Parenting & Family Quote by Vivienne Westwood

Westwood slips a whole manifesto into a throwaway family anecdote. “My son has followed fashion since he was a punk” isn’t just cute parental pride; it’s a reminder that punk, in her world, wasn’t a hairstyle but an argument. Punk treated clothing as a weaponized signal - confrontational, DIY, loud about what polite society wanted hidden. By placing her son’s style origin story there, she frames “fashion” as something learned through rebellion rather than shopping.

Then she lands the provocation: “fashion is about sex.” Not sex as a marketing gimmick, but sex as power, appetite, risk, and display. Westwood is pushing against the sanitized notion of fashion as tasteful refinement. Sex is the underlying engine: why silhouettes emphasize or deny the body, why fabrics cling or armor up, why “modesty” codes can feel like control and why exposure can read as defiance. It’s also an implicit critique of the industry’s hypocrisy: everyone sells desire, then acts scandalized by the desires they’ve activated.

The line “He and I agree” matters, too. It’s a generational bridge that refuses the usual moral panic about youth culture. Westwood turns mother-and-son consensus into a cultural shrug: of course fashion is sexual; pretending otherwise is the real performance. Coming from the designer who helped midwife punk into the mainstream, the subtext is sharper: fashion only looks frivolous if you ignore how reliably it maps our hungers, our identities, and our battles over who gets to be seen.