Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (150th Anniversary Edition with Dame Vivienne Westwood)

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The exhibition finale allows visitors to step “through the looking glass” with an immersive digital art installation inspired by the text and imagery within the Alice stories. Maybe it offends her feminist principles, I suggest. "Oh no, I'm anti-feminist," she says. "They don't see the wood for the trees and everything has to be viewed from this feminist point of view. I know women have suffered and I think it's great that people stand up for women's rights but the problem with feminists is that they somehow consider women to be superior beings. And in the end, they just want to be men anyway. They want to do men's work." I try to ask her what she means by "men's work" but she steamrollers on. "[Feminists] certainly underestimate the power women [have had] in influencing their children, or men."

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. 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." Wonderland is always a powerful metaphor or idea to work with," says Bailey. And that's what the V&A show is interested in: how one man's nonsensical story, made up to entertain a little girl, has allowed so many generations of readers and so many restlessly reinventing artists to go down the rabbit hole of their own imagination. Great art should make you think, ‘My god, how did anybody do that?’ It’s incredible what human beings can do. Absorb the illusion of reality.”—Vivienne Westwood, 1941-2022 By beginning the penultimate paragraph with the declaration that this is “the world we think we know”, rather than the world we know, Westwood implies that the control Carroll holds over his characters is the same as the control the establishment holds over us. We, like the characters of Wonderland, have been “conditioned” to see things in a way that is absurd.

Carroll's novel remains culturally relevant over a century after it first became popular.

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. Carroll published several other nonsense works, including The Hunting of the Snark (1876), Sylvie and Bruno (1889), and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893). He also wrote a number of pamphlets poking fun at university affairs, which appeared under a fake name or without any name at all, and he composed several works on mathematics under his true name. In 1881 Carroll gave up his lecturing to devote all of his time to writing. 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. V&A ‘Alice: Curiouser And Curiouser’ exhibition features Vivienne Westwood, Iris van Herpen and Viktor and Rolf Lewis Carroll was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson on January 27, 1832, the eldest son and third of eleven children born to Frances Jane Lutwidge and the Reverend Charles Dodgson. Carroll had a happy childhood. His mother was patient and gentle, and his father, despite his religious duties, tutored all his children and raised them to be good people. Carroll frequently made up games and wrote stories and poems, some of which were similar to his later published works, for his seven sisters and three brothers.

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. Carroll loved to entertain children, and it was Alice, the young daughter of Henry George Liddell, Dean of Christ Church, who can be credited with his pinnacle inspiration. Alice Liddell remembers spending many hours with Carroll, sitting on his couch while he told fantastic tales of dream worlds. During an afternoon picnic with Alice and her two sisters, Carroll told the first iteration of what would later become Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. When Alice arrived home, she exclaimed that he must write the story down for her.

An illustration of the Mad Hatter by John Tenniel

Unlike most of the children's books of the day, Alice and through the Looking Glass did not attempt to convey obvious moral lessons. Nor did they contain what critics have tried to insist are there—hidden meanings relating to religion or politics. They are delightful adventure stories in which a normal, healthy, clearheaded little girl reacts to the "reality" of the adult world. Their appeal to adults as well as to children lies in Alice's intelligent response to ridiculous language and action. On politics: "I'm [Brown's] worst enemy. I hate that man. I hate his cowardice, the fact that he just acquiesced in everything the horrible, disgusting Blair wanted to do. Cameron doesn't seem to have much to say, and the Liberal Democrats are following the government ideas. They are all old-fashioned thinkers."

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. The book has such a phenomenal number of ideas and concepts in it, but it creates space for the creativity too," says Bailey. "It really is this Bible for the imagination."For books that are all about surprising transformations, it should perhaps be no real surprise that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are among the most frequently adapted and reinterpreted stories ever written. Alice falls down a rabbit hole, and steps through a mirror, into worlds where anything can happen, where even the sense of self is transformed: where a drink can make you shrink and a mushroom can make you grow; where babies turn into pigs and a little girl can become queen; where flowers and animals and playing cards all speak but logic and learning slip out of grasp. 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.

The exhibition aims to immerse visitors into the world of Alice around every turn, including a “mind-bending” game of croquet in virtual reality. Visitors emerge into the Queen of Hearts’ croquet ground to pit their wits in ‘A Curious Game of Croquet’. 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." He was educated at Richmond School in Yorkshire, Rugby School and Christ Church, Oxford. Although his years at Rugby School (1846–49) were unhappy, he was recognized as a good student, and in 1850 he was admitted to further study at Christ Church, Oxford. 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’). Westwood herself hosted an event during the installation, reading from the novel to more than twenty children from the charities The Kid’s Company and Rays of Sunshine. It was an appropriately heartfelt conclusion to an event that allowed one modern icon of British culture to pay tribute to another even more venerable one, and to give vibrant life to their shared lineage of playful, dangerous, intelligent anarchy.Alice interpretations abound in this era. Adrian Piper and Joseph McHugh made Alice-inspired works in the characteristic swirling hot pinks and oranges of psychedelic art. Musicians got in on the act, from Jefferson Airplane's delicious, droning 1967 hit White Rabbit though to The Beatles' I am the Walrus, with John Lennon inspired by the poem The Walrus and the Carpenter from Through the Looking-Glass. Ralph Steadman's illustrations duly depict Lennon himself as the caterpillar, while German artist Sigmar Polke collaged Tenniel's original caterpillar into his trippy, polka-dotted works. There's more dottiness in Yayoi Kusama's 1968 "happening", where naked, spot-painted performers cavorted around the Alice statue in Central Park. "Alice was the grandmother of hippies. When she was low, Alice was the first to take pills to make her high," Kusama stated, spelling it out somewhat. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland may technically be a children’s book, but Westwood fixes it with a universal theme. She drives us away from complacency: “The games [Carrol] plays with Alice empower her to think”. Even if the comparison between Wonderland and the establishment feels too radical, or too crass, for some, Westwood’s anarchy also “empowers” us to think.