Who Can Afford to Fail?
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Vivienne Westwood, Malcolm McLaren and the Class Politics of Art School
Vivienne Westwood enrolled at Harrow School of Art in April 1958. She left after one term. That fact is usually told as temperament, boredom, or proto-rebellion. In reality, it was an institutional outcome. Harrow sorted students, and she was sorted out.
The myth of the rebellious art-school dropout obscures the fact that leaving was rarely a free choice.
Art education in post-war Britain operated as a system that distributed risk and regulated legitimacy. Art schools absorbed large numbers of students but only channelled a minority into recognised professional pathways. Leaving was common, but its consequences were unevenly distributed.
In mid-twentieth-century British art schools, failure was not exceptional. It was routine. What mattered was not simply whether a student failed, but what resources they possessed afterwards. The ability to turn failure into culture depended not on creativity alone, but on who could carry the cost.
Drawing on archival research into Westwood’s brief enrolment at Harrow in 1958, and a re-reading of Malcolm McLaren’s later experience at the same institution, this essay argues that failure operated as a sorting mechanism within art education. The institution did not simply cultivate artists. It regulated progression, stabilised reputations, and quietly shed those who could not remain inside the system.
Harrow School of Art did not primarily exist to cultivate individual artistic identity. It functioned as a vocational filtering system: absorbing large numbers, channeling a minority into recognised pathways, and shedding the rest with minimal institutional liability.
Working-class formation and material skill
Vivienne Westwood was born on 8 April 1941 in Glossop, Derbyshire, and grew up at 6 Mill Brook, a row of cottages between the villages of Hollingworth and Tintwistle.¹ Her mother worked in the local cotton mills as a weaver, while her father came from a family of shoemakers. From the outset, Westwood’s creative formation was embedded in a working-class culture of material skill, repair, and production rather than artistic vocation.
At the age of eight, Westwood attended her first sewing class, and by fourteen she recalled making “all my slinky evening dresses” herself.² Her aptitude was practical and applied. In 1953, her parents, Gordon and Dora Swire, acquired the Tintwistle Post Office, assuming joint postmaster roles. This move, and the later relocation to London, formed part of a post-war pattern of working-class mobility driven by necessity rather than cultural aspiration.
At Glossop Grammar School, Westwood completed her School Certificate. Her artistic potential was recognised by her art tutor, Mr Bell, who helped her assemble a portfolio and encouraged her to apply to art school in 1957.³ Entry into art education was not framed as self-expression, but as a possible route to paid work.
Relocation to London and the structure of Harrow
In 1958, the Swire family relocated to London, taking over the Post Office and general store at 31 Station Road, Harrow. This move placed Westwood within reach of a rapidly expanding art education system undergoing significant reform.
Following the 1946 restructuring of the Ministry of Education’s examination framework, British art schools introduced the Intermediate Certificate in Arts and Crafts and the National Diploma in Design (NDD). The NDD was explicitly vocational, designed to align artistic training with industrial and commercial employment rather than autonomous artistic practice.
This repositioned art schools as mediating institutions between state education and industry. Their function was no longer to sustain speculative practice indefinitely, but to regulate progression, standardise competence, and limit exposure to economic risk, primarily on behalf of the institution itself.
Westwood enrolled on the foundation course at Harrow Technical College and School of Art for the summer term from 14 April to 4 July 1958, having just turned seventeen.⁴ Harrow’s prospectus stated its aim was “to provide a sound practical training in all branches of Art”, encompassing painting, advertising design, illustration, textiles, costume drawing, dressmaking, millinery, lithography, embroidery, silversmithing, jewellery, pottery, and related crafts.⁵
Despite this breadth, the curriculum was tightly structured. The foundation year prioritised general knowledge, composition, design and crafts, and life drawing. Specialisation was limited to a single day per week. Progression required successful completion of the Intermediate Certificate, reinforcing a sequential model of training.
