Vivienne Westwood has barely taken her coat off and she is already halfway through explaining her plan to save the planet. “I’ve figured it out, you see,” she tells me in her distinctive Alan Bennett-esque tones: dry, quiet, matter-of-fact. Her roadmap to an equitable, sustainable world economy, without private land ownership, is laid out in slogans on a set of playing cards. The idea is to print a million packs to be sold as works of art, for £100 each. “You see, anybody who is prepared to pay £100 for a pack of cards is buying them because of what those cards represent. So if Greenpeace sell hundreds of sets of cards, they are in a position to say, we have hundreds of people supporting us.” She believes this will convince the world’s governments to adopt a new global economic system. “It seems I am the only person who has identified a total strategy and who also has a platform to speak,” she says.
It is quite the opening salvo, but at 78, Westwood has been ruffling feathers on a grand scale for half a century. She is the queen of punk, the fairy godmother of streetstyle, the dame who twirled knickerless at Buckingham Palace. In the dressing room above photographer Juergen Teller’s studio, Westwood begins to extract the pins that secure her halo of delicate, baby-soft strands of vanilla-blond hair in its complicated updo of avant garde kiss curls. She spent this morning at her Mayfair boutique overseeing the presentation of a new collection, and was thinking through the playing card strategy all the time. “It’s given me a headache,” she sighs. Westwood’s concept of no man’s land, a principle that outlaws private land ownership, “can stop Putin saying he owns the Arctic,” she says. “We can stop Bolsonaro saying he can cut down the Amazon. If no one owns land any more, they can’t do it. I won’t go into exactly how it works, but it will give a fair distribution of wealth. It all fits together. The strategy to save the Earth is on these cards.”
