I never minded that Vivienne Westwood didn’t pick me. I’d gone with my beautiful German exchange by bus from Reading to spend a day looking at the London sights. We were both 15, wearing homemade tartan minis, slashed T-shirts and pixie boots, and wandering down the King’s Road when the punk fashion designer stopped her bike in front of us and asked my exchange if she’d like to model for a show.
We didn’t tell my parents but two days later we returned to her shop, and my Düsseldorf friend was dressed in a flesh-coloured unitard with a figleaf and a see-through plastic mac. She looked sensational, but it was Westwood whom I remember most: her huge energy, passion and kindness throughout the day, while refusing to adhere to any rules or heed any advice. I was transfixed.
I met Westwood again 30 years later, and she was still compelling — that irritation with conformity, fascination with ideas and determination not to be pigeon-holed. She didn’t bother to define herself against others, she wasn’t divisive, hers weren’t the politics of envy. Punk, she explained, was a positive movement, pushing bourgeois boundaries. Or, as she told me: “We were just saying to the older generation, we don’t accept your taboos.” Her looks had barely changed, nor her views. The frugal apricot-haired eco-warrior had aged well, wearing her “Buy less, choose well” T-shirt with plus-fours, shooting socks and trainers, and explaining she had a bath only once a week.
Westwood, who died last week, showed how powerful 20th-century women could be when they didn’t care about convention and refused to be categorised or to compromise. She was endlessly curious as she transformed herself, a 5’5’’ grocer’s daughter from Derbyshire, from punk princess to Dame Viv, embracing everything from the ruffles of the French Revolution to Victorian corsets, held together by safety pins and chains, always anarchic, never dangerous.
She shamelessly stole the best of British: the quirkiness, tartans and tweeds without appearing jingoistic, and she made women feel sexy and curvaceous rather than a commodity. Romantic but unsentimental, she enjoyed being a conundrum. “Punk is about making people think, even if it’s uncomfortable,” she told me. Wearing no knickers under her immaculately tailored grey suit when she accepted her damehood at Buckingham Palace was perfect posturing. It harmed no one but gave her a kick. In many ways Westwood was a great role model. Teenagers in the 1970s and early 1980s were learning to question authority and to rebel. “I wanted to be a hero,” she said, and she was.
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But what about the young now? Who do Generation Z have? Many feel as distanced from their elders as we once felt, and as disenchanted. “It was the idea that the world was so mismanaged” that drove the young Westwood. Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2012, are growing up with some of the same problems: strikes, threat of war, disillusionment with politics. Yet they’ve also had to contend with a pandemic and the threat of climate change as well as a more pressurised exam system, often higher expectations from parents and being the first generation to live their lives online.
It seems harder for them to find inspirational heros. Andrew Tate posed as a guru to modern teenage boys with his 11 billion views on TikTok. But his is the greed-driven, talentless politics of hatred and division. This 36-year-old former kickboxer has been pitting boys against girls from his Bucharest hideout, revelling in mistreating women and glorifying in guns, money and Lambos. He’s abusing his position to incite not anarchy but misogyny: “slap, slap, slap” is a favourite phrase. Men cheat for exercise, female “sex slaves” get punished for stepping out of the bedroom. His teenage followers will tell you he’s joking, but he’s now been arrested on suspicion of human trafficking and rape.
Meanwhile the Kardashians encourage girls to follow them with their endlessly shifting appearances, curvaceous then skinny, but their purpose is product placement rather than breaking boundaries. These adults are trying to monetise children. They’re manipulating them for their own ends rather than showing them how to challenge themselves.
Generation Z should be rebelling, but at best they seem cynical, at worst depressed. The number of children in England needing treatment for serious mental health problems has risen by 39 per cent in a year. Of course, it’s harder now to shock by piercing a nipple, getting a tattoo, shaving your head or going vegan, but they don’t seem to know how to take on old orders. They seem to feel they have little agency.
Greta Thunberg is an exception. She has stepped up using Generation Z tools: Instagram and Tiktok. She eviscerated Donald Trump with a glare when he was president and took on Tate with the hashtag “email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com”. She has shown it’s possible for a teenager to make a difference. Perhaps her peers are just a gentler generation, more accepting, less likely to drink or take drugs than their elders. But they still need to question old assumptions. Extinction Rebellion is overrun by ancient climate warriors — the oldest arrested was 92. The younger ones mire their cause by sobbing halfway up a gantry on the M25 rather than articulating their frustrations with more inspirational protests.
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Campaign, be creative, query the orthodoxy, at the very least vote. It doesn’t matter that under 25s are so turned off by this government that only 2 per cent say they would vote Tory, if few can be bothered to go to the polls. This new generation deserve better role models. They need more punk and less porn king.
