Wealth & Money Quote by Vivienne Westwood

Punk’s great trick was always the safety pin: take a symbol of austerity and turn it into an aesthetic weapon. Westwood, patron saint of DIY rebellion, is doing a quieter version of that here by pulling the curtain back on the least romantic part of fashion: the spreadsheet.

The line lands because it refuses the fantasy that “true” creativity floats above commerce. Westwood isn’t defending greed; she’s naming infrastructure. Perfume and licensing aren’t just side hustles, they’re the mass-market cash engines that subsidize the expensive, failure-prone work of making clothes at the level designers are judged on: prototypes, sampling, development, shows, the whole money-burning laboratory of originality. The subtext is almost managerial: if you want risk in the atelier, you need safety in the balance sheet.

Coming from Westwood, the admission has bite. She built a brand on anti-establishment posture, yet she’s bluntly acknowledging that the system rewards not just vision but scalability. Fragrance lets a house sell a feeling to millions who will never buy the runway garment; licensing converts cultural capital into recurring revenue. That tension is the point. The quote frames “selling out” less as betrayal than as a survival strategy in an industry where the myth of the lone artist persists, even as the costs of staying relevant keep rising.

It’s also a sly critique of fashion’s hierarchy: couture-level ideas are bankrolled by accessible products, and everyone pretends not to notice. Westwood insists we notice.