Power to the People

Crown Vivienne_Westwood Juergen_Teller

Symbolising power to the people, this week’s post is to recommend & illustrate how to make your own crown. A democratic crown.
How to make the one illustrated above in the photo by Juergen Teller is already on this site. Click on ’Do It Yourself’ above.
There is a second version you can also make. Instructions here.
This version was made for the recent London Unisex fashion show, AW 2016/17, which was named after the green energy supplier Ecotricity & was also worn at the Fabric nightclub event in London on the 20th Feb.
Read about the night here.

 

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The Antipeople Scarf

Antipeople_Scarf Vivienne_Westwood Climate_Change Financial_System

This week Worlds End has a new scarf/shawl in 100% lambswool, 270 cm long by 75cm wide. I have previously written about the manufacture, history & quality of this accessory here.

The current version is in 5 colours & sports several slogans all connected with the rotten financial system we currently live under & it’s responsibility for austerity measures, poverty & climate change.
This financial system allows one million, of what Vivienne has coined the ‘antipeople’, to control the rest of the seven billion of us on this planet, acting the same as a parasite in that they suck up all profit from the works of others & like a parasite they eventually kill the host – us!
(have you switched your energy supplier yet to a green one?).
At the end of the scarf are the words:
Friends of Oxfam oppose Rotten Financial System = Rot $
Soon nobody will be able to help anybody/globa
l”.
This wording is addressed specifically to Oxfam but also to the other NGO’s & their supporters addressing the rape of our planet & the suffering of its inhabitants, i.e Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the RSPB, etc.
What the wording explains is that the world situation is getting worse & worse & the work of these organisations although helping a bit is fighting a losing cause. It is a call for them & all of their supporters (of which we are one) to realise that they need to ‘up’ their game & get more politically opposed to the root cause of their fight. The rotten financial system.
These NGO’s have a lot of supporters. They need to start co-ordinated actions, like for instance urging their members to all switch energy suppliers away from the fossil fuel industries.
Some of these NGO’s receive funding from the UK government, which complicates any direct criticism. If these NGO’s don’t come out against the government though, their causes are lost.

Antipeople_Scarf Vivienne_westwood Climate_Change Financial_system

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‘The Machine Stops’ by E M Forster

The-Machine-Stops-E-M-Forster climate-revolution worlds-end-shop

First published in 1909, ‘The Machine Stops’ is a short science fiction story written by E.M.Forster, better known for novels like ‘A Passage to India’.
In it he describes a world run for pleasure by a machine. Through the generations, people rely more & more on the machine until they do nothing without it. They don’t even try to do anything not provided by it. The machine becomes almost a new religion.
Then, although the people don’t understand this, the machine starts to break.
During its collapse & before the machine does break completely, the people keep making excuses for the machine’s behavior.
When the machine does stop, civilization totally collapses & the human race becomes virtually extinct.

Vivienne has picked up on this story as the exact metaphor for our own situation today.
One example of this is our complete reliance on fossil fuel energy which is imminently going to kill most of us through climate change.

Read Vivienne’s blog in the Huffington Post here

Read ‘The Machine Stops’ here

Read about runaway climate change here

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Punk Farming

Home Farm Alwyn Craven Jordan Wildflowers

Last July whilst I was interviewing Jordan for this blog she told me that I should look into what her nephew Alwyn Craven was doing with the family farm they owned in North Yorkshire.
Rather than continuing to farm on the land he had instead decided to convert it back into a natural environment for wildlife, bees, trees & flowers.
Continue reading

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Roisin Murphy wears World’s End

Roisin-Murphy-and-Elaine-Constantine-(photographer) Vivienne westwood Worlds end

I was just in Brigitte’s (she runs the ‘Red Carpet’ dept) office the other day & I saw this photo stuck on the wall behind her. She told me it was of Irish singer/songwriter Roisin Murphy & it was taken by photographer Elaine Constantine. The photo caught my attention because she is wearing a Squiggle shirt.
I looked on Roisin’s website & found this explanation from her:
Scott King is the art director for ‘Overpowered’. I have worked with him once before. He was creative director of Sleaze Nation when Elaine Constantine (Photographer) asked me to model in a fashion story she was shooting for them. We shot his idea, like a little movie, it was a narrative about a “small town pub band”. I ended up on the cover of the magazine, pictured being shagged by a hairy rocker in the cabin of a parked transit van. My Mother was very proud”.
http://roisinmurphy.blogspot.co.uk/p/bio.html
You look great Roisin. Thank you!
& thank you to Elaine too. Great photo!

 

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