The Queen of Fashion and a tale of two Orbs

In her earlier career, Westwood was a household name as an iconoclastic fashion designer and punk pioneer. By the mid-1980s, she had transitioned into a champion of British fabrics and ethical production, boxes which Harris Tweed comfortably ticked.

Perhaps her most significant contribution, however, was inadvertent. Through the “blatant appropriation” of a trademark remarkably similar to Harris Tweed’s Orb, she demonstrated that the Clò Mor itself needed stronger brand protection – which was duly achieved to provide today’s vital safeguards.

From a working class background in Derbyshire, Westwood’s family moved to London where she became entangled with another icon of the punk era, Malcolm McLaren. They opened a shop in Chelsea’s King’s Road when it was the epicentre of fashion trends.

As her biographer, Jane Mulvagh, wrote: “Vivienne may have been introduced to the fashion business by McLaren but it became, in her words, ‘a baby I picked up and never put down’. She earnestly taught herself the tailoring craft (McLaren could not thread a needle) and gradually introduced new designs”.

All this helped establish Westwood’s reputation as an enfant terrible of the fashion world. Tartan, mostly ripped and with safety pins holding it together, played its part in punk couture but not tweed. The world Vivienne Westwood inhabited through the 1970s was, in every respect, a long way from the Hebrides.

Westwood’s reputation as a designer grew in inverse proportion to her financial stability. Her biographer wrote: “As McLaren was often abroad and Vivienne had no commercial acumen, the accounting and stocktaking procedures were non-existent… burdened by debt, she filed for personal bankruptcy”.

Thus unburdened, she was determined “to fight her way to the centre of the fashion world” and moved to Italy where she signed a deal with Armani. Her point of introduction to Harris Tweed was around 1984 when Ian Angus Mackenzie, then a weaver, recalls the HTA bringing a group of designers to Lewis and to his loom shed. They included Vivienne Westwood.

Her biographer wrote: “At the beginning of 1986 Vivienne was in straitened and precarious circumstances. Her seven year contract with Armani had been abruptly terminated … Perhaps because of her exposure to Italian views on smartness, Vivienne now abandoned her ragamuffin clothes in favour of strictly prim English suiting.

“She took to ceaselessly extolling the fine tailoring of Savile Row and the tradition and craftsmanship to be found in Scottish and English tweeds and English gaberdines…”. Amidst the continuing personal and financial chaos, she became “overtly nationalistic in her choice of cloth, manufacturers and themes for her clothes”.

She was drawn to Harris Tweed by its depth of colours – “so intense, they’re like jewels” – and the narrative behind it. She had gone into full reverse gear as far as royalty was concerned and the fact “the Windsors had worn Harris Tweed for generations” fitted perfectly into the “royal” collection she was planning.

Jane Mulvagh wrote: “Vivienne was reminded of this evocative cloth when she was shown it by Elliott Little, the London agent for Kenneth Mackenzie … The firm’s managing director, Harris Mackenzie, travelled to London to meet her. When he showed her his colour chart, he found her ‘very explicit in what she wants … demanding, yes demanding, she even sent swatches back with instructions to ‘make it more hairy’.

“Vivienne used nine eight-metre pieces in the collection. The order was hand-written in her bold, looping, schoolmistress script, giving only a home telephone number and a promise the bill would be settled – she was clearly accustomed to suppliers refusing to open accounts with her”.

“As Vivienne’s relationship with Kenneth Mackenzie Ltd developed, she became increasingly experimental in her use of the traditional cloth. Unlike other designers, whose clothes were produced in modern, automated factories, her small collection was hand-cut and assembled on domestic sewing-machines. Consequently, she could work with the single-width traditional tweed which could not be cut on industrial cutting machines designed for double-width cloths.

“Robin Huggan, the firm’s art director, found her ‘forceful’ and constantly innovating, suggesting a tweed based on the Prince of Wales check or, on being shown a sheet displaying a multitude of samples of different tones and grids, proposing that they be amalgamated into one patchwork tweed. Huggan replied that this was impossible but Vivienne was adamant and the multi-coloured tweed was painstakingly woven inch by inch on many shuttles”.

Harris Mackenzie recalls that first meeting, when he made his way up the stairs at Worlds End, 430 Kings Road, which was still the Westwood headquarters. “There were lots of bits and pieces of material lying around. We both sat on a table having a coffee. It was all very informal and she wanted to know about where I came from and how Harris Tweed was produced. She knew exactly what she wanted and we always managed to supply it”.

