The model and environmentalist Cora Corré grew up devoted to the legendary designer. Now she’s quitting her grandmother’s label, denouncing what she says is a bullying culture and a betrayal of Westwood’s remarkable legacy and beliefs.
When Cora Corré arrives at our shoot in a jumper with giant holes along the sleeves from each elbow almost to each wrist, I assume it’s something avant garde from her late grandmother Vivienne Westwood’s archive. Actually, it belongs to her dad - Joe Corré, the designer’s younger son - who has a habit of ruining clothes while fixing stuff around the house, she says.
When he launched the underwear boutique Agent Provocateur in the Nineties with Cora’s mother, Serena Rees, Corré worked on all the shop fits himself, from wallpapering to electrics, presumably ruining other jumpers in the process. (They sold the business for a reported £60 million in 2007, when they divorced.)
Ripped clothes and DIY run in the family. It was low-budget slashed T-shirts that propelled Cora’s grandparents, Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, to punk-era fame in the Seventies when they printed them with naked breasts, the word “SEX” and the Queen’s portrait, pierced with a safety pin. (Corré was McLaren’s Jewish grandmother’s surname, given to Joe at birth in defiance, because the older woman did not want McLaren to have a baby with Westwood.)
Protest is in the genes too. McLaren’s band the Sex Pistols wore Westwood’s agit-urchin look to kick back at the “fascist regime”; in 2004 Agent Provocateur sold knickers with the slogan “The only Bush I trust is my own”. Cora Corré was six when she went on her first march against the Iraq war with Grandma Vivienne, as she knew her. In 2015, Westwood drove a tank to David Cameron’s Oxfordshire home in an anti-fracking stunt that was part of her rich third chapter as an environmental campaigner.
If you want proof of Vivienne Westwood’s status as British cultural icon, look no further than the National Portrait Gallery, where she appears variously as Queens Elizabeth I and II, a tweedy Radclyffe Hall figure and a (totally naked) flame-haired odalisque in her late sixties, shot by photographer Juergen Teller. In 1989, she starred on the cover of Tatler’s April Fool’s edition dressed as Margaret Thatcher, then in 1992 collected her OBE from the Palace with no knickers on - and had the paparazzi shots to prove it.
The NPG also owns two portraits of her with her granddaughter - one in which she and Corré as a chubby toddler are both dressed in the 18th-century toile de Jouy she revived for the Nineties; another in matching tiger print gowns from a 2001 collection that marked Corré’s catwalk debut, aged four, holding the hand of the German model Veruschka von Lehndorff. Now 27, Corré only remembered the experience years later, she tells me, when being backstage as an adult model triggered déjà vu.
Corré spent her early years
living above Agent Provocateur’s HQ in Marylebone, playing on the computers in its offices. She was obsessed even as a two-year-old with the pink leopard-print heels it sold and the nurse-like button-front pink dresses worn by its staff, which were designed by - who else? - Grandma Vivienne and now change hands for £300 ($645) or more. (Where Chrissie Hynde was one of Westwood’s original shop girls, Agent Provocateur’s included Paloma Faith.)
In 2006, eight-year-old Cora accompanied her grandmother to Buckingham Palace for her investiture as a dame. She was again without underwear - though we’ll have to take her word for it this time — and sporting golden devil horns.
“When you’re a little girl, she’s just grandma,” Corré smiles. “It’s just your life.”
As a teenager at the boho boarding school Bedales, Corré did her English Speaking Board presentation on the Sex Pistols. Because of her surname and the Kashmiri looks she inherited from her mother, friends who had heard of Vivienne Westwood didn’t quite believe she and Corré were related. Then, when her grandmother turned up to watch a school play wearing “big earrings, Reebok Classics and a whole outfit”, the next day someone called her a “chav”.
“I used to go to her house in Clapham for half-term,” Corré remembers. “We hung out a lot. She loved taking me to galleries.”
They would go to the Wallace Collection together, home to several rococo masterpieces - such as Fragonard’s The Swing - that Westwood borrowed to decorate her designs. Such is the demand for vintage Westwood that a Fragonard corset from her autumn 1990 collection now sells for almost £10,000 ($21,500). The 1993 28cm stacked platforms Corré is wearing for our photoshoot are the same as the pair that Naomi Campbell fell off and which now live in a glass case at the V&A. The collector who owns this pair wouldn’t part with them for less than £20,000 ($43,000).
Westwood prioritised culture over cash though, Corré says. “She always had a dictionary to hand and insisted on looking up words she didn’t think I knew.
“We bonded over intergenerational conversations, me as a young person growing up with different media, new things. We’d discuss politics, injustice - she always spoke to me like an adult.”
