Photo by Kate Garner
❚ A LAVISHLY DESIGNED OBITUARY of Stephen Linard written by me appears in today’s Evening Standard online and stands as a well-deserved memoir for one of my best friends…
➢ The life of Stephen Linard – A flamboyant Canvey Island boy who went on to shape the Blitz Kids silhouette in the 1980s
Posted in biography, death, fashion illustrations, journalism, London, New Romantics, Swinging 80s, Youth culture, zeitgeist
Tagged Blitz Kids, fashion, Stephen Linard
Stephen Linard in 2018: A last pint at his local pub before moving away from Canvey Island. (Photo @ Shapersofthe80s)
INCREDIBLE!!!! Update – Shapersofthe80s has received 8,100 hits during the three days since Stephen’s death. Thank you to his fans
❚ HARD TO ACCEPT THAT STEPHEN LINARD has now died from the extensive throat cancer that had caused him so much pain recently. He was one of the craziest of eccentrics who frequently made me laugh out loud. We met at a party at Steve Strange’s flat in 1980 when he was among the sharpest half-dozen Blitz Kids who changed their looks daily and put the Blitz Club on the map. We hit it off immediately and I soon latched onto the star trio of Stephen, Kim Bowen and Lee Sheldrick who went everywhere together.
I photographed his degree show and over the years helped him through various projects in that era when St Martin’s School of Art failed to equip its graduates with any guidance for running their own businesses. Luckily, pop stars from Pet Shop Boys to U2 and even Bowie readily adopted his strong styles and in 1983 the American fashion press included him among the eight most influential London designers [see link below], noted for his strong eye for colour.
From 1983 to ’86 Stephen lived in Tokyo designing for Jun Co, the fashion giant, on a salary which, he liked to boast, exceeded the prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s. From 1989 until recently Stephen was a key player on the design team at Drake’s, the respected men’s haberdasher off Savile Row (pictured below). The main photo (above) marked a last pint at his local pub on Canvey Island where he lived in his late mother’s house until 2020 before joining the Old Romantic Folks who go on retiring to St Leonard’s-on-Sea.
Only six months ago, as if in anticipation of the worst, Stephen staged a striking exhibition of his early illustrations, titled Total Fashion Victim after the club-night he had hosted at Soho’s coolest hang-out, the Wag. I was lucky enough to write the outline catalogue with him.
Former Blitz Kid and St Martin’s fashion graduate Stephen Linard in 2011: a designer with Drake’s, the gentlemen’s haberdasher, seen here at a staff preview for the opening of its first shop just off Savile Row. (Photograph © Shapersofthe80s)
➢ Previously at Shapersofthe80s: 2023, Total Fashion Victim – Linard’s exhibition of his early work
➢ Previously at Shapersofthe80s:
The Blitz Kids WATN? No 28, Stephen Linard
➢ Previously at Shapersofthe80s:
1982, Six British designers take London fashion
to the French
➢ Previously at Shapersofthe80s: Overseas influencers
declare eight hot fashion Brits for 1984
➢ Goodbye, Stephen Linard: It was a privilege to know you – by novelist Maggie Alderson
➢ Linard’s entry at the Encyclopedia of Fashion – by Alan
J. Flux; updated by Daryl F. Mallett
Posted in biography, death, London, New Romantics, Swinging 80s, Tributes
Tagged Alan Flux, Blitz Kids, Drake’s, fashion, Maggie Alderson, Stephen Linard, Total Fashion Victim, Vogue, WWD
At his TFV PV: a colourful Linard with some of his early illustrations inspired by Tom of Finland. (Photo © Shapersofthe80s)
❚ NORMAN ROAD in St Leonard’s on Sea hosted more than its usual share of Eighties art fans this weekend. At Lucy Bell’s a book signing by Bowie’s travelling companion and photographer Geoff MacCormack drew fans seeking a signature on his latest title. Only yards away the newish Rogue Gallery was hosting Total Fashion Victim, an archive exhibition of one-time Blitz Kid Stephen Linard’s earliest fashion illustrations while a student from 1978 onward. As his tutor at St Martin’s Rosetta Brooks declared, he was a leader among the small pack of London fashionistas noted for their poser talents. “Each poser,” she believed, “is a ready-made,” exactly as defined by Marcel Duchamp in New York around 1914 when modernism was being born. (His own most famous ready-mades included Bicycle Wheel, Bottle Rack and the urinal titled Fountain.)
Partying with Linard – Click any pic to launch slideshow:
Here we can judge for ourselves from more than 40 pieces of artwork on sale for the next month, and enjoyed by a considerable crowd at the private view. Among them one of Linard’s designer contemporaries at St Martin’s School of Art was Corinne Drewery, later to become a pop singer with Swing Out Sister, here eye-catching in one of his flapper dresses in ikat with faded rose print which she used to wear circa 1983, “and it still fits”!!!
Linard’s previously unseen work – Click any pic to launch slideshow:
Posted in 20th century, art for sale, Blitz Kids, degree shows, exhibitions, fashion illustrations, New Romantics, stage costumes, Swinging 80s, Youth culture
Tagged Corinne Drewery, Eve Ferret, Helen Robinson, Lucy Bell, Michele Clapton, Princess Julia, Ray Gange, Rogue Gallery, Rose Hibbert, St Leonards on Sea, Stephen Linard, Total Fashion Victim, Val Byers
An exhibition of fashion legend Stephen Linard’s archive of drawings, photographs and garments runs for a month from 8 September and provides eye-opening insights into his startling influence on the other Blitz Kids and on the fashion jetset…
Ex-St Martin’s fashion designer Stephen Linard at the height of his commercial success in 1984, when he worked for three years for Jun Co in Japan. Here pictured by Toscani for i-D magazine’s issue No 15 in “An illustrated guide to detail”. He sports a leather Confederate Army cap $15 bought in transit through Anchorage airport in Alaska. The jacket £250 over giant-collared shirt £120, and trousers £200 are all by Yohji Yamamoto. Waistcoat £180 by Gianni Versace. Artfully placed on his left lapel is a silvered bathroom tap £60 and faucet brooch £40, both from a jewellery collection for Chloe, Paris. He said: “It was worth it for the stir it caused at the Paris collections.”
❚ THE PRESS CALLED THEM the New Romantics and the Blitz Kids, declaring the Eighties the Age of the Pose. Art-school tutor Rosetta Brooks compared their self-consciously styled poses to “street theatre ultimately extended into continuous performance as a post-punk embodiment of Gilbert and George in one person (the individualist).” Each poser, she believed, is a ready-made. Step forward fashion student Stephen Linard for ticking all the above boxes – a flamboyant Canvey Island boy from Southