Daily Inspiration Quote by Vivienne Westwood

Westwood’s jab lands like a ripped seam: quick, confrontational, and meant to expose what she saw as feminism’s aesthetic mistake. Coming from a designer whose whole career was built on playing with gender codes, it’s not a neutral observation; it’s an accusation that a certain strand of feminist politics was mistaking liberation for mimicry. “Wish” implies coercion and groupthink, as if feminism is a single styling directive. “Seem like” keeps the argument in the realm Westwood knows best: appearance, presentation, costume. She’s not debating equal pay; she’s policing a look, a silhouette, a posture.

The blunt tag line - “They’re not men” - is doing double duty. On the surface it’s biological essentialism: a curt refusal of gender fluidity or sameness. Underneath, it’s a provocation against the old corporate bargain many women have been offered: adopt the uniform (the suit, the hard edges, the suppressed ornament) and you’ll be taken seriously. Westwood frames that bargain as a kind of cultural tragedy, where “power” is defined so narrowly that it requires women to erase what she considers distinctly feminine.

Context matters: Westwood came up through punk, a scene that attacked respectable masculinity and respectable femininity at the same time. Her own work put women in armor and men in lace; she profited from gender drag even as she defended difference. That tension is the subtext: she’s not rejecting gender play so much as insisting it should be chosen, flamboyant, and aesthetic - not mandated by a politics she caricatures as humorless assimilation.