Old Romantics
In the late Nineties early Noughties it was The Frames in Belfast, The Pod in Dublin and The End in London. The definite article was a clue you were definitely going to have a good time. In the beginning, before these epochal nightlife venues tripped the light fantastic, there was Blitz Club. Or at least in the early Eighties. David Bowie, Siobhán Fahey, Boy George, Gary Kemp, Zandra Rhodes, Peter York … they all cut loose on its dancefloor in Covent Garden. Spandau Ballet was the house band. The latest show at the Design Museum London celebrates this tiny short lived yet influential Club (just 18 months of fun filled nights) founded by Steve Strange and Rusty Egan.
Clothing, textiles, artwork, records, music videos, ephemera and best of all an immersive nightclub complete with clubbers and discarded bottles of Blue Nun make for an escapist visitor experience. Produced inhouse, Senior Curator Danielle Thom worked with many of the clubbers who loaned their belongings. “Almost all of the material in this exhibition has come straight from the original sources,” she confirms. “Take the dresses – they are not generic. They are things that were actually worn to the Club. That immediacy adds a valuable layer to the exhibition.”
Visitors can dial a rotary telephone to listen to interviews by Blitz Kids (the name given to frequenters of the Club by the media). Danielle says, “We are the Design Museum so are interested in design in all its facets – all its creative outlets. We wanted to capture that moment when visual design, fashion design, culture and the media start to shift at the opening of the decade.” She notes that cultural influences on Blitz ranged from architectural futurism to the Weimar Republic.
“The exhibition’s emphasis on fashion isn’t on the designer output that would emerge from the Club but on how people were actually styling themselves,” Danielle confirms. “Their clothes were gathered from jumble sales and theatrical costumiers and also pieces their friends would run up for them on sewing machines. It was necessarily very rough and ready because they had little in the way of money. But what they did have was ingenuity and creativity.”
ID and The Face magazines were birthed from this scene. Many of the editors, photographers and writers were Blitz Kids who featured clubbing contemporaries on their pages. Danielle highlights this symbiotic relationship of coverage creators and content. She says, “There was a shift in emphasis from fashion which is trend led and top down to style which is personal and idiosyncratic.” This individualistic marrying of stylistic and aesthetic awareness divorced from the mainstream with music would become the engaging singular legacy of Blitz Club.
