Vivienne Westwood predicts humanity is heading for the gas chamber.

Her extreme viewpoints on human rights, the financial crisis and the environment ended up being the focus of a Guardian profile from this weekend. She’s even reluctant to encourage people to buy her clothes.

On the inevitability of human extinction:

I will say something that sounds terrible. We’re all going into the gas chamber, and what I’m saying is that it’s not a bathroom. We’re going to be killed. The human race faces mass extinction.

On the contradiction between selling expensive clothes while fighting to save the planet from the harm that consumerism is supposedly doing to it:

‘My message is: choose well and buy less,’ she said then – as if to suggest you should buy one Westwood dress rather than filling Primark trolleys regularly.

‘I don’t feel comfortable defending my clothes. For 15 years I hated fashion.’ Why? ‘It’s not very intellectual, and I wanted to read, not make fashion. It was something I was good at; it wasn’t all of me.’