Westwood's wunder boy

In the rarefied world of menswear the summer collections in Milan are one of the most crucial moments of the fashion year.

It's when designers show off next year's ranges to the press and buyers, and in a small room above the Vivienne Westwood shop on Milan's main shopping street, Andreas Kronthaler is talking me through the collection.

"What about this?" I ask him, pointing to a man's suit made out of a heavy cotton in purest baby pink. "Isn't something like this slightly hard to wear?"

"Nooo," says Andreas. "Why would you say that? No, it's just a pink jacket - what's so hard about that?"

It's true. Kronthaler himself is wearing a pair of light-green gingham cropped trousers, long burgundy socks and a star-spangled bandanna. A baby pink jacket would top it off nicely.

"And what about this?" I say. "This" is a blue and white round-necked sweater decorated with an anchor motif that I'd spotted in the rack earlier as precisely the sort of reason why I'll never understand fashion.

"What about it?" says Kronthaler.

I'm not sure how to phrase this without being rude. "It looks like something my dad might have got for Christmas circa 1973."

"Does it?"

Kronthaler is Austrian and has a very soft syncopated Germanic singsong accent, so this comes out more like, "Dooze it?"

"It's got a bit of a golf-club feel to it, don't you think?"

"Dooze it? But it's cut in a certain way so it's slightly asymmetric. That means that it's square and the neckhole is not right in the centre. So when it's on, it's a bit wonky."

Or "one key", as it is in Kronthaler-speak. "It gets a certain dynamic on the body. It's like this ordinary summer sweater but with a twist."

Oh, it's all in the twist. The next day I see the sweater going down the runway and he's right, it's not all that golf club when teamed with a diamanté belt and a black leather hangman's mask.

It's impossible not to be put in mind of that other current Austrian fashion icon: Brüno, the latest creation of Sacha Baron Cohen.

In the film he premieres such fashion firsts as the Velcro suit and wears, well, things that could quite easily have been plucked off these racks.

I hesitate before asking Kronthaler about certain similarities, worried that he might be offended - needlessly, as it turns out.

He hasn't seen it yet, he says, "but you know some of the people in the studio, they were saying it's based on me! But I don't know. I met him once, I think. Sacha Baron Cohen. He was good friends with Naomi [Campbell]. And they borrowed some of the clothes, I think. For the film. He may even have been at one of the shows once."

I tell him about the outfit he wore for the Dutch premiere the previous week - shorts, a red thong and a cutaway jacket and bare chest - but it's not until I see the show that I realise how very un-outré this is.

There are men wearing turbans which look like the type of thing Betty Grable might have worn to go bathing; there's a man in a black shiny posing pouch teamed with knee socks, gladiator sandals and a whip.

When I ask Kronthaler about the theme, it's also a bit Brünoesque. On the invitation to the Milan show, it says "Stop Climate Change", Westwood's latest mission.

But then Kronthaler says the theme is "Hollywood in the '30s - you know, Errol Flynn, and Zorro, and The Thief of Baghdad, and that man who live in the woods? What is his name? The man with the feather?"

"Robin Hood?"

"Yes, Robin Hood."

"But Andreas, what has this got to do with climate change?" He thinks for a moment and then says, triumphantly: "You know, we need heroes like Robin Hood to save the world!"

Phew! It's a close-run thing whether he's going to pull off an explanation, any explanation, but in the end I think he does and it's a perfect blend of Westwood ideology with - yes! - a Kronthalerian twist.

And then Vivienne Westwood appears, for the finale, in a scarlet dress. Kronthaler appears briefly, slaps her on the bum and, like the old pro she is, she skips the length of the runway, her tangerine hair pulled back, her face decorated with the funny red lines she wears as make-up these days, looking positively girlish.

They married 17 years ago, when Kronthaler was 25 and Westwood was 50; she's now 67, he's 42, and they work together and live together, and the dynamics of their relationship are a fascinating crossword puzzle that I defy anyone to crack.

She's so extraordinary, Westwood - one of the very few visible older women still active in public life, and almost certainly the only one who has Janice Battersby's accent and habitually wears a pair of silver horns on her head.

I can't quite imagine what Kronthaler will be like before I meet him, although I've seen photos: D.H Lawrence reborn as a 1970s catalogue model.

He's much more handsome in the flesh. Well over 182 centimetres tall, and strapping with it.

