Expanding interview 1: Elena Caoduro in conversation with Lorna Tucker, director of Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist (2018)

Summary

Elena Caoduro [EC]: What is your relationship with fashion and, more generally, the fashion world?

Lorna Tucker [LT]: I never was into fashion as a kid. It was more when I was 19, after I had my first daughter. Actually, I got scouted to model when I was 17, but then I wasn't really interested. That was the first time I even knew anything about fashion because, where I came from, people didn't really read Vogue. It was more kind of Adidas tracksuits and baseball caps and a bit of Reebok classics. Kids looked up to glamour models. It was the era when girls wanted to grow up to be footballers’ wives, which is actually really depressing when you look back at it. I was very much into just wearing what everyone else wore, as most teenage girls do to fit in. It was interesting. Because once I was scouted to model and I was on shoots and I used to see how the models used to put their outfits together, I think that's when I really started to get and have an interest in fashion. But also, I started to understand about quality and the difference between buying cheap fabrics that won't last to just buying ethical cotton. The dressing up part of modelling was something that was extremely fun for me, because I couldn't really afford clothes; I didn't have a wardrobe. Like the majority of teenagers, I had a pair of jeans and a couple of tops, a jumper and that was it. It was really fun and I kind of fell in love with it, dressing up and seeing how outfits are put together. It took me till I was as much older to actually understand what fitted me and what suited me.

EC: How do media and fashion relate, in your opinion?

LT: I’m anti media fashion because of the one take-out I had. I wasn't a model for long. That's a big misconception about me. When Westwood came out, the press said I was a supermodel or I’ve gone from modelling into film-making, but I didn’t.