Now Corré is launching an insurrection of her own - only this time, the establishment she is taking on is the company that still bears her grandmother’s name. She is clearly nervous about talking to me. “I’ve always been brought up to be suspicious of media interest in my grandma, and protect her by not saying too much. But my main goal now is to honour her wishes.”
After Westwood’s death aged 81 in December 2022, ownership was split in thirds between a family trust (of which Corré is part), her third husband, 58-year-old Andreas Kronthaler (whom Westwood appointed creative director in 2016), and her business partner Carlo D’Amario, 79, who was made managing director in 1996 and is now CEO.
“My grandma actually wanted to close it down,” Corré says. “Then [she thought] it didn’t seem right because of the number of people employed there. But she was deeply unhappy for many years.”
Last month, Corré sent an email to all staff at the Vivienne Westwood company, resigning from her position there as campaigns manager and severing the link between the label and the family-run, not-for-profit Vivienne Foundation set up by her grandmother in her final years. In it, she called for the removal of D’Amario, alleging bullying, unpaid royalties and an attempt to thwart Westwood’s legacy of environmental and humanitarian activism.
Corré’s email was deleted from staff inboxes within an hour, and she has received several legal threats from the company since - including one just before we sit down for this interview.
“It’s scary hearing you might be sued for defamation,” she says. “But it’s an emotional reminder of… my grandmother. She was vocal in her criticism of how the business was run and she received intimidating letters too.
“She hated the cheap volume direction the company was taking. There were plastic PVC shoes everywhere, outlet stores were popping up all over the place and TK Maxx was receiving the collections before her own stores did. She refused to provide any more T-shirt designs or diffusion lines - she insisted on quality over quantity.”
D’Amario tried to sue Westwood and Kronthaler in Luxembourg, where the holding company is based, seeking millions for defamation - until profits began to increase and the case fell apart.
“The constant letters and threats intimidated my grandmother for a long time. The stress it caused was ultimately irreversible.”
Corré also cites a shareholder agreement in 2012 that gave her grandmother and Kronthaler creative control, while allocating all financial and management decisions to Carlo D’Amario, and apportioning him 50 per cent of voting rights despite only owning a third of the business.
“She didn’t take any legal advice before she signed it, because she trusted him. Which turned out to be a mistake.”
In her later years, the designer was often photographed in T-shirts emblazoned with “Buy less” and slogans reducing consumer culture to “I ♥ crap”. Her motto, which she quoted often, was “Buy less, choose well, make it last” — hardly the usual message promoted by those in the business of turning a profit.
“She had her small forms of visual protest,” Corré says simply. “Now you can understand the context.”
Corré admits she hasn’t heard from Kronthaler - who married Westwood in 1993 - since she sent her email, despite knowing him since birth and spending Christmases together over the years.
“I had a lovely relationship with Andreas. He and my grandmother had this great love and she very much trusted him to continue her legacy. I can’t speak for him though; it’s such a personal thing. We’re all trying to navigate it.”
Her father, Joe, already has some experience of contesting settlements, having launched a legal bid over the will of his father. When Malcolm McLaren died in 2010, Joe - who covered the costs of a lavish punk funeral for the former music mogul - found he had left his entire estate to his girlfriend of 12 years, Young Kim. The petition failed but in 2016, on the 40th anniversary of his father’s band the Sex Pistols releasing their first single, Joe and Westwood set fire to a family collection of punk memorabilia estimated to be worth £5 million ($10.7m) to protest against the watering down of the movement’s original rebellious spirit.
Under Kronthaler and D’Amario, the Westwood brand has been busier than ever in recent months, dressing Taylor Swift for a portion of her Eras tour and Ariana Grande at several red carpet events for Wicked. Rihanna has worn the label for hyped post-pregnancy appearances, as has the Brat singer du moment Charli XCX. Dua Lipa, Bella Hadid and Daisy Edgar-Jones are yet more celebrity fans who have encouraged a renaissance in demand for both vintage and new pieces among Gen Z fashion followers.
The reason the label’s popularity endures despite fickle attention spans and changing trends? Not only Westwood’s savvy habit of reworking historic designs that actively celebrated the natural shape of the female body, but her talent for construction and corsetry that made the women wearing it feel invincible. As her long-time client Helena Bonham Carter declared at the designer’s memorial service in Southwark Cathedral in February 2023, “Other actresses on the red carpet wouldn’t have eaten in weeks, but [in Westwood] I could have a full English.”
Cora Corré was the final speaker at that service, to an audience that included Bianca Jagger, Stormzy and Victoria Beckham, and featured performances from Nick Cave and Chrissie Hynde, alongside a colliery band from Westwood’s native Derbyshire (she was born - and is buried - in Tintwistle). Corré says she wasn’t nervous - given her mother’s long-term partner is the Clash bassist Paul Simonon, she is presumably used to holding her own around rock stars - and that instinct took over.
