Is it important for her to be in love? "No, it wasn't. One of the greatest periods of my life was when I was without a man, sexually or any real way, for about 10 years. Except that wasn't really true because I was very close to my friend Gary Ness, who is dead. He was a homosexual but I was very attracted to him. I was not looking for a man at all, and if you want to find a man, maybe don't look for one and you might get one." These original characters have been adapted for present day accessibility. Puybaret simplifies the Mad Hatter’s inclination toward wordplay through the conspicuous word “YUM” and the Hatter’s “strange giggles” about the concept of nothingness. The language of the original Tea Party is abstract, complex, and filled with puns, but this version offers the same ideas with brevity and childlike visuals. It seems fitting, then, that Westwood’s view of Wonderland’s “adult logic” is that it is entirely illogical. Does he mind being in her shadow? "No, not at all. He's not in my shadow anyway. He's a very bossy person actually. He prefers to let me do the public things. He has an original point of view, he's extremely interesting. What is good about him is that he likes to go out. He goes to the pub across the road and he just loves to look at people. So when he goes down the club, or is watching TV, I can get on with my reading."

In the book, the King of Hearts tells us: “Begin at the beginning . . . and go on till you come to the end, then stop.” This marks the first V&A exhibition ever to offer a virtual reality experience and has been developed in partnership with HTC Vive Arts and produced by immersive games studio Preloaded. The visuals are based on new artworks created by Icelandic artist Kristjana S. Williams, commissioned for the V&A’s exhibition publication.Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland may technically be a children’s book, but Westwood fixes it with a universal theme. She drives us away from complacency: “The games [Carrol] plays with Alice empower her to think”. Even if the comparison between Wonderland and the establishment feels too radical, or too crass, for some, Westwood’s anarchy also “empowers” us to think.

By beginning the penultimate paragraph with the declaration that this is “the world we think we know”, rather than the world we know, Westwood implies that the control Carroll holds over his characters is the same as the control the establishment holds over us. We, like the characters of Wonderland, have been “conditioned” to see things in a way that is absurd. The choice of language is evocative. “Agent” and “conspiracy” seem incongruous words to use in the context of Alice in Wonderland. What they do, however, is link Alice to Westwood’s broader, typically anarchic, interpretation of the book. Wonderland as symbolic of our present day society, and Alice becomes a rebel who sees through this madness. Westwood thinks of Wonderland as a place of conflict: here, Alice’s logic is in tension with that of the characters within Wonderland.One of the final sobering sentences reads: “Time is running out”. Whether this refers to capitalism, which is “at the end, it can’t continue”, or to the time that falls away as we move further from fixing climate change, remains ambiguous. Yet both instances retain a sense of extreme urgency. I was hoping to see Westwood's third husband, Andreas Kronthaler, but he isn't in the studio. Westwood met him when she was teaching a class in Vienna and he was one of her students and they married in 1992. "It's amazing, it's incredible," she says of their relationship. "I feel so sure about it. He's so supportive and we're just so interested in each other. He's an amazing person." Westwood had 11 exclusively-owned shops in UK; four in London, and one in Bicester Village, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle, Glasgow, Manchester and Nottingham. She also has showrooms in Milan, Paris and Los Angeles.

Alice has long been a touchstone for fashion, too. Vivienne Westwood, Zac Posen, Viktor & Rolf, and John Galliano have all sent looks down the runway inspired by Caroll's characters and Tenniel's drawings, while the transformative, otherworldly possibilities of Wonderland hold appeal for fashion shoots. The exhibition finale allows visitors to step “through the looking glass” with an immersive digital art installation inspired by the text and imagery within the Alice stories. During the digital press preview, Kate Bailey, senior curator of theatre and performance at the V&A, said: “This is the first exhibition to look at the impact and influence of Alice across disciplines, and we will provide visitors with a dynamic theatrical experience, transporting them through space, time and scale into a series of different encounters and dimensions, inspired by the books through Alice’s adventurous journey. The book has such a phenomenal number of ideas and concepts in it, but it creates space for the creativity too," says Bailey. "It really is this Bible for the imagination."Great art should make you think, ‘My god, how did anybody do that?’ It’s incredible what human beings can do. Absorb the illusion of reality.”—Vivienne Westwood, 1941-2022 Maybe it offends her feminist principles, I suggest. "Oh no, I'm anti-feminist," she says. "They don't see the wood for the trees and everything has to be viewed from this feminist point of view. I know women have suffered and I think it's great that people stand up for women's rights but the problem with feminists is that they somehow consider women to be superior beings. And in the end, they just want to be men anyway. They want to do men's work." I try to ask her what she means by "men's work" but she steamrollers on. "[Feminists] certainly underestimate the power women [have had] in influencing their children, or men." When Lewis Carroll dropped Alice into Wonderland,” she writes in her introduction, “she became his agent in a conspiracy to undermine adult notions of logic”.

Dame Vivienne Westwood, DBE, RDI (born Vivienne Isabel Swire) was a British fashion designer largely responsible for bringing modern punk and new wave fashions into the mainstream.

The famous blue dress

As much as Westwood retains a place in fashion history, she ever-wizened as a fashion historian throughout her seven-decade career. Her billowing pirate shirts, 1990s tartan derriere padding, and 1980s mini-crinis were all inspired by 17th-century style, while her Empress Josephine gowns and abundance of corsets originated in 18th-century dress. Westwood’s name is also stitched to some of the most memorable moments in fashion—among them Naomi Campbell crashing down from purple python platforms on the runway for fall 1993, and a near-naked Kate Moss eating ice cream while wearing a miniskirt, hat, and heels for spring 1995.