Vivienne’s Diary 27 – 4 May

I just don’t have time to answer all your letters except every now and again, but I do read them. In lieu of this, I have decided the best thing to do is to write a quick diary each day.

Friday, 27 April: Came home after a glorious day with Juergen Teller shooting Stella Tennant for our publicity campaign. We had worked exhaustively over days to prepare it and it went well. Stella was marvellous. Inspired by Velasquez, we created an atmosphere of 17^th century interiors.

Saturday, 28 April: Yoga. Decided every Saturday will be my day of rest and glory! Reading for pleasure in bed. Of course I enjoy all my books and I have a queue of them waiting, but most of them are non-fiction. This book is ‘The Story of the Stone’ – fascinating, profound, exhilarating. It really is a book of life – a Chinese 18^th century classic in five volumes. Read until slept.

Sunday, 29 April: Iris came to stay with us and to work for one week – a pattern cutter who is a creative genius. Dinner to friend Giselle. Discussed Twin Towers; difficult not to believe their collapse was caused by demolition and not as a result of the aeroplanes (watch ‘911 Mysteries, Part 1: Demolition’, www.911mysteries.com) .

Monday, 30 April: First fittings for ‘Gold Label’ (see my blogs: ‘Creating worldwide Woman’, 15 & 24 March, 2011). Our fitting model tried on the toiles. A toile is a draught – a work in progress of a design, executed in calico, which we develop and fit until finally we make the finished garment in the correct fabric. Iris really enjoyed working on some of the clothes inspired by beetles. A kind person had sent me a little book on beetles thinking it could inspire jewellery designs.

Tuesday, 1 May: Yoga. Long talk with Julian Assange: Wikileaks and their problems
raising funds to ensure their economic survival; they’ve been fighting an unlawful economic blockade by giant US finance companies for over a year. This has destroyed 95% of their revenue from the public. www.wikileaks.org
Human rights are really being scrapped by what is fast becoming a totalitarian world order. Our politicians are in default on every level – climate change created by squeezing everyone with a crazy financial system and decreasing regard for human rights. It’s all connected. When I read the newspapers (I expect TV’s the same) they make you think the public agrees with all this. But I don’t think we do. I am against the whole thing. I am not alone. You are not alone. We are the majority.

Wednesday/Thursday, 2/3 May: Worked on collection. Hard. On average, if you can make one decision a day – this is speed. With Iris here we can work more quickly; Iris develops the new ideas for cut. She is so light and so quick because she is technically trained; she brings more than one idea to a point each day; she helps us and our other pattern cutters. We can pin our ideas down at the fittings and I can check with her the use of fabrics for the designs. Andreas thinks the most important thing is to catch the accident, keep it, use it.
Right use of fabrics is the hardest part, matching the idea – the toiles – with the fabric. This continues throughout the building of the collection and includes how to sew and make up the garment. You have to let the fabric do what it wants to do. At the moment we only have small samples of fabric, some are only 2” square, the rest 12”. Nothing has arrived, yet I need to work it out in the air: a) because I need to get a potential overview for the collection, e.g. what blouse goes with what skirt/jacket; through such practical solutions you develop the collection and the feeling and b) this will show me what other fabrics I am going to need so I can still order before it is too late. Some fabrics – I think, why on earth have we ordered this; what am I going to do with it? Print it? Cut it full of holes? Then I might get an interesting idea.
When the fabrics do start to come then it often happens that the idea and the fabric just don’t work together; then you have to design something else for the fabric and something else for the idea which is still at the toile stage. Anyway, this is the hardest thing. Luckily, Andreas is genius at all this and when the fabrics arrive he will start to commit himself. Knitwear is much easier to design. One day I’ll explain why.

London Mayor:
I voted for Ken. He’s done great for London throughout his career. He made you feel we were all in it together, that London was our town. I liked Siobhan Benita – an independent – she was very specific and practical. Boris, yes he adopted the bike idea from Paris but, apart from that, he’s shown no imagination – just hard line Conservative policy. Yet Labour supporters like him, like him because he’s silly. I remember some years ago I attended a discussion at the British Museum, run by the Telegraph, “Do we live in a free society”. Boris was on the panel and sabotaged the whole thing by showing off and saying silly things.

Awake in the middle of the night thinking, “How awake is public opinion?” I am always looking for ways to test this out: what can I say and do to find out and also to make it happen?
The Great Democratic myth is full of holes. It becomes daily more obvious that it is falling apart. The reality is that our rulers are the people who run the financial system and it’s run only for their benefit. Global Corporate Capitalism. Our democracy is really a plutocracy masquerading as a democracy.

The myth is more and more difficult to sustain because more and more of us are experiencing the destruction it causes; not only does it ruin the countries of the developing world and the lives of the people who live there, but the citizens/people of the priveledged countries. I might as well reiterate my mantra:
The financial system is the cause of climate change and the financial system is collapsing because we’re running out of resources. Politicians do not stop climate change because they cling to the collapsing system and police it with an ever more desperate and glaring abuse of human rights. Only public opinion will save us from unprecedented catastrophe. See http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30620.htm for an overview.

Friday, 4 May: Met Will.i.am. He popped in to see me about an idea he has for fashion. We talked a lot. He had helped Obama get in with his hit song, “Yes I Can”, but he is very politically aware; he knows how the political system works. Because Obama is a fan of drones and because Will. believes in technology, I talked about drones. We now live in a world worse than “1984” for surveillance, and drones can be targeted at anybody the Ruling System decides to kill.

Do we really believe they’re killing only terrorists and that they know who these terrorists are? (To me a terrorist is more often someone who is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Will thinks that social media/internet provides a transparency so that no-one can lie.

I say: for two centuries western people have agreed with the belief system created and fathered by an increasing build-up of propaganda through the media, especially in the US.  Movies, bombs, cars – we believed the myth. Even in the face of the lie, we believe; the more blatant the lie the more we believe. We do not see our own face in the mirror. We can only hope that as the lies become more blatant, more of us will admit to the reality. It will be great of the internet increases our disbelief.
Will. works hard and donates a lot of money for education. He connects education with being able to use technology in a creative way. He took my point that education doesn’t start from you and what you can do. You have to know the past in order to understand the present and to launch into the future. He laughs that I don’t have a mobile phone, etc. but acknowledged what I also said – whatever the marvels of technology, the internet can’t read the book for me.

He is a very good, sweet, clever man. Apart from his other charities, he’s interested to help with Cool Earth and I told him about Leonard.
There is no better way to know things than from the motive: How can I make the world a better place?

Re the collection: Another milestone attained! I had not found a tailoring fabric I liked. Now I’ve decided on three and I have some idea of “how it’s gonna be”.