Clothes and food should cost much more than they do in Britain to reflect their true impact on the environment, Vivienne Westwood said on Wednesday night.
Speaking at a Guardian Live event at Chelsea Old Town Hall hosted by columnist Deborah Orr, the controversial fashion designer said: “Clothes should cost a lot more than they do – they are so subsidised.
“Food should cost most more too – you know something is wrong when you can buy a cooked chicken for £2. The world runs on debt and that’s why nothing costs what it should.”
OK, so perhaps not all environmental externalities are included in the prices we pay,. Not sure I’d want to have to prove or refute that idea but certainly open to the possibility that it’s true.
But what’s the connection with debt there? Anyone?
Westwood also declared that capitalism was over and that “austerity is just a cover-up for the Ponzi scheme”.
She added: “Capitalism is a war economy, it is there to suck everything up for the people with the most power … never trust the government – they never work for you. They work for this terrible machine system.”
Ah, sorry, I get it. Silly me, looking to a fashion designer for insights into economics.
The old basket always was a basket case.
Typical of shrivelled Leftist misandry to look at a chicken requiring the average guy to work for ten minutes to cover the cost and bemoan the fact rather than marvelling at the utterly astounding cornucopia that a modern economy brings.
As I understand it, this old battleaxe made her name and fortune in fashion. Which was (in her view) massively subsidized, since no customer paid the real costs of the products they bought. Her wealth, then, represents a transfer to her from the public at large, who bore those costs. I await her declaration that she will donate all of her (ill-gotten, I believe is the favourite adjective of the pseudo-intellectual left) gains to either charity, or a general redistribution scheme. Until then Dame Vivienne might ponder a good sized cup of Shut-The-Fuck-Up.
…and yes – it is interesting that affordable food should be a *problem* isn’t it?
Looking at her recent output, I wouldn’t look to her for fashion tips either…
“a Guardian Live event at Chelsea Old Town Hall”
No more need be said.
She is a rancid old hypocrite, and she clearly dozed off during history lessons/her life, but I do like this bit:
“never trust the government – they never work for you.”
If the world runs on debt, who are we all borrowing from? Martians?
She seems to have conflated some slogans to generate some addled nonsense. I doubt there is much profit to be had from trying to detect something coherent therein.
We had to endure this talentless epsilon semi-moron spouting drivel propaganda and utter fuckwittery on “economics” for the Yes side panel in one of the televised debates on Scottish independence, along with numerous other talking heads who happen not to live here and not be entitled to a vote. Why?
She got some loud cheers from yes supporters of course.
“I only invented punk rock in order to sell more trousers. It worked.” — Malcolm McLaren
I don’t think Westwood was the brains of the outfit.
JuliaM,
Recent output? For as long as I can remember, she’s been the emperor’s new clothes of fashion designers. Someone who can take beautiful young women and make them look utterly ridiculous.
Memo to Cameron:
Oh Mighty Giant Space Lizard (UK Region),
Alex is onto us, use the SmartMeter to take care of him.
The bastards don’t want the poor to heat their homes, cover up against the ensuing cold or eat healthy food to combat the resulting sickness . They really do want to kill off the poor.
They really do despise ordinary people, not just “the poor”, but the mass of ordinary souls who they consider to be socially and intellectually stunted, small minded and not quite human.
IanB: The very fact that ordinary people don’t rise up and bring an end to rich, prating leftist dross like Westwood and all the others suggests there might be a small measure of truth to that opinion.
Are she and Russell Brand related?
Widdershins: They are Father and Son.
‘Ordinary people’ neither read the Guardian nor have much more than a hazy idea of who this woman is. That, their astonishing levels of comfort as compared with ‘ordinary people’ of a generation or two back, and the fact that – for now – this bollocks is just words in a barely read newspaper/website which exists only to sell adverts under the guise of preaching class envy to gullible halfwits like Arnald, explains the lack of lynchings.
Many of those Graun readers who *have* read and digested this shit haven’t thought it through (quelle surprise). Or, like soldiers in Afganistan, they think that if it happens it will happen to someone else, and that they’ll be ok.
Also where can you buy a cooked chicken for £2? She’s not only stupid, she’s lying.
The comments underneath are the usual Guardian idiocy eg
“It’s a difficult bind, but it doesn’t make her wrong. Food retailers are driving down prices at a rate that is making farming untenable on anything other than a mass industrial scale, and our largely disposable and ephemeral clothes are having to made in Bangladesh and shipped to us.”
They really do want us to return to backbreaking labour, and the Bangladeshis can starve.
It behoves us to point out to these cunts their level of cuntitude at every possible opportunity.
I hope you are right, Interested and it is certainly true that Westwood is just a pimple on the arse of statism/socialism. However it seems that at this time in history said arse is huge, fat and a very heavy weight sitting on us all. Out of all proportion to the actual level of support socialism “enjoys” judging from the “barely read newspaper”.
I start each year by watching the New Year’s Day Concert from Vienna on television. It is a delight for its melodic music and elegant settings. This year Vivienne Westwood designed the dresses. They were ghastly. It made me ashamed to be English. (The choreography, also by some English **** was also dire). I read that Westwood’s father was a greengrocer. I suppose that’s where she learned to love sacks of potatoes.
