"Fashion is very important. It is life-enhancing and, like everything that gives pleasure, it is worth doing well"
About this Quote
Westwood doesn’t defend fashion by pretending it’s noble; she defends it by insisting it’s pleasurable, then refusing to apologize for that. “Life-enhancing” is doing double duty here: it elevates clothes from frivolous consumption to a daily technology of mood, identity, and power. She’s arguing that the things we dismiss as “surface” are often the very surfaces through which we live - how we’re read, how we belong, how we provoke.
The sly move is the clause “like everything that gives pleasure.” Westwood links fashion to the entire ecosystem of human enjoyment - art, sex, food, music - and smuggles in an ethic: pleasure isn’t automatically suspect. In a culture trained to see enjoyment as indulgence and seriousness as virtue, she flips the moral hierarchy. If it gives pleasure, it deserves craft. “Worth doing well” is a subtle rebuke to fast-fashion apathy and trend-chasing. She’s not praising shopping; she’s praising design: intention, construction, intelligence.
Context matters because Westwood’s career was built on turning style into argument. From punk’s DIY aggression to later historical tailoring, she treated clothing as a public-facing manifesto. That makes this line less like a pep talk and more like a standard: if fashion is going to take up time, labor, and resources, it should be done with imagination and responsibility. The subtext: don’t sneer at fashion - demand more from it.
The sly move is the clause “like everything that gives pleasure.” Westwood links fashion to the entire ecosystem of human enjoyment - art, sex, food, music - and smuggles in an ethic: pleasure isn’t automatically suspect. In a culture trained to see enjoyment as indulgence and seriousness as virtue, she flips the moral hierarchy. If it gives pleasure, it deserves craft. “Worth doing well” is a subtle rebuke to fast-fashion apathy and trend-chasing. She’s not praising shopping; she’s praising design: intention, construction, intelligence.
Context matters because Westwood’s career was built on turning style into argument. From punk’s DIY aggression to later historical tailoring, she treated clothing as a public-facing manifesto. That makes this line less like a pep talk and more like a standard: if fashion is going to take up time, labor, and resources, it should be done with imagination and responsibility. The subtext: don’t sneer at fashion - demand more from it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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