Tarnished legacy: Inside the civil war at Vivienne Westwood

An epithet like “the godmother of punk” can prove something of a mixed blessing. In her lifetime, Dame Vivienne Westwood – British fashion designer, political crusader and ultimately national treasure – represented more than just a brand. Her early association with a whole pop-cultural movement that stuck two fingers up at the establishment continued to inform her identity to the end.

Now, less than two years after her death at the age of 81, the legacy of the iconoclastic creator is hotly contested. Her granddaughter Cora Corré, 27, has resigned from her role as campaigns manager at the Vivienne Westwood fashion label, alleging her grandmother’s wishes have been “betrayed and disrespected”.

The model and activist called for the removal of the label’s chief executive, Carlo d’Amario, in an all-staff email seen by The Times.

“In the years leading up to my grandmother’s death, she was deeply unhappy with the way the company was being run,” she reportedly wrote. “It was her wish that… D’Amario was removed and the company was managed in a way that respected her values.”

Part of her grievance stems from what appears to be a conflict between the label, with its commercial imperatives, and the Vivienne Foundation, a not-for-profit company formed in 2019, with a mission to promote and advance the fashion designer’s values.

The foundation’s aims are not small: the goal is to save the world by halting climate change, stopping war, defending human rights and protesting capitalism.

Awkwardly perhaps, the fashion brand bearing Dame Vivienne’s name makes money by selling people stuff, in common with all fashion labels. Its products retail for hundreds of pounds in the likes of Harvey Nichols and Harrods – neither of which are known for their rejection of consumer capitalism.

D’Amario was reportedly once a keen reader of Karl Marx. Now he stands accused of getting in the way of Dame Vivienne’s progressive causes. “Effectively Carlo is preventing [the foundation] raising money to support the charities Vivienne was so passionate about,” Corré’s message claims.

This was not the first hint of tension between the foundation and the brand. In an Instagram post earlier this month, the foundation criticised the brand’s recent collaboration with the skater clothing label Palace, calling it a “great shame” the Vivienne Westwood company had “decided to base the designs on Vivienne’s archive without consulting the Foundation”.

The post accused the Vivienne Westwood label of showing “a blatant disregard for Vivienne’s wishes, her legacy and the Foundation”.

Still, the question of who gets to speak for Dame Vivienne is a tricky one. It is not made any less so by the fact that her widower, Andreas Kronthaler, 58 (her husband for nearly three decades), is creative director at the label.

Corré, as well as working at Vivienne Westwood until she quit, worked with her grandmother closely on her foundation in the last two years of her life. In a tribute delivered during London Fashion Week last year, she talked of how her grandmother had “challenged the status quo, the media, society’s perception of fashion, but most importantly, she challenged the injustice in the world”.

It is this legacy she apparently wants to protect. Dame Vivienne’s political sensibility evolved over time, and came to play an increasingly prominent part in her life. But, while all brands claim to have “values” these days, hers can be traced right back to her anarchic beginnings in fashion, to when she and her second husband Malcolm McLaren established their famous shop, Sex, at 430 King’s Road, in Chelsea.

“In 1971, they both hated hippies with a vengeance,” Jon Savage writes in his 1981 book England’s Dreaming, his definitive chronicle of punk rock and the Sex Pistols, the band McLaren managed. “Both deeply mistrusted the apparent social progress of the free and easy hippie culture that was all around them… Both felt that the claims of hippie culture to have changed the world were false: it was just like window dressing,” he writes.

Dame Vivienne was always about far more than window dressing. As she would later demonstrate through her support of various causes, she cared deeply about social progress. Taking up the cause of the environment, she adopted a position that seemed at odds with the business of fashion, urging consumers to “buy less”.

“Vivienne was never as motivated by money and fame,” Garry Hogarth, the former chief executive of Agent Provocateur, the brand co-founded by Corré’s father, tells The Telegraph. “Her designs and the way she lived her life and ran her business were true to herself. I never felt she was just about making money.”

Hogarth has known Corré since she was a young girl and says she was close to her grandmother. “I think she’d be doing what she believed her grandmother wanted,” he says. “She’s true to her.”

He is not alone in this view. Alexandra Shulman, the former editor-in-chief of British Vogue, describes Corré as a “devoted granddaughter” who has been “such a keeper of the flame”. She says: “I feel sure she would have Vivienne’s interests at the heart of her actions.”

But when the namesake of a brand is no longer there, deciding how to continue their legacy isn’t always straightforward, as Dame Vivienne’s biographer Jessica Bumpus suggests. “Things can get complicated,” says Bumpus, author of Vivienne Westwood: The Story Behind the Style. “When a fashion designer themselves is no longer at the label, it does change. These brands evolve.”

Dame Vivienne was “the original disruptor”, she says. You never knew what she was going to do. In a way, perhaps this makes it harder to speak with certainty now about what she would or would not have wanted. “They were saying she would hate the collaboration with Palace, but I don’t know,” muses Bumpus. Collaborating with such an unexpected brand might have been right up her street.

Yet there are risks that go beyond internal strife in straying too far from the ethos of a brand after its founder has died. A perceived betrayal of values can alienate loyal customers. “If certain elements are diluted, then of course it risks the brand value,” says Fflur Roberts, head of luxury goods at Euromonitor International, a market analysis firm. “When [pound] signs become bigger than the culture of the brand then it becomes a problem.” Labels such as Alexander McQueen have managed to get this right in recent history – when Lee Alexander McQueen died in 2010, his right-hand Sarah Burton was appointed his successor, managing to navigate both his artistic wishes and commercial demands to keep the name alive.

D’Amario, who started working with Dame Vivienne decades ago, helped transform her fortunes, literally. Her annual turnover reportedly increased from a few hundred thousand pounds, to millions after he joined forces with her.

Insiders say things have soured. So far, it doesn’t look like a dispute that will resolve itself either quickly or quietly.

The Vivienne Westwood company has been approached for comment.