Genuine subversion is a subtle business and history has often proved that radical revolutions are made with small acts and gestures. That's exactly what artist, stylist and designer Judy Blame did in his career and that's why his death at 58, announced yesterday, cast a dark shadow on the final day of London Fashion Week.
Born Chris Barnes in Leatherhead in 1960, Blame ran away from home at 17. Educated at the school of punk rock, he spent a couple of his formative years in Manchester where he became a friend of Peter Saville and of radical artist Linder Sterling.
Blame then moved to London where he went through an act of self-reinvention, accidentally helped by designer Anthony Price, who called him Judy while he worked the cloakroom of gay club Heaven in the early 80s.
Judy Blame first started producing jewellery as a form of personal adornment within the London club scene. He had a totally DIY approach to things and often used safety pins and buttons creating with them conglomerates in which he added keys and other assorted objects he found while mudlarking on the banks of the Thames.
His style around this time was perfectly summarised by the "Father Thames" shoot by Robyn Beeche, portraying a young man in an assemblage of clothes and accessories made with simple hopsack linen and a necktie covered with buttons and random objects.
While the main point of these adornments featuring safety pins (a symbol for him since 1974 when he threaded six plastic beads in a rainbow gradient through a safety pin), buttons, badges, pearls, corroded bottle tops, bottle openers, rusty keys and cutlery, plastic bags and commercial elements such as toy soldiers was standing out from the crowd, once reassembled these mass produced elements turned from the debris of a society based on waste and suffering from industrial and economic decline into richly textured layered tokens shaping an almost tribal identity and a new and cool youth culture.
Around this period of time, Blame met and influenced creative minds such as Boy George, Derek Jarman, Anthony Price, John Maybury and Leigh Bowery.
In his autobiography, Straight, Boy George wrote that Blame would arrive with a bag of safety pins and a cork and would create "a fashion revolution". Indeed the pieces for performers à la Boy George in which Blame turned the ordinary into the extraordinary inspired fans who imitated them, starting new trends.
In 1984 Judy Blame showcased some of his pieces of jewellery (fashionably donned by models wearing Marks and Spencers underwear...) during a fashion show at the ICA. Spotted by Martin Fry from ABC, he ended up inspiring the track "Judy's Jewels" on the b-side of ABC's single "Vanity Kills" (1985).
In 1985 Blame helped John Moore to establish The House of Beauty and Culture in Dalston, a craft collective of like-minded artists and designers, located on Stamford Road that included Fiona Skinner, Dave Baby, Fiona Bowen, John Flett, Peter Foster, Alan Macdonald & Fritz Solomon (furniture making duo Fric & Frack), Richard Torry and Christopher Nemeth.
The collective experience led Blame later on in his life to become a consultant and collaborate with various labels and designers including John Galliano, Rifat Ozbek, Rei Kawakubo at Comme des Garçons (remember the Homme Plus S/S 2005 collection?), Gareth Pugh, Marc Jacobs, Kim Jones at Louis Vuitton (for the accessories in the A/W 2015 menswear collection) and more recently Jeremy Scott at Moschino.
Before moving into the realm of designer fashion and luxury houses, Blame worked as a stylist in the music business: meeting the late stylist Ray Petri (behind the Buffalo fashion collective) led to key collaborations with Neneh Cherry (he styled her iconically dynamic and sporty look for her performance of "Buffalo Stance" on Top of the Pops in 1988, when the singer was heavily pregnant).
Blame also produced fashion editorials with photographers Mark Lebon, Mark Mattock, Jean Baptiste Mondino and Juergen Teller for publications such as i-D, and The Face, acting as art director, image maker and consultant for Björk and Massive Attack among the others.
Blame was celebrated last year with a first major show at London's ICA - "Judy Blame: Never Again", curated by Matt Williams.
In the exhibition Blame's make-do-and-mend spirit prevailed together with his neo-Dada collages, fashion editorials and sketchbooks, and pieces about his collaborations with other artists and creative minds including Charles Atlas (check out the 1987 film "Hail the New Puritan"), Jake and Dinos Chapman, Derek Jarman, Jim Lambie, Mark Lebon, Linder, John Maybury, Jamie Reid, Peter Saville, Juergen Teller, Nicola Tyson (see the 1983 film "Judy Blame on Southwark Bridge") and Tim Noble & Sue Webster.
At times the pieces and images included in the event (see the old heroin foils transformed into art) weren't just provocative or crazily eccentric (bits and pieces of his shopping lists were transformed into badges), but hid a darkness that pointed at the intermittent periods of Blame's drug and alcohol addiction.
Judy Blame represents everything that London is currently missing (despite what the British Fashion Council wants you to believe...): even in the birthplace of punk most people have conformed to fast fashion, super quick trends, streetwear fads or (for those who can afford it) luxury pieces.
Click on the Instagram account of any prominent influencer and you will sport adverts, references, names of labels, borrowed and leant clothes maybe worn with personality, but surely not with any personal effort (a prolific user of Instagram on which he posted many pictures from his archives, Blame actually disliked the fact that on Instagram everybody seems to be an "art director" or a "stylist"...).
Flick through the thousands of streetstyle photos taken during fashion weeks and spot one person who is wearing something truly original you can't buy in a shop/online, something handmade with a childish glee, something that is not tagged and attributed to this or that designer.
In a way, while fashion has recently been ripping off the '80s, it hasn't certainly been celebrating the DIY aesthetic of people like Judy Blame who were major players in that decade.
Blame proved that you could be low on resources, but high on resourcefulness and that, yes, it can be frustrating not having a lot of money, but that doesn't mean your imagination can't come up with something truly extraordinary.
He saw beauty where others saw trash and inspired many out there to go down the same route, painstakingly covering berets in buttons, playing with safety pins, experimenting with commercial toys and proudly wearing the results as works of art. After all, diamonds may be a girls' best friends, but safety pins are sharper and toilet chains can be even cooler - the trick is indeed in how you assemble a piece and in how you wear it and not in how much you paid for it.
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