“Wearing Vivienne’s clothes was like being shielded in a suit of armour – they were beautiful and unlike anything else.”
In 1985, I moved back to London to work as her assistant. At first, it was just the two of us working from her flat; I learnt everything about the fashion business from her. I made a lot of mistakes and was also very annoying, spending ages cooking us lunch or chatting on the phone and getting to work late, which naturally drove her mad. But she was endlessly patient with me and we had some wonderful, funny times.
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.
Vivienne never took the easy path. Sometimes she would describe an idea and I would think it couldn’t possibly work, but it always did and I would feel ashamed that I ever doubted her.