He grew up in the Zillertal valley in the Tyrol, which seems about as far away from the London fashion scene as you can get, and although he looks like he should be scaling mountains, he, like Westwood, has a gentle almost consoling manner; listening to him talk about his childhood is a bit like tuning into an episode of Heidi or a scene from The Sound of Music.

"So did you have one of those very pretty Alpine houses?"

"Yes, exactly."

"And a cow with a bell on its collar?"

"Yes! Everything. My dad was a blacksmith and my mother came from a family of dairy farmers and she had a little antiques shop."

Even more thrillingly, he wore lederhosen. "It was very good for playing. I was handed it down from my older brother."

He always wanted to be a fashion designer, he says. "My mother had all these clothes, all these wardrobes full of stuff, and I got all my friends together and put together a kind of fashion show with looks and everything.

"And we made these posters and advertised it all over the village and had a fee to get in. It was a big success and afterwards we had huge things of ice cream. I was always doing things like this."

At 14 he left his family and the village school and went to study at an art secondary school in Graz, learning goldsmithery, and at 18 he enrolled at the Vienna Academy of Arts, where he would meet Vivienne Westwood.

"I didn't really know much about her. I was quite a virgin towards all that. I just remember meeting her the first time and it really struck me. I just loved her. I loved the way she looked. I always like extreme things and she was quite extreme. And then she started to speak, and I really connected with her.

"For the first time, there was somebody who spoke the things that I thought. She had the same kind of outlook. She's not just fashion. It's much more than that. It's a vision. It's the world. It's everything."

When I interviewed her, I lapped up the snippets she dropped about their relationship. Such as that they'd got married in secret and didn't bother telling anyone.

And that, after Westwood had lived in the same tiny council flat for 30 years, Kronthaler finally managed to prise her out of it by buying a house and doing it up.

He tells me that he said to her: "'You know, the house is ready - we can sleep over there.' And she said, 'Yes? Really?' And we just took a taxi over and slept there. She had nothing to bring whatsoever. She's like a monk."

He speaks so affectionately of her, almost gushingly, but he's flustered when she arrives in Milan, goes to kiss her, and then stands embarrassedly to one side while I ask her questions about him.

She says he has an amazing attention to detail. "For example, Andreas always changes his underwear according to what he's wearing. Don't you? That's very important to you. Whereas I don't bother wearing any these days."

He looks like he wants the floor to swallow him up and eventually ushers her away. Later, though, I speak to her properly and she's expansive in her praise of him.

It's their domestic life, though, that I find most gripping. Westwood does the cooking. "She's a lovely cook. But you can't help her. She's so bossy. So bossy. We quarrel after the first minute. Where I cut the onion. Or how I cut it. Or which wooden board I take. Or where I put my knife. She is a control freak."

He, on the other hand, does the housework. "I love it. Whether it's hoovering. Or washing clothes. I love washing. It's something that really relaxes me. It's like yoga."

Is she very appreciative of that? "I don't think she notices. I don't think she's ever hoovered or used the washing machine, ever, in all these years. She just never notices. She can just live with it. She's bohemian. She's in her world."

She didn't need a boyfriend, she says; she'd been on her own for 10 years since she split up with Malcolm McLaren, with whom she had a son, Joe (she had another, Ben, with her previous husband, Derek Westwood), and she certainly didn't need a husband.

So how did it happen? "I don't know. We were just messing around one day. But I never wanted to get married. I thought it was ridiculous. He was much too young. And I liked being on my own. But. Anyway. I've got used to living with him now. And I love living with him."

Is Westwood a mother figure? "Maybe," he says. He doesn't like sleeping by himself and Westwood tells me that he doesn't like to fly alone because "he gets frightened" and: "You mention mothering, which I don't think I do, but sometimes he pesters you like a child. All the time he's: 'Vivienne? Vivienne?'"

They're both so softly spoken and expressive and unfazed by any question I ask them. And Westwood, in particular, who on the last occasion I met her, was inclined to lecture on her own topics, not mine, is relaxed and unguarded. She even, at times, giggles - about Kronthaler's underwear, or his high levels of organisation.

They spend almost every waking hour together, working in the same room, and cycling home together to the same house where she has the back garden and her own gardener and he has the front and his own gardener. They're so separate and yet so together.