West­wood: Punk, Icon, Activist – first look review

The prospect of cre­at­ing a fea­ture-length trib­ute to a wild, larg­er-than-life per­son­al­i­ty is always entic­ing. Yet while film­mak­ers will nev­er want for dra­ma or sala­cious sto­ries, there is always the threat that such a fig­ure won’t be con­tained by a mere doc­u­men­tary. This is espe­cial­ly true if that famous face has opin­ions on how they should be por­trayed as the hero of their own story.

In West­wood: Punk, Icon, Activist, fash­ion design­er Vivi­enne West­wood offers both of these bless­ings and curs­es. The free-spir­it­ed styl­ist has plen­ty of sto­ries from her ear­ly days work­ing in the back of a record shop, to cre­at­ing high and low fash­ion col­lec­tions. Yet for all her brash atti­tude, she’s some­times makes for a tricky sub­ject, refus­ing ques­tions and play­ing coy about cer­tain aspects of her past. Her friends and fam­i­ly are bet­ter suit­ed to fill in the blanks of her present, but as for her sto­ried career? It leaves the view­ers at the mer­cy of her obsti­nate secrecy.

Westwood’s sto­ry is a rags to rich­es tale set in a coun­try not known for its upward mobil­i­ty. She escaped pover­ty and an abu­sive mar­riage to pur­sue her cre­ative inter­ests, dress­ing notable bands like The Sex Pis­tols along the way to cre­at­ing a fash­ion empire with sev­er­al bou­tiques. Through­out her career West­wood has skirt­ed con­tro­ver­sy and ridicule, as one cringe­wor­thy TV inter­view shows. In her ear­ly years, West­wood exper­i­ment­ed with ripped-up sleeves held togeth­er by safe­ty pins or ties, and she embla­zoned her shirts with con­tro­ver­sial words and graph­ics. Some of her lat­er out­fits mixed plat­form shoes with short skirts, mis­shapen blous­es, funky hair­dos and gaudy make­up for run­way-ready cou­ture looks.

It took years for West­wood to earn the admi­ra­tion of the high soci­ety her ear­ly anti-estab­lish­ment aes­thet­ic lam­pooned. The doc­u­men­tary effec­tive­ly frames that uphill bat­tle through a talk­ing heads-style col­lage of her annoyed tes­ti­mo­ny and the mem­o­ries of her friends and admir­ers. Now in her lat­er years, the design­er is tak­ing a step back and allow­ing her pro­tégée turned hus­band, Andreas Kro­n­thaler, exert more con­trol in her com­pa­ny with­out los­ing its con­nec­tion to her ear­li­er work. When West­wood isn’t super­vis­ing the lat­est clothes from her com­pa­ny, she’s tak­en up activist caus­es for the environment.

The life of this vision­ary entre­pre­neur is far big­ger than a sin­gle film, but direc­tor Lor­na Tuck­er does a decent job of com­pact­ing Westwood’s icon­o­clas­tic lega­cy. Still, it’s hard to shake the feel­ing that there’s much more to this fash­ion icon than meets the screen. And while the film suc­cess­ful­ly incor­po­rates music and a hand­ful of stylised inter­sti­tials for cre­ative effect, these flour­ish­es bare­ly stand­out against the flame-haired punk.