Westwood: Icon, Rebel, Activist

Vivienne Westwood is undoubtedly a major figure in the fashion world, while remaining controversial, contrarian and with a distinctly personal vision. She’s also, in this documentary, not a very co-operative interview, and the film that results tends to lack particular depth or analysis or deeper understanding of the subject. Her activism, when it’s presented, tends to come across more as dilettantism, her rebellion feels minor and inconsequential, and she comes across (inadvertently or not) as someone no longer in control of her own iconography, lost in the middle of the giant corporate machine that trades on her brand name. This was, to put it shortly, not a documentary I warmed to particularly – while it puts its subject at the forefront, her reticence to tell her own story means that by the end of it I didn’t really feel I knew or understood much more about her than I did at the beginning. Which to my mind makes it a bit of a flop.