Around this time, Westwood also bought Breanish Tweed which was produced by Iain Sutherland at his home in Uig. Iain had re-trained as a Harris Tweed weaver but preferred to create his own business which allowed him flexibility in how the fabric was produced, so long as it wasn’t marketed as Harris Tweed.

I recall going into his kitchen in Breanish while he was in the middle of a telephone conversation which included very firm notice that “if I don’t get paid, you won’t get any more tweed”. When he came off the call, Iain explained that the recipient of this advice was Vivienne Westwood, in person. In that respect at least, nothing had changed at that point in her career!

The quantities of Harris Tweed ordered by Westwood were “very small”, says Harris Mackenzie but, as with other high profile design houses, her identification with Harris Tweed was more significant than volume. Westwood was “now making the past fashionable in a provocative way … by making fashion out of traditional Scottish tweeds and arcane accessories”. Her biographer, Jane Mulvagh, wrote:

“The small Harris Tweed collection, Vivienne’s first back on home turf, was put together in the front room of her flat ‘without an ironing board or trestle tables, nothing! It just manifested itself from nowhere’, a temporary assistant recalled. It incorporated such staples of upper-class dressing as tweed schoolgirl/nanny coats inspired by images from the thirties and forties of the young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, twinsets and pearls, hunting coats and black velvet. They were accessorised with pantomimic headgear … a crown, a John Bull hat … the St Trinian’s style models, chosen for their English schoolgirl looks, chewed gum and smeared lipstick across their mouths in imitation of the photographs in the society magazine Tatler of debutantes snogging their beaux at dances”.

Westwood herself attributed inspiration for the collection to a non-royal source. She wrote: “My whole idea for this collection was stolen from a little girl I saw on the Tube one day. She couldn’t have been more than 14. She had a little plaited bun, a Harris tweed jacket and a bag with ballet shoes in it”. Whatever its origins, Westwood’s 1987 Harris Tweed collection established, in more ways than one, a connection between the two “brands” that continues to the present day.

In a tribute last week, her fellow designer Bella Freud recalled: “A moment I will treasure was when Vivienne was working on the Harris Tweed collection, influenced by clothes the Queen had worn as a child. She sent something over in a taxi. “I’m not sure if it’s any good, so tell me what you think and I’ll see whether to continue with it or not,” she said – or words to that effect.

“The taxi delivered a plastic carrier bag containing a Harris Tweed crown with the jewels in green and blue tweed and the arches in fake ermine. It was the loveliest thing I have ever seen and my eyes filled with tears”.

It was a short leap from a crown to an Orb and that became more problematic. As Mulvagh wrote: “Since 1911, Harris Tweed’s trademark has been the royal orb – a symbol once known to virtually every child who owned a tweed school coat and every man who wore a sports coat. On the backdrop of the catwalk for her ‘Harris Tweed’ show, Vivienne used a huge orb encircled, Saturn-like, by a ring and this became her logo”.

It was, wrote Mulvagh, a piece of “blatant appropriation” and the Harris Tweed Association (as it then was) thought so too. By that time, Ian Angus Mackenzie was its chief executive and he recalls the insistence, particularly from their Edinburgh lawyers, that action should be taken to safeguard the HTA’s own Orb. Further advice suggested it was unlikely legal action would succeed. There were just enough points of difference to distinguish between the two symbols.

A compromise was agreed (and soon forgotten) that Westwood would only use her Orb on non-tweed items. Honour was served and, Ian Angus reckons, the mutual identification did more good than harm for both.

It also preserved the burgeoning Westwood organisation as a client which, to this day, buys bespoke tweeds from Harris Tweed Hebrides – mostly big checks and bright colours.

Most importantly, the Westwood Orb alerted the old HTA to the reality that its trademark protections were not as secure as it had believed and this led it to promote the Harris Tweed Act of 1993 which created the Harris Tweed Authority and gave the industry its current, crucial protections.

Harris Tweed Hebrides creative director, Mark Hogarth, says: “Vivienne Westwood spanned six decades in fashion and style and continually went in new directions which, inevitably, others would follow. In terms of the fabrics she used, it wasn’t enough that they were bright and bold, they had to have a narrative and identity that matched her personal style and ethics”.

For all these reasons, Vivienne Westwood and Harris Tweed became surprisingly well-matched partners – and that first handwritten order grew into a lasting relationship, defined by two slightly different Orbs.