I love Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, a BBC interview show that not only has great guests, but treats them, and us, to that uniquely British brand of intelligent, quick silliness. A few weeks ago, one of the guests was Dame Vivienne Westwood.


Viv is one of my all time favorite fashion designers, and people, for that matter. She was Malcolm McLaren’s partner when he managed the Sex Pistols. The shop they had together, named at various times Sex and Let It Rock, among other things, supplied the Sex Pistols with the clothes they wore at their first gig, thus cementing the link between Punk and Vivienne Westwood. Safety pins? Dog collars? Tartan fabric? Vivienne Westwood.


At any rate, Viv actually had contacted Jonathan Ross with a request to appear on his show. She wanted to talk not about fashion fabulousness, but about climate change. And I’ve now re-watched this interview on Youtube about 10 times: Part One and Part Two.


See, what’s so remarkable if you’ve been alive for a little while is that Johnny Rotten of The Sex Pistols sarcastically sang God Save the Queen to protest England’s conformity and deference to royalty in the face of rampant social injustice. And a little over 30 years later, Vivienne Westwood of bondage pants fame is sincerely singing the praises of Prince Charles because he’s working to reverse climate change through an organization called Rainforest SOS.


This endorsement was surreal to me at first, and then I decided I like Viv even more because she didn’t feel beholden to a radical pose from years ago, but has chosen a new radical pose that’s just as principled as the last one was! She’s been influenced by the work of James Lovelock, who is best known as the father of Gaia Theory. Gaia Theory is basically the idea that all parts of our planet form a complex interacting system, like a single organism. So, for example, if part of the earth experiences extreme drought, extreme flooding strikes somewhere else as the planet works to re-balance itself as a whole. Lovelock’s holistic viewpoint is unusual, and he need not hold back his provocative opinions, because he’s been working as an independent scientist free of corporate and institutional funding since 1964. I find his message to be a real downer on the written page, so his charming and cheerful and classically British delivery of apocalyptic predictions is the way I prefer to hear about them. Here’s an example from YouTube.

Apocalyptic climate change, royalty, eccentricity, surrealism, fabulous fashion, silly humor – believe it or not, we actually have a bag that sums it all up: the Napoleon Cinchy Tote. The cinchy shape is a nod to vintage handbags, and on this grand scale, made out of a rice sack, it’s a cheeky reference like one Vivienne Westwood would pull. Plus, Napoleon in a rice field? That’s funny and surreal, or apocalyptic if you think about the world’s landscapes collapsing in on themselves with violent change over time. At any rate, the bag is 25% off ($71.25) through the end of next Tuesday. Wear one and feel fabulous while you save the world!


All the Best to You,
Bonny