Britain's leading fashion designer, Dame Vivienne Westwood was bestowed with an honorary degree by the University in June this year. While she was at the University she also delivered her 'Manifesto' at the Dundee Literary Festival alongside sixteen students from Duncan of Jordanstone College, highlighting her passionate campaign to defend free speech and freedom of thought.
Professor Mike Press delivered the laureation address during the Graduation ceremony - eliciting huge cheers from the audience - and later in the day sat down for a fascinating conversation with the grand dame of fashion, tracing her journey from being 'Little Dolly Daydream' to an icon of Britain's creative industries.
In his laureation address, Professor Press began by telling the audience, 'Before you is a thief; an outrageous and extraordinary one at that. She has plundered our culture, our history to tell stories.' So what better way to start her own story than with this question...
Mike Press: Are you a thief?
Vivienne Westwood: I don't think so. For whatever reason I started... I could always make things. And when Malcolm [McLaren, former husband] asked me to help him I knew I could do the things that needed doing. There then came a point after working with him when I decided to carry on myself, because I realised the effect I'd had.
You know, I came from up north and I was Little Dolly Daydream. Malcolm was from this big Jewish family and went to all the art galleries and things, and was just much more cosmopolitan.
I had to work at all of it to make myself believe I could do it. Other people took things I'd done and copied them and in some cases made a lot of money from it because they had the outlets to do that. But it had the effect on me of making me think what I did was good and I should be telling the world about it. I thought I had this talent and that I should keep on using it.
That's not to say I enjoyed it. I didn't enjoy it for fifteen years or more. It was always something I did and looked forward to getting finished with. I'd be like 'Once I get this pair of trousers finished I can do something else that I actually want to do, I can read a book or have some tea.'
But what drove me on I suppose is that I felt I had to explore these ideas I had to understand the world I lived in. I was this idiot person and doing this was what I needed to do to understand what was going on.
It's like the first time I had to go on the catwalk, I really didn't want to do that. But Andreas, my husband, told me not to be silly and that all these people knew how hard I'd worked and wanted to see me, so I did it.
I've always looked on this as my job, but because it is my job I had to do it. I don't ever want to go to parties but when I do I'm usually the last person to leave. That's just how I am.
MP: This ambition you have, where does it come? You are a household name, you probably don't have to work again. So why do it?
VW: I have thought 'How can I give this up?' but I have found now that I do like it. From time to time I am very pleased with what I do. I feel like I have to do this because no one else can do it.
When I said I wanted to learn more about this world, one of the things I wanted to see was whether something which is good can survive in this corporate world. Of course with fashion you always have to try and find funding and support but I have never been given funding from business, which in the long run has been good because I haven't had people telling me what to do or what I couldn't do.
Fashion is so hard, you have to keep organising things and it is very hard to find good assistants, it is hard to get funding, there are so many things that make it difficult. And there are some things you perhaps don't want to do, but have to do. You have to have a perfume, for example, because it helps fund some of the other things you do.
My high fashion is not fully costed. The only costs that come through are how much the material cost and the cost of making the final garment. We don't cost the effort put in by 20 people over six months that lie behind that. Even if a dress costs £2000 it should cost £20,000.
So you have to have all these offshoots to support it, and it drives me mad really. From the initial idea comes this original thing, and then it ends up on ties and socks and all this stuff.
MP: Where did your interest in fashion come from? Were you conscious of the 'New Look' around the 1940s and '50s?
VW: I lived in a little row of cottages between two villages in the north of England. At the time there was a local woman who, by the standards of the time, was considered to be a little 'risque'.
One day I was standing with my mother and another woman, and this lady walked past in her finery and my mother exclaimed, 'Oh, look, she's wearing the New Look!'.
I loved that 50s stuff. I made my own clothes as a teenager and that was the kind of thing I liked. I was the last person among my friends to shorten my skirts.
MP: You went to art school for one only one term?
VW: It wasn't a long time.
MP: So why should anyone go to art school?
VW: I don't think they should go to fashion schools. Terrible places. You can teach technique in fashion but that's about it. And the only thing to learn if you want to paint is how to draw.
