Paris Fashion Week: Vivienne Westwood spring/summer 2014 Dame Westwood's new collection seemed gloriously crazed, but it made perfect sense to her fans on the front row - and the hundreds more who waited in the street outside. She is the fashion designer who says we should stop buying clothes and declares herself sick of "the conveyor belt of profit." There is capitalist method, however, to Dame Vivienne Westwood's counter-intuitive anti-consumerism: her label this year turned a £5 million profit on sales of £30 million. READ: Vivienne Westwood - 'Everyone buys too many clothes' In Paris Dame Vivienne presented a collection that seemed gloriously crazed, but which made perfect sense to her fans on the front row - and the hundreds more who waited in the street outside. Dressed in loosely medieval-themed clothes the models' faces were splattered with mud as if splashed by a passing cart - and their hair arranged into nestlike entanglements as if they'd had to leap into a bush to get out of its way. The looks veered from a tartan shift worn over a lime green lace petticoat to a full-length, ripped-hemmed Les Miserables strumpet frock made of silk that was coated with a film of recycled bottles and accessorised with a shepherd's crook. Knitwear, ribbed and form fitting, was earthily toned and dappled with the recycled lenses of mirrored sunglasses. A wide skirt in horizontal stripes of pink, silver and apricot was worn below over a slouchy white blouse and a laurel wreath. The show was held in a Haussman-era bank headquarters that had been gutted and turned into modern offices: the models arrived in front of the photographers up an escalator, did a turn of the atrium on their six-inch heels, and then took the escalator back down again. Backstage, Dame Vivienne said that she and her husband Andreas Kronthaler - who co-designs the collection with her - had slathered different references on top of their Pilgrim's Progress theme. Long silk skirts came in a colourful print painted by Westwood after a picture she'd spotted in the National Geographic. One was worn under a T-shirt emblazoned with a kitsch kitten drawing lifted from an old book Kronthaler had picked up in a Paris coffee shop. "If people only bought beautiful things," mused Dame Vivienne: "then perhaps we wouldn't have the environmental problems we have." Beneath the leg-warmers stamped with global warming warnings and all of Westwood's other riotous styling tics this was a collection that was in its way very flattering. As Kronthaler said: "One of the things I have learned from Vivienne never to squash anything - or if you are going to squash something, squash it for a reason and send it in a certain direction." Vivenne Westwood at the finale of her show with husband Andreas Kronthaler. Photo: Isidore Montag