Vivienne Westwood, right, with activist Tina Louise Rothery at the anti-fracking protest on Friday, Sept. 11. (Photo: Talk Fracking/YouTube)
While many of the world’s most famous designers were turning heads on the runways of New York Fashion Week, one of the industry’s biggest names was making a more important statement on the streets of England. Vivienne Westhood drove a military tank to U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron’s home in Chadlington, Oxfordshire, on Friday to deliver a bold message.
“We’re in incredible danger,” she told a camera crew from Talk Fracking, the environmental group she helps fund and with which she organized the protest. “I don’t think any of these politicians have got any clue of the disruption of the disaster that fracking could cause. The things they plan to do are crimes against humanity,” said Westwood, who is best known for creating The Sex Pistols’ original Union Jack T-shirt designs. Evidence of her influential punk aesthetic can be seen on the website for Climate Revolution, a movement she founded in 2012 to help stop climate change.
Westwood’s demonstration comes less than a month after the U.K. government announced it would license 27 blocks of land, each about six square miles, for oil and gas companies to search for petroleum. The move is part of the country’s long-term plan to grow its economy, boost its shale gas industry—which could see investments of up to £33 billion—and support an estimated 64,000 jobs, according to the U.K.’s Oil & Gas Authority, which is currently reviewing an additional 132 sites for licensing.
Such licenses could lead to an increase in fracking, the controversial practice of drilling deep underground to inject a high-pressure fluid mixture intended to fracture the rock and release natural gas. Activists like Westwood say fracking is not only environmentally irresponsible because of its potential to cause earthquakes and contaminate groundwater, but that it will exacerbate climate change while governments should be investing in a transition to clean energy.
The immediate pollution caused by hydraulic fracturing was the primary focus of the Friday protest, in which the activist group known as The Nanas—the British term for grandmother—dressed like 1950s maids wearing aprons and bonnets while waving dusters, presumably to clean up carcinogenic chemicals. Donning gas masks while riding on Westwood’s white tank, the women resembled the apocalyptic elderly female warriors of Mad Max: Fury Road.
Cameron was out of town in Leeds when the spectacle unfolded on his doorstep, but the weekend protest was just the beginning of a series of demonstrations Westwood and The Nanas are planning as part of a national anti-fracking tour. According to Talk Fracking, Westwood and her gang of gas-masked activists will raise hell in the coming months at nearly all the blocks that have been newly licensed for exploration.