Punk Queen Vivienne Westwood Holds Mad Max-Style Anti-Fracking Protest

Fashion designer/punk icon/lifelong activist Dame Vivienne Westwood half-asses nothing, so when she staged her brilliant protest against fracking in London yesterday, it was replete with post-apocalyptic zombie models on stilts, presumably examples of what we will become in a fracking world. She also carried a “bloody” doll which she called a “fracked baby of the future.”

Westwood has been outspoken against fracking for some time now, and is concerned by the government’s interest in exploratory drilling. Last summer, she made an informational film for for the BBC about the dangers of the drilling method, and debated two MPs about the process.

With the UK’s general election coming up May 7, Westwood’s protest on Monday was advantageously timed. In cooperation with the Talk Fracking organization—headed up by her son, Joe Corre—Westwood stood in front of a spoof pro-fracking billboard showing a scorched earth and the tagline “Let’s Stay on the Road to a Fracked Future,” flanked by the aforementioned Mad Max spider zombies. “I’m trying to get across to people, the danger we’re in,” she said, according to Reuters. “We have to stop the destruction.” (For a more metaphorical approach to the issue, you can indulge in Dame Westwood’s “fracking” swimsuit, which seems to say fracking is like a fire in the crotch of the earth; not an inaccurate description, really.)

Last year, upon the launch of Talk Fracking, Westwood told the Independent, ““If we carry on like this, we’re looking at the mass extinction of the human race within a short time.” The organization is backed by around 150 academics, companies, and celebrities ranging from Bianca Jagger to Yoko Ono to Stella McCartney to Jeanette Winterson to Professor Sir Harold Kroto, the Nobel Laureate in chemistry.

“[The government] knows they’re not going to get anything to help us with our energy needs, that’s why they’re doing fracking,” Westwood told the Independent. “They’ve got to be seen to be doing something, they have to be seen to be drilling. But they know it won’t work.”