a crime he didn't commit.

In the morning, I practice 15 minutes of yoga.

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.