Harrow School of Art as an educational system
During Westwood’s enrolment, Harrow School of Art was staffed by a faculty whose authority reinforced the institution’s emphasis on discipline and formal competence. The Dean, Ken Illingworth, oversaw the school, while the foundation programme was led by Ivor Fox (1918–1983). Teaching staff included Sir Hugh Casson, Theodore Ramos, Peter Blake, Ken Howard, and Barry Fantoni, combining academic authority with emerging contemporary practices.⁶
This was not an environment hostile to creativity, but one that insisted legitimacy be earned through foundational skill rather than immediate production. Drawing functioned as a gatekeeping mechanism, regulating access to making.
Such gatekeeping did not merely train students; it protected the institution. By deferring making, narrowing progression, and enforcing sequential advancement, Harrow reduced reputational risk while externalising the cost of delay, boredom, or exit onto students themselves.
Westwood selected dress design as her specialist craft, taught by Maggie Shepherd, who also led the NDD in Dress Design. Shepherd had begun teaching at Harrow in 1949 while designing for wholesale manufacturers and private clients.⁷ By the late 1950s, her coats and suits were sold in the budget section of Woollands in Knightsbridge, positioning her as a model of commercially viable design practice.⁸ Westwood later recalled Shepherd as “quite famous”, and her trajectory may have appeared attainable within the constraints of the system.⁹
Frustration with curriculum and the problem of making
Despite her commitment to dressmaking, Westwood became frustrated by Harrow’s insistence on preparatory drawing. She recalled watching diploma students produce finished garments while she remained confined to observational exercises:
“…I saw the girls who had been exclusively with Miss Shepherd for two or three years and were doing their diploma and they made these dresses… I was just dying to make dresses.”⁹
Life drawing and still life dominated the curriculum, prioritising accuracy over application. Westwood later reflected:
“I had made my own clothes before… but you weren’t allowed to do it like that. You had to sit there and make drawings… I just got bored; I couldn’t stand not making anything.”⁹
Westwood transferred to the silversmithing course taught by Robert Edgar Stone.¹⁰ However, by July 1958, after a single term, she decided to leave Harrow entirely.
Leaving Harrow: failure as constraint
Westwood’s departure is often narrated as frustration or proto-rebellion. Her own accounts indicate something more structurally limited. In 2014, she explained:
“I was set on the idea that the only way to make a living in the arts was to sell paintings. I was just too working-class to see beyond that one stereotype”.¹¹
That summer, she saw an advertisement on the Underground for a Pitman’s shorthand course and resolved to earn the money to enrol, taking factory work at Kodak in Harrow.¹¹ She later trained as a teacher at St Gabriel’s Teacher Training College in Camberwell and secured a post at a primary school in Harlesden.¹²
Her exit from art school was not a strategic rejection of the system. It was an accommodation to its limits. Failure here did not generate cultural capital; it narrowed options and redirected labour.
For Westwood, failure was not an aesthetic position but an economic interruption. As a working-class woman, her exposure to risk was intensified by expectations around appropriate labour, stability, and respectability. What appeared institutionally as neutral attrition registered personally as constraint.
Subculture as alternative infrastructure
Outside art school, other cultural systems were already operating. Westwood’s involvement in subcultural networks intensified after meeting Derek Westwood in 1961. By the mid-1960s, the Railway Hotel in Harrow had become a hub for the local mod scene, hosting art students, musicians, and sharply dressed youths. The venue hosted The Who during a twelve-week residency in 1964, including Pete Townshend’s now-mythologised guitar smashing incident.¹³
Outside formal education, Westwood encountered a different system of validation, where style, performance, and participation carried immediate cultural value. This was not a rejection of structure, but an entry into an alternative one, governed by visibility, taste, and subcultural capital rather than institutional progression.
Subculture functioned here as a parallel infrastructure: informal, unstable, but capable of converting immediacy into meaning without requiring credentialed progression.
