Punk queen Westwood rails against magazines and the 'sea of clones'

Vivienne Westwood is causing trouble again. She rose to fame in the 1970s as an iconoclastic clothes designer who dressed the Sex Pistols and brought the modern punk movement to the masses with her new wave fashion.

And more than three decades on, the high priestess of punk has not lost her rebellious edge.

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Westwood, who this week re-invented herself as a "thinker" above her role as a fashion designer at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival, has launched a manifesto in which she has attempted to re-define the meaning of art and culture.

In Active Resistance to Propaganda, she called on people to eschew trash television and magazines and encouraged them to read and visit galleries and concerts instead. The human race had never appeared as ugly to her as it did today, she said.

"It must be to do with mass marketing that is producing a whole sea of clones across the world," she said. In her lecture, No Art, No Progress, she identified two social evils: "organised lying" and "non-stop distraction", which she described as filling people's minds with rubbish so that no one could think. But by viewing the world through culture and by becoming more cultivated, people would become more human.

Speaking to a rather puzzled and dwindling audience at the festival, she added: "If we ignore that, we will just continue to be this self-destructive animal."

Westwood first launched her manifesto earlier this month in a newspaper article. In it, she wrote: "We have a choice: to become more cultivated, and therefore more human - or by not choosing, to be the destructive and self-destroying animal, the victim of our own cleverness."

She claimed her manifesto penetrated to the root of the human predicament to offer a solution. The beginning of the endeavour, she said, was a "search for art" and that "culture is the antidote to propaganda".

Westwood, 66, began her career when she opened a boutique, in King's Road, Chelsea, Let it Rock, in the 1970s. She became linked to the Sex Pistols through her partner, Malcolm McLaren, the group's manager. She later ran another shop, Sex, with McLaren, also in the King's Road.

Her punk style began to gain notoriety when the Sex Pistols wore her clothes - which typically included bondage gear, safety pins and razor blades - at their first gig. Westwood and McLaren are often credited for revolutionising fashion, and the impact is still felt today.

She worked historical factors into her collection by using 17th- and 18th-century cutting principles and modernising them.

Other influences in her work have included ethnic Peruvian designs and she is known for combining traditional Scottish tartan with punk elements.

A major retrospective of her designs was shown three years ago at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London as well as the National Gallery of Australia. The exhibition was made up of about 145 of her most iconic outfits, ranging from early punk garments to glamorous "historical" evening gowns.

In September 2005, Westwood joined forces with the British civil rights group, Liberty, and launched a limited-edition of designer T-shirts and babywear bearing the slogan: "I am not a terrorist, please don't arrest me."

Westwood's celebrity clients are said to include Gwen Stefani, Jerry Hall, Mick Jagger and Naomi Campbell.