Kronthaler is 25 years her junior and she has often spoken of how he goes off on holiday without her ("I hate to travel"). It is perhaps mean to even suggest it, but does she ever worry he will leave her? "No, I don't. But it's difficult to say that and one doesn't want to sound complacent. I know he's committed to me. We support each other, intellectually and in all kinds of ways." 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." Born in Tintwistle, Derbyshire on 8 April, 1941, the doyenne of British fashion, Dame Vivienne Westwood (Vivienne Isabel Swire) forayed into the world of design in the early 1970s, after working as a primary school teacher and making her own jewellery that she would sell at local stalls. A voracious reader and an enthusiastic creator, she stitched together her bridal dress for her first marriage to Derek Westwood, before meeting Malcolm McLaren (musician, impresario, and singer-songwriter who also promoted and managed the band, ‘Sex Pistols’ and ‘New York Dolls’). Other characters from Wonderland are just as famous as Alice. The Mad Hatter, the Queen of Hearts, and the Cheshire Cat appear through modern lenses. For example, in true 1960s aesthetic, a psychedelic poster designed by Joseph McHugh portrays a red-eyed Cheshire Cat. The exhibit will also include images from modern dramatic renditions of the tale. The costume designs of the 2010 Tim Burton film and Christopher Wheeldon's ballet (performed in 2011 by London's Royal Ballet) demonstrate the enduring relevance of Carroll's characters. Original Walt Disney concept art created for the animated 1951 film will also be on view. 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.

She was commissioned to design Vintage’s special anniversary edition of the book, and from the ground up her approach was based on a principle of reappropriation. She insisted that the original book’s illustrations by John Tenniel were retained, even incorporating one of those images into the striking harlequin pattern of the cover, and the endpapers are an explosion of colour, narrative and texture. That ethos has been retained in the striking installation that took over Westwood’s flagship Conduit Street emporium. Punk is characterized by a consistent rejection of the mainstream. And while punk is often associated with a distinct musical style, fashion designers like Vivienne Westwood crossed mediums and helped shape a uniquely punk fashion movement by pushing against traditionally feminine aesthetics with dark colors and oversized pieces. This 2016 version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is inspired by the original text’s Mad Tea Party chapter, which features the March Hare and the Mad Hatter. In this edition, aspects of both characters have been modernized for the child reader. In the original, the Mad Hatter misuses words and turns the “normal” into the extraordinary. He is fantastical, and his tea party displays his personal eccentricities and Wonderland’s magic. The March Hare in Carroll’s text is both bizarre and exciting. He flirts with the line between the human and the animal: even though he is a rabbit, he speaks, wears a shirt, tells time, and sits upright. He thus eludes easy categorization. It seems fitting, then, that Westwood’s view of Wonderland’s “adult logic” is that it is entirely illogical. The main enemy, she says, is non-stop distraction, by which she means television, the cinema, the internet, adverts, the press and fashion magazines. "If people are not thinking then we really don't have any future," she says. "We live in this terrible, terrible danger because everyone is not thinking." We remedy this, as far as I can tell, from reading lots of books and appreciating art and culture. "My manifesto is saying, essentially, every time you learn something, you see something you understand, you are helping to change the world and you are a freedom fighter. Even if it just means looking a word up in the dictionary you didn't know before."

One of the messages of her last collection was "don't buy clothes" and she rails against consumerism, strange for a fashion designer who produces several collections a year, for an industry that is nothing if not about consumers. "You might think that's really disingenuous of me, but I'm serious," she says. "I'm not here to defend [being a fashion designer], it's something I do. 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. Despite the original stories' reliance on wordplay, puns, and nonsense, Alice has become such an icon that she is often used as a touchstone even within primarily visual media. When Christopher Wheeldon first suggested a ballet version, his designer Bob Crowley reportedly thought he was "completely insane" to make a wordless Wonderland. But the Royal Ballet's 2011 show was a huge hit – not least because of Crowley's designs, which combined familiar Alice shorthands with classical tutus and cutting-edge stagecraft, from op-art projections to a multi-part Cheshire cat puppet. The Queen of Hearts stepped out of an intimidatingly huge crinoline-cum-throne-cum-tank, to dance a parody of a sequence from the ballet Sleeping Beauty: both very Lewis Carroll, and very ballet. Another speech follows - and I'm not sure how we got on to this - about how she doesn't think science is the answer to everything because it doesn't take account of human nature and what makes us happy. She says: "Sorry if I take rather a long time to explain things," then: "Hang on a minute," when I interrupt. She steamrollers over me, talking slightly faster and louder, sometimes putting her head in her hands, as if nothing will stop her getting her point out. She has a lot to say. On the destruction of the planet: "We have to save the rainforest or else we've got no chance. Can you imagine the war lords, and the rape and pillage, and the mass migrations and the hunger? The human race has looked never before on the apocalypse and I do believe that is what we're facing."

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”.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." 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. Scieszka’s retelling substantially alters and abridges the film and the original books. Both Carroll’s and Disney’s versions allude to Isaac Watts’ poem "Against Idleness and Mischief." In each version, however, the poem is changed from “how doth the little busy bee” to “how doth the little crocodile,” replacing the original text with incorrect verses. This allusion was removed from Scieszka’s version, a clear example of the changing times, since children no longer memorize Watts’ poems during their early education as they once did.