Vivienne Westwood: crusader of chic

There was a boy at her school whom everyone called Dirty Edward; nobody liked him. So she told everyone she was his girlfriend. "He was a poor little thing. He was in his own head and never talked to anybody. He'd been isolated and avoided all love, probably even from his mother." I wonder if she had the same impulses to save Malcolm. Did she see him as a little boy who wasn't loved, rejected by his mother, and left to grow up with a cruel grandmother whom he believed was his mother? She giggles. "I can see that, yes. Everybody thought that boy was a pain in the arse, but you know I like a bit of a rebel."

Have her children inherited her spirit of rebellion? "Yes, but not really. My children have got mixes of me in them, but of course each child is an alien. They are nothing to do with you, they are not your possessions."

She has two sons: Ben Westwood, who runs a photographic company in Japan, and Joe Corré, who co-founded the British lingerie label Agent Provocateur.

"Joe is brilliant at strategy. He came on the Let's Talk About Fracking campaign with me. We tried to have a debate about this, but none of the pro-frackers would come. Do you know people in fracking areas in America are having to spend $1000 a month because their water is poisoned?"

She is on a crusade now and the only thing that stops her is when her husband, Andreas, comes up. He is tall and impressive, curly hair and penetrating blue-grey eyes. They met when he was a student of hers. She has said that he has the kind of body that Arnold Schwarzenegger would have had if he hadn't pumped himself up.

He is rather strapping and gentle all at the same time. And while Westwood talks about how much she dislikes US President Barack Obama and doesn't like the look of his wife, Michelle, Andreas thinks "she's got flair, she's got style. That little cardigan she wears. That's her look."

Westwood says, "Well, I could dress her, of course. But she's married to someone disgusting and therefore she ought to be doing something about not letting things happen or trying to divorce him. But I suppose that's no reason why you shouldn't make somebody look good.

"Now my hair is shaved, I feel I set an example as Vivienne the freedom fighter. Clothes that make me look like a hermit suit me. Can you see that this carries a sense of auto irony and devil may care? That's when I think I look important, when I'm amused by myself. It gives me power in my actions."

Was there a decision behind getting rid of the tangerine-coloured hair?

"I kept putting the henna on my head and seeing the white parting all the time, so I just decided not to put the red on it one day. I remember sitting on the bus with my mother in my village growing up. And there was an evacuee, which meant she was probably somebody suspicious, anyway. And this woman had black roots in her hair. It was sort of shameful, but today what you see is mostly white roots. Andreas cut it. We cut it off then shaved it."

going back to the book, it is interesting to see how growing up in the war influenced Westwood design-wise. The Utility (or rationing) years during and just after the war were all about conservation; minimum fabric maximum return. And that's always the way she's cut her clothes. But it's more than that. Having to create whole worlds out of cardboard boxes made her pro-resourcefulness and anti-excess.

"I'm glad I was born in that period. I just think it's dreadful now: children inundated with all this rubbish. Especially fuchsia-coloured plastic and pink bicycles for little girls. It's like bubble gum. It's awful. Compare that to a child growing up with nothing but crawling on a floor with little Delft tiles; you know, those Dutch tiles where there'd be a windmill or a falcon. Wonderful things to look at.

"I didn't have anything around me. No art. And my mother always read to us. That was important, how I could discover art. I recall a window in the sweet shop. In the middle of the window was a book, a Bible with a pre-Raphaelite picture of God the Father with a lantern. It was beautiful. I'd never seen anything like that before and I knew my mother would get it for me for Christmas. She would have done anything for us."

She and her mother, Dora, were incredibly close. Dora gave her everything she had and was constantly telling her she was proud of her up until the day she died in 2008. Her father came from a long line of cobblers. All the children went to sleep with her mother singing.

Westwood's first husband, Derek, a factory worker, was a devoted father to Ben and a general good egg. But it somehow wasn't enough. "I wasn't happy. I just wasn't content looking after my child [Ben]. I needed to know more of the world. He was very good-looking and charismatic. I think of Derek with great affection, but I grew out of him."

Derek wanted to be a pilot and that's what he became, whereas Westwood wanted to be an intellectual. "I think it's absolutely important that people stay friends."

Did she stay friends with McLaren?

"No, I did not. Malcolm was impossible. Malcolm was so bad to me. Malcolm was, 'If you are not with me in any way, you are against me, you are my enemy, you are taking the bread from my mouth.' I didn't put it in the book, but he was very jealous of me. He would say things like, 'She's just a seamstress' and 'Vivienne would not be a designer if she'd never met me.' "

Malcolm was insecure?

"Yes. And he wanted success, Malcolm. That was his downfall because he never found out about anything, he just invented everything. He had a good mind and I liked the way he put things together."

When they were together, did they fight every day? "Yes. He used to drive me mad. He used to be provocative and selfish and spiteful, so spiteful. He would try to undermine your confidence and say something that would make you feel bad. All the time.'

She describes how whenever she went out to do something, anything, he would be bereft. She once found him going crazy walking down the lines in the middle of the road. Needy and cruel.

"He was similar to [Sex Pistols singer] Johnny Rotten," says Westwood. "I call it jiving with people's emotions. Come close to me and as soon as you're close you'll get pushed away. When you're far away, they'll pull you back. Then they'll get frightened when you get too close.