In a way they are following the wrong ethic. This idea of democracy, that everyone is this kind of noble savage, that everyone should feel something and then they will be able to create, its just wrong. The worst thing is to promote to people something for which they have no talent. I think that genuine talent is extremely rare. Not everybody can do things.
I think children should be bored, they should not be constantly coddled. How else can we expect them to engage their imaginations?
MP: It seems very much that your message to young artists and designers is that they have to be rigorous?
VW: People are always trying to be something different, and that can lead to them being too self conscious about what they are doing. The important things come back to technique - if I were a painter and looking at a Caravaggio, I would be looking to relearn that technique he used and develop something from that. If I wanted to make furniture, I would want to make a Chippendale chair and find out about the techniques that led to that. I wouldn't want to make a chair from the coat hangers in the wardrobe - that's rubbish.
In the Manifesto I am saying there is no progress in art, but I think there can be progress in technique, which in turn can lead to wider progress. That has been the course of history, if you look at how things like Greek pots developed as new techniques became available.
MP: I do a lot of work that involves craft, and I was asked recently who were the greatest craftspeople in the UK, and I mentioned you, which led to some argument! But I do think you have an outstanding sense of technique and a real respect for tradition in terms of craft knowledge.
VW: Every fashion designer is a craftsperson. I can't make a suit from a pile of bricks - it has to have arms and legs and you have to able to get around in it, it needs to be worn. So it is very much a craft, and applied art as well.
Here are two examples of how I am very, very interested in this point of how things develop.
For example, these bonnets that Victorian ladies wore. They look so demure and almost like victims in these and I always wondered why. And then one day I was looking at some fashion of arouind 1793, at the time of the Directoire, where they had these long dresses to the ground and their bonnets and I suddenly saw that, yes!, they were trying to look like Greek helmets. That was what came to me and suddenly I understood what it was, where it came from. And so we put them in the fashion show and people were really quite startled by them.
I was also thrilled by this idea of the first real garment being made in Europe, which was this suit which went beneath armour. There had been clothes before, obviously, but they were limited by the width of weaving machines and so on.
The fabric was woven to fit bodies and so on. But when they developed plate armour to protect the body they had to create a new kind of garment to go underneath it, with padding and then the tights and so on. This went from being something very practical to an item of huge fashion which became all the rage.
Well, we copied it and put it in one of my shows and it looked like something from outer space. You see how the idea develops, from this very old idea which lies at the start of fashion to something which we present now and people think is very futuristic - it is all linked.
MP: The Manifesto - what do you hope to achieve with it?
VW: It has a chance to take on a life of its own and a chance to infiltrate people's concepts. The next thing I want to try with it is see if I can turn it into something which can be more fully dramatised and see what kind of different readings we can, maybe with more people - I think we could do with up to 600 people if we had the right kind of amphitheatre.
The Manifesto was written from the point of view of an art lover, going on a journey to discover art. Just because there is no progress in art doesn't mean people can't develop a love of art. And if they can do that then we might find some artists out of this as well.
If we don't have any art lovers then we are not going to get artists. Or they might exist but there won't be anyone to appreciate that they exist.
If you want to learn about art, about how brilliant someone like Matisse is, then go and try and copy it. It isn't easy, but you will see for yourself just how brilliant it is. That is what I have done.
MP: There have been some discussions here in Dundee about establishing a satellite site of the Victoria & Albert Museum, where your work has been displayed in the past. What would be the impact of that in a place like Dundee?
VW: One of the questions I was asked recently, when I was in Sao Paulo, was how do you engage with culture if you don't live in a cultural centre?
My answer to that is that you get back what you put in, so you can be reading good books, or painting, or listening to music. But there are other things you can do as well, you can know the names of the plants or flowers where you live - the Greeks knew this, that when you start naming things you build a greater understanding of the world around you.
But what something like the V&A coming here could do is add a whole new dimension to the city and the area, it can really change things for people. You have a wonderful landscape here and something like the V&A could really complement all of that.