The Saturday interview: Vivienne Westwood

When Vivienne Westwood was four or five, she had an epiphany. "When I first saw a picture of the crucifixion, I lost respect for my parents. I suddenly realised that this is what the adult world is like – full of cruelty and hypocrisy." At the time she was living in the Pennine village of Tintwistle, where her father worked in the Wall's sausage factory and her mother was an assistant at the local greengrocer's. "I thought they'd been lying to me by telling me only about the baby Jesus, rather than what happened to him."

We're sitting at a table teeming with glue, scissors and drawings in her fourth-floor office at the Westwood empire HQ in Battersea. She's wearing a beautifully cut pin-striped suit, as well as dangly earrings and more makeup than usual for the benefit, she says, of the photographer. "I'll tell you what I was like as a child," says Westwood. "I was a good person. I was high-spirited but I was a big reader. What I remember as a child is that other kids didn't care about suffering. I always did."     More Read