For a reality check & genuine appeal from the hungry, can any one tell me where Viv Westwood buys cooked chickens at two quid the bird?
One thing I’ve noticed since coming back up here is the astronomical price of Brit food. In the case of avian comestibles, that’s under the equivalent of nearly 4€/kg* for the small variety against under 2€/kg. And that’s for the raw guys in major supermarkets. Cooked’d be well north of 5€/kg.
*And heaven knows how much of that’s chicken. I’m used to getting a hint of juices in the bottom of the pan, when frying, not a bloody great puddle of water.
Sorry. The first “under” slipped in when I reversed the order of prices to make the sentence work. The “under” was a couple cents over.
Westwood doing economics, ranks alongside Geldoff offering pension advice:
http://www.pionline.com/article/20141015/ONLINE/141019931/geldof-makes-case-at-napf-conference-for-new-areas-of-pension-fund-investment
I mean, he done such a great job solving Africans problems; ended poverty and starvation across the continent.
Cannot wait for the day we have a soap dodging comedian to lead us to Utopia.
Did I see her quoted as remarking that Italian designers make cheap cloth look expensive, but she works to make expensive cloth look cheap?
Destruction of value, and vulgar with it.
Also where can you buy a cooked chicken for £2?
The back of a BAE Systems test lab?
If your local supermarket has a rotisserie section, you need to find out what time they close it. Arrive at the shop at just the right time and they’ll be selling off delicious whole cooked chickens for two quid.
You’re welcome.
@S2 – maybe, but that’s not really the same as ‘selling chickens for two quid’ as evidencing (in this madwoman’s view) a widescale economic problem.
That’s cutting your losses and avoiding ‘waste’ – that other great bête noire of the chattering Grauns.
Wasn’t suggesting she was right. Just giving a helpful tip.
The wife & I used to time our Saturday visits to Asda in Glasgow just right. Then buy a bag of Indian chips on the way home. Great days, great days.
Ah understood. OT, I recently discovered a Chinese which does chips in crispy chili and garlic, at the sort of temperature you can only achieve with some sort of domestic-sized thermonuclear cooking device. Awesome.
I don’t understand the “runs on debt” concept either, but I keep seeing it these days. Can someone explain? There seem to be two Great Themes:
1) We all “run on debt”, which is bad, and somehow new
2) Governments should be creating money. not banks, and this money should be created “debt-free”.
I’d ask on Richie’s site, but he’s finally worked out that I’m a wrong ‘un.
Dying from malnutrition caused by not being able to afford food is a fairly big externality.
>If your local supermarket has a rotisserie section, you need to find out what time they close it. Arrive at the shop at just the right time and they’ll be selling off delicious whole cooked chickens for two quid.
In my experience, these are usually dried-up chickens that have been made unpalatable by being exposed to the glare of the lights for too long.
(Bit like Ms Westwood herself.)
Given that Westwood, by her own admission, never takes a bath, I imagine she must be fairly ripe by now. Bunging her a whole cooked chicken for a couple of quid, may well be a ploy to get her out of the shop, before all the other customers flee the premises.
In other news, the “Worstall Frock” has been clebrated as a work of art in fashion circles in Paris.
I think I spelt that right…
Interested
“It behoves us to point out to these cunts their level of cuntitude at every possible opportunity”
Good luck, but their shield of self-regard is unbreakable.
I’ve met Vivienne Westwood. She’s completely bonkers, but charmingly so. I don’t have a problem with her. She adds to the gaiety of nations.
But I do have a problem with the Guardian reporting her remarks as significant.
Everybody said Tony Benn was an affable old cove. The problem was that his way led to the gulag.
BiCR,
> Everybody said Tony Benn was an affable old cove. The problem was that his way led to the gulag.
Really, just no. It didn’t. I disagree with Tony Benn about pretty much everything, but he was extremely principled when it came to democracy. His argument against the EU remains the best one: that MPs don’t have any power, they are merely lent power by their constituents, so none of them have the authority to cede that power to the EU or anyone else, because it’s not theirs. No-one with that attitude towards the power of the people ends up putting them in a gulag, and it’s a gross calumny to say so.
Benn’s way led to impoverishment and the collapse of the economy. And a superfast luxury plane for rich people subsidised by taxpayers — his proudest achievement in office, he said. But not the gulag.
Churm,
Yes, she’s nice enough, and — contrary to some of the above comments — a superb fashion designer. Similarly, Tilda Swinton is one of the best actresses in the country, whose comments about politics should also be ignored by the media.
I find it best to remember that all celebrities are basically Joey Tribiani.
Squander: Your adulation of dross like Benn is –lets be kind–misplaced. He was a CND shill who would have gladly sold us to his soviet buddies. He may have done this because he possessed colossal powers of self-delusion rather than a chortling love of evil for its own sake. So what–the result would have been the same. He would probably have made some intellectual wankers protest to his new masters about their behaviour and got an AK 47 butt in his face and a quick execution. A prize fool and stooge of the wicked.
And yet he was in the Cabinet and none of that happened. Nothing even remotely close.
Also, you might want to look up “adulation” in a dictionary.
He would have if he could. Wilson was in charge not Benn. A rare occasion to be grateful for Wilson.