Malcolm McLaren and flamboyant failure
McLaren’s significance here lies not in his personality, but in what he demonstrates about the system. Malcolm McLaren enrolled at Harrow School of Art in autumn 1963. Fellow student Fred Vermorel later described Harrow as “the centre for miles around for bohemian frenzy”.¹⁴ McLaren encountered an environment in which provocation could be tolerated, noticed, and sometimes rewarded rather than curtailed.
His first teacher, Theodore Ramos, remembered him as “far more angry and intense than most of the students”.¹⁵ McLaren repeatedly recalled a formative lecture in which a tutor declared that all students would fail, urging them not merely to fail, but to become “flamboyant failures”, as this was “better than any kind of benign success”.¹⁶
Failure became a resource because he could afford to treat exit as rehearsal. He moved between institutions, sometimes enrolling under false names to access grants.¹⁷ The key point is not the anecdote but the buffer. His middle-class background reduced the consequences of institutional rupture, allowing failure to function as strategy rather than constraint.
The contrast between Westwood and McLaren is structural. Westwood’s failure required immediate economic recalibration. McLaren’s failure generated narrative, posture, and eventually authority. The same institution produced radically different outcomes because risk was not evenly distributed.
Their meeting in 1965 at the Railway Hotel brought these trajectories together. Harrow constrained one and enabled the other, yet its contradictions produced the conditions under which their collaboration later emerged. Failure did not disappear; it sorted.
Revisiting their experiences at Harrow School of Art complicates the familiar romance of the art-school dropout. Failure was not a shared creative condition; it was an uneven exposure to risk shaped by class, gender, and economic security. Westwood’s departure was structured by the practical limits of working-class mobility and the need for paid work. McLaren could perform failure as provocation because the downside was buffered. For Westwood, failure carried a cost.
The difference was not talent. It was who could afford to fail.
Footnotes
[1] Alexander Fury et al., Vivienne Westwood Catwalk: The Complete Collections, 1st edition (Thames and Hudson Ltd, 2021), 16.
[2] Marisa Meltzer, ‘Vivienne Westwood, 81, Dies; Brought Provocative Punk Style to High Fashion’, Fashion, The New York Times, 29 December 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/29/fashion/vivienne-westwood-dead.html.
[3] Vivienne Westwood and Ian Kelly, Vivienne Westwood (London: Picador, 2014), 70, http://archive.org/details/viviennewestwood0000west.
[4] Westwood and Kelly, Vivienne Westwood, 76.
[5] ‘Harrow School of Art Prospectus 1957-58’, Harrow College of Higher Education, 1957, https://access.westminster.arkivum.net/har-5-4-15.
[6] Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren: The Biography (Constable, 2020), 47.
[7] Westwood and Kelly, Vivienne Westwood, 76.
[8] Serena Sinclair, ‘The Smaller Woman Is in Luck, a Fellow Sufferer Is Bearing Her in Mind’, Daily Telegraph and Morning Post, 28 August 1961.
[9] Westwood and Kelly, Vivienne Westwood, 76.
[10] Elizabeth Lomas, Guide to the Archive of Art and Design, Victoria & Albert Museum (Taylor & Francis, 2001), 235.
[11] Westwood and Kelly, Vivienne Westwood, 79.
[12] Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming (Faber & Faber, 2011), 20.
[13] Scott Schinder and Andy Schwartz, Icons of Rock: An Encyclopedia of the Legends Who Changed Music Forever (ABC-CLIO, 2007), 253.
[14] Fred Vermorel and Judy Vermorel, Sex Pistols: The Inside Story (Omnibus Press, 2011), 214.
[15] Savage, England’s Dreaming, 42.
[16] Ian Macleay, Malcolm McLaren - The Biography: The Sex Pistols, the Anarchy, the Art, the Genius - the Whole Amazing Legacy (Kings Road Publishing, 2010), 30.
[17] ‘Malcolm McLaren: Punk? It Made My Day’, The Telegraph, 30 September 2007, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3668263/Malcolm-McLaren-Punk-it-made-my-day.html.
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