"He treated Joe exactly the way we've been describing. He was terrible to his own son."

When McLaren died in 2010, he didn't leave his only son a penny. "But at the same time he gave him all these adventures. He would have been a good schoolteacher. One day he did a day at school where he told them all to bring in things from the land, then he would make them have a conversation among all the objects they'd brought in. He made pandemonium, but the kids were excited."

For a while, Westwood and McLaren worked well together. At the height of the punk movement they had a shop called SEX on the King's Road in Chelsea. She finally left him in the early 1980s, although he begged her to come back. "It was hard to put up with Malcolm's cruelty. He was also cruel to Ben. He didn't need to make me think that I was stupid, I thought that anyway."

It took nearly a decade of being more or less on her own for Westwood to get to know herself again. "I love working on my own. I find it very difficult to work with Andreas."

here's another contradiction. westwood seems addicted to having the men she loves also being the men with whom she works. Andreas, whom she met in 1991, exudes a sweetness, but also he is exacting. "We suffer because he's such a perfectionist. But he's so capable. I influence the collections and I find it easier when I'm the boss. But I'm not the boss now, when we design. I tend to play the role of assistant to him and it's been more difficult as I'm doing all this activism. I'm not always engaged at the start of the collection; if you're not absorbed at the beginning, you can get lost."

She and Andreas married in secret in 1992 when she was 50 and he was 25. She only told her sons. Despite her protests that he is bossy, when I meet him he seems calm: attentive, adoring. Do they argue? "No, no. We don't argue because I do what Andreas says. He is the most incredible talent. I'm not aware of myself being a talent, so we'll just put me to one side."

Was that what first attracted her to him? His talent? "When I met Andreas, he was already attractive to quite a lot of people in the troop that I was teaching. I was attracted to him purely as a man, not necessarily about what he could do. I would go into rooms looking for Andreas. Soon he was meeting me off airplanes and if I went into a room he would always be there. He says for him it was love at first sight. He has told me this has never happened before.

"I worry about my activism when I see Andreas getting so tired. I feel guilty. He needs me nearer than I am most of the time." The pictures of women in corsets around us are inspirations for Andreas, although Westwood took the corset and reinvented it to make women feel more powerful and more feminine. "Oh, a woman in a corset looks like a goddess."

She talks with love about her favourite supermodel, Naomi Campbell. "She gives herself too big a schedule. She can never fulfil all her commitments." She also likes Pamela Anderson and Jerry Hall. "I love Jerry because she's kind and polite. And Pamela. She is the most caring person and fights for what she believes."

Westwood's granddaughter, Cora Corré, 17, has become a model, too. "She's a beautiful girl, but I wish she would use it to stand for something, although it's terrible for me to impose that on anybody. I would also like to see more of her. I only see her through Joe. She's busy, she never calls me. I wish she would read my only diary. I am trying to understand the world we live in. I think she could get a lot from it."

Malcolm and me

Thank goodness Ben and Joe were both very easy babies. I looked after all of them. All three. Little Joe and Ben - and Malcolm, who was a student. Malcolm didn't help at all. He wouldn't help. He refused, because he had said it was my decision to keep Joe. I said to him, "Malcolm, you've got to at least take Joe to nursery for me in the morning. It's too much for me to drop him off every day."

I was late for work nearly every morning, being threatened with the sack, and Malcolm's still in bed. Poor Joe - I'd be cramming milk and food at him and running down such a long road to the nursery with his ever-heavier weight - we couldn't afford a pram - then back on the bus with Ben to my job. My life and the life of my children was very, very hard. And in the evenings, there'd be washing and sorting and cooking and cleaning, and I did a lot of school preparation in the evening. I was exhausted.

Malcolm was horrible. And he reserved a special "horrible" for anybody who was a mother. He hated my relationship with my children, even with his own son, even Joe. He always pretended that he wasn't Joe's father at all. "No, your daddy's the milkman," or "Your daddy's the cactus in the corner" - whatever. Unsurprisingly, my mother and he weren't able to get on, so I couldn't see my mother at that time of my life, either.

It became too difficult for me, because I was very loyal to Malcolm. I believed in him, absolutely, as an artist. And that he needed me. So I wouldn't see my mother.

Meanwhile, she looked after Ben after school such a lot. She probably loved Ben more than she'd loved me and [Westwood's siblings] Olga and Gordon when we were little, because she felt he was really neglected and that he needed her. But it was this huge, frightening love for her, almost. She used to say that the room lit up for her when Ben came in. And when I had Joe, she said, "I'll never love Joe as much as Ben. I can't let myself ... I'll never ever invest so much affection in anybody as I have done for Ben."

My position was simple. I loved Malcolm. I believed in him. My children would benefit in the long run, and still, sometimes, he would organise creative things for the boys to do.

I so valued what I could learn from Malcolm.

I know people will think I was a doormat. But I needed him for what he knew, and he needed me because someone had to need him - and I could talk to him and I could develop by talking to him. So I stayed with him.

Edited extract from Vivienne Westwood by Ian Kelly and Vivienne Westwood, published by Pan MacMillan next week.