Vivienne Westwood protests against Guantánamo at London Fashion Week

Showing at London Fashion Week yesterday evening for the first time in nine years, the ever-provocative Vivienne Westwood sent her lead model down the catwalk wearing Agent Provocateur’s Guantánamo orange “Fair Trial My Arse” knickers, conceived in conjunction with the legal charity Reprieve, which represents dozens of detainees held in Guantánamo without charge or trial. The underwear was first publicized yesterday in a column in the New Statesman by Reprieve’s director Clive Stafford Smith, and I reported on it here.

“I don’t know if I will actually wear them,” Westwood said backstage, as she showed reporters her necklace, which read, “I’m not a terrorist, please don’t arrest me.” Her son Joseph Corre, one of Agent Provocateur’s founders, added, “It’s about people standing up and deciding what side of the fence they’re on. Hopefully they’ll take a bit of notice. If not, they’ll get a great pair of knickers.”

Photos above © Reuters/Alessia Pierdomenico. Top photo © AP/Kirsty Wigglesworth.

Earlier in the day, Clive Stafford Smith delivered a pair of the knickers to Prime Minister Gordon Brown at 10 Downing Street.

Reprieve’s press release, “Reprieve and Agent Provocateur Join Forces in the Case of the Contraband Underpants” is here (PDF). For more on the farcical episode in Guantánamo that led to the creation of the knickers, see here.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

('�)

Share