Top 160 Vivienne Westwood Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Buy less. Choose well. Make it last. Quality, not quantity. Everybody’s buying far too many clothes.”

— Vivienne Westwood

Featured in: Quality Quotes, Environment Quotes

2. “The best fashion accessory is a book.”

— Vivienne Westwood

Featured in: Book Quotes

3. “The sexiest people are thinkers.”

— Vivienne Westwood

4. “I’m not trying to do something different, I’m trying to do the same thing but in a different way.”

— Vivienne Westwood

5. “Buy less, choose well, make it last. Quality rather than quantity: That is true sustainability. If people only bought beautiful things rather than rubbish, we wouldn’t have climate change!”

— Vivienne Westwood

6. “You’ve got to invest in the world, you’ve got to read, you’ve got to go to art galleries, you’ve got to find out the names of plants. You’ve got to start to love the world and know about the whole genius of the human race. We’re amazing people.”

— Vivienne Westwood

7. “My aim is to make the poor look rich and the rich look poor.”

— Vivienne Westwood

8. “I can’t think without my glasses.”

— Vivienne Westwood

9. “Buy less, choose well: that’s the maxim. Quality not quantity. That’s the most environmentally friendly thing you can do.”

— Vivienne Westwood

10. “The most erotic zone is the imagination.”

— Vivienne Westwood

11. “I do think if you aim for quality, it’s not so much about consumerism. The idea is ‘Buy less, choose well, make it last,’”

— Vivienne Westwood

12. “I’m not terribly interested in beauty. What touches me is someone who understands herself.”

— Vivienne Westwood

13. “I talk to fashion designers and say I want some money to save the rainforest, and they say, ‘Oh, I agree with you completely Vivienne. Yes, climate change, it’s definitely happening,’ but they don’t feel that they can do anything about it; they don’t even think ‘Well let’s stop it!’”

— Vivienne Westwood

Featured in: Fashion Quotes

14. “There is a real connection between culture and climate change. We all have a part to play and if you engage with life, you will get a new set of values, get off the consumer treadmill, and start to think, and it is these great thinkers who will rescue the planet.”

— Vivienne Westwood

Featured in: Real Quotes

15. “I’m a fashion designer and people think, what do I know?”

— Vivienne Westwood

16. “My clothes have a story. They have an identity. They have a character and a purpose. That’s why they become classics. Because they keep on telling a story. They are still telling it.”

— Vivienne Westwood

17. “Every time I have to look up a word in the dictionary, I’m delighted.”

— Vivienne Westwood

18. “Why do people think that if you don’t dress up, others will appreciate your beauty more – that style will somehow emanate from you? It’s rubbish. If you dress up it helps your personality to emerge – if you choose well.”

— Vivienne Westwood

19. “I don’t have faith in young people any more. I don’t waste time trying to communicate with them.”

— Vivienne Westwood

20. “More people should read books. It’s the most concentrated experience you can have.”

— Vivienne Westwood

Featured in: Book Quotes

21. “Save the rainforest for your loved ones.”

— Vivienne Westwood

22. “Fashion is very important. It is life-enhancing and, like everything that gives pleasure, it is worth doing well.”

— Vivienne Westwood

23. “Shoes must have very high heels and platforms to put women’s beauty on a pedestal.”

— Vivienne Westwood

24. “You have a more interesting life if you wear impressive clothes.”

— Vivienne Westwood

25. “I am attracted to people who make this effort in knowing what suits them – they are individual and stylish.”

— Vivienne Westwood

26. “I’m always attracted to people who interest me. They’ve got to be people who are really true to themselves somehow, and who are always trying to do something that makes their life more interesting, or better, or something for somebody else. They’re interested in people.”

— Vivienne Westwood

27. “I have been asked what would I ban immediately if I could. Advertising.”

— Vivienne Westwood

28. “There is so much that people take for granted.”

— Vivienne Westwood

29. “There’s nowhere else like London. Nothing at all, anywhere.”

— Vivienne Westwood

30. “The main message of Climate Revolution is that climate change is caused by the rotten financial system we’ve got, designed to create poverty and rip off any profits for a small amount of rich people. Meanwhile, it destroys the earth.”

— Vivienne Westwood

31. “Every time I hear that word, I cringe. Fun! I think it’s disgusting; it’s just running around. It’s not my idea of pleasure.”

— Vivienne Westwood

Featured in: Fun Quotes

32. “The best night of my life was watching the Japanese Noh theater. I’ve only seen it once, but even saying it now, I think, ‘How can I ever have this experience again?’ It was so mesmerizing, so complicated and so primordial; I could not believe it.”

— Vivienne Westwood

33. “I was a punk before it got its name. I had that hairstyle and purple lipstick.”

— Vivienne Westwood

34. “The fight is no longer between the classes or between rich and poor but between the idiots and the eco-conscious.”

— Vivienne Westwood

35. “The only possible effect one can have on the world is through unpopular ideas.”

— Vivienne Westwood

36. “I don’t think punk fashion is a specter or overemphasized – it made a big impression, as there had never been anything like it before.”

— Vivienne Westwood

37. “I didn’t know how a working-class girl like me could possibly make a living in the art world.”

— Vivienne Westwood

38. “The young need discipline and a full bookcase.”

— Vivienne Westwood

39. “Britishness is just a way of putting things together and a certain don’t care attitude about clothes. You don’t care, you just do it and it looks great.”

— Vivienne Westwood

40. “When I was a little girl you used to learn to sew all the holes in things, darning socks, but nobody mends things anymore.”

— Vivienne Westwood

41. “What I’m always trying to say to the consumer is: buy less, choose well, make it last.”

— Vivienne Westwood

42. “Even though it was the 70s, we found old stocks of clothes that had never been worn from the 50s and took them apart. I started to teach myself how to make clothes from that kind of formula.”

— Vivienne Westwood

43. “I disagree with everything I used to say.”

— Vivienne Westwood

44. “It is not possible for a man to be elegant without a touch of femininity.”

— Vivienne Westwood

45. “We have got to change our ethics and our financial system and our whole way of understanding the world. It has to be a world in which people live rather than die; a sustainable world. It could be great.”

— Vivienne Westwood

46. “I may be a rebel, but I am not an outsider.”

— Vivienne Westwood

47. “I just think people should invest in the world. Don’t invest in fashion, but invest in the world.”

— Vivienne Westwood

48. “I’ve got a real sense of three-dimensional geometry. I can look at a flat piece of fabric and know that if I put a slit in it and make some fabric travel around a square, then when you lift it up it will drape in a certain way, and I can feel how that will happen.”

— Vivienne Westwood

Featured in: Real Quotes

49. “People have never looked so ugly as they do today. We just consume far too much.”

— Vivienne Westwood

50. “In the morning, I practice 15 minutes of yoga.”

— Vivienne Westwood