“I thought, ‘What would she have wanted?’ I learnt from my grandmother that having a voice is a privilege. A voice is power.”
Corré’s speech was a call to arms on the not inconsiderable to-do list Vivienne had bequeathed her through the charitable foundation, set up in 2019. Its aims are to defend human rights, stop climate change, stop war and protest about capitalism. Westwood transferred her creative estate to the United Kingdom, including copyrights and intellectual property of everything she created before Vivienne Westwood Ltd was formed in 1993, and on all new designs beyond 2019. Her intention was that royalties from them would raise funds for the causes she believed in.
“One of the saddest things that happened while Vivienne was still alive was that the company registered the trademark of ‘the Vivienne Foundation’ under charitable fundraising,” says Corré. “For what possible reason other than to stifle the foundation she had created?”
As Corré was speaking in the cathedral, an industry veteran next to me suggested sotto voce that one person who knew what was going on behind the scenes was Westwood’s friend, the designer Jeff Banks. A week before her death, Banks, then 79, was summoned to Westwood’s home and made a director of the company, which was estimated to hold around £50m ($107m) in cash and assets.
“Vivienne was intent on saving the planet right up to the days before she passed away,” he told me in February 2023. “She was at her desk, trying to raise funds for Greenpeace. I’ve seen companies paying lip service to this stuff, but she was the genuine article — it was never just words.”
Those plans came to fruition in June, when Christie’s held an auction of her personal collection, including a £25,000 ($54,000) ballgown she had handstitched herself. The sale of the 263 pieces not only attracted more than 20,000 visitors - many of whom queued outside to be let in - but also raised more than £750,000 ($1.6m) for Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Médecins Sans Frontières and the Vivienne Foundation. Westwood’s legacy appeared to be secure.
Jeff Banks felt so when we spoke in 2023. “Normally when a designer passes on, somebody is hired in and takes the brand in a direction that isn’t what the founder would have wanted. But her and Andreas’s thoughts were so melded together, I’m supremely confident that Vivienne’s ethos will carry on.”
For a while, that seemed to be the case. Corré, who has modelled for Vogue, Dolce & Gabbana and Rimmel and spoken at the UN about next-generation women leaders, appeared on the label’s Paris catwalk twice the following year.
“It was really emotional,” she says. “I always think of my grandmother when I’m in Paris - often we’d find ourselves sitting in a corner after a show, chatting away. I thought it’d be the start of a relationship between the company and the foundation, carrying on her spirit.”
In July this year, however, Banks was ousted from his position in a vote by the board. He declined to speak to me for this article, but it was reported at the time that Kronthaler had, according to anonymous sources, also supported the motion.
Since then, Westwood showed in its usual slot at this autumn’s Paris Fashion Week and held an extra catwalk showcase in Shanghai soon after. Yet it was the launch of a capsule collection with the cult streetwear brand Palace last month that proved to be the straw that broke Corré’s back. The now sold-out range featured several pre-1993 designs and trademarks that she claims her grandmother registered to the family-run not-for-profit.
“The VW company continues to produce and make profits from these designs without paying any royalties,” read Corré’s email to its staff.
One of them is Westwood’s signature orb logo, which was splashed across hoodies and denim but is also a prominent motif in the brand’s jewellery collections, which remain one of its bestselling categories. Another is the Salon imagery of a Louis XIV interior, used in a 1992 collection across dresses and corsets, and being sold printed on items this season. Any intellectual property argument is tricky given how recognisable Westwood’s original design tics are, and how much of the business (and its popularity) still relies on this “greatest hits” factor.
“She placed everything pre-1993 in the hands of the foundation, so she would have the freedom to do the things she wanted to,” Corré says.
At the memorial service, several family members - including Westwood’s older son Ben, 61, and her brother Gordon Swire - spoke of the designer’s renewed creativity before she died, of her sketching until her final days. It was during this period that she designed a final, full collection for the foundation, Corré tells me, with the intention of the money it raised going to charity.
“It was beautiful to see her find happiness and so much excitement, working alongside her children. She felt this collection was the best thing she’d ever done - a mix of new [ideas] and her earliest, most iconic designs. We didn’t expect to be launching it without her.”
What happens next is uncertain. “It requires a delicate approach, but it will be worth the wait.”
In the meantime, Corré has taken up boxing as a form of stress relief.
“I’m very strong when I need to be,” she says. “My friends say it’s quite scary.”
Perhaps that runs in the family too.
Written by: Harriet Walker
© The Times of London
