As Seen in BLITZ: Fashioning ‘80s Style

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Iain R. Webb

Antique Collectors’ Club, Woodbridge, UK, 2013, English

Nonfiction, Fashion Design

ISBN: 9781851497232

From the Publisher. In London at the start of the 1980s, three new style magazines emerged to define an era. It was a time of change: after Punk, before the digital age, and at the dawn of a hedonistic club scene that saw the birth of the New Romantics. On the pages of BLITZ, The Face and i-D, a new breed of young iconoclasts hoped to inspire revolution. As BLITZ magazine's fashion editor from 1982-87, Iain R. Webb was at the center of this world. His images manipulated fashion to explore ideas of transformation, beauty, glamor and sex. The magazine's arresting, subversive fashion pages, and its profiles of disparate designers and creative types, let the imagination run free. Lavishly presented here are over 100 BLITZ fashion stories, with previously-unseen archive content, original images and tear-sheets. A separate section features original BLITZ interviews with the key designers, and there is also a vast amount of completely new material: Iain R. Webb has gathered the memories of those involved into a gripping oral history of an under-documented time.

Characters and contributors include: Leigh Bowery, Amanda Cazalet, Boy George, Princess Julia, Nick Knight, David LaChapelle, Paul Morley and Anna Piaggi. Featured designers include Bodymap, Judy Blame, Dean Bright, Comme Des Garçons, Jasper Conran, John Galliano, Jean Paul Gaultier, Katharine Hamnett, Hermès, Pam Hogg, Marc Jacobs, Stephen Jones, Calvin Klein, Andrew Logan, Issey Miyake, Franco Moschino, Vivienne Westwood, and many more.

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This is Iain Webb’s celebration of the iconic 1980s English style magazine Blitz (1982–87); featuring Boy George, Nick Knight, David LaChapelle, Anna Piaggi, Judy Blame, John Galliano, Katharine Hamnett, Pam Hogg, and Stephen Jones. There was so much creativity during this time. I remember shopping at Kensington Market, and meeting Leigh Bowery and Rachel Auburn. I loved their designs, and those of Body Map. They told me to go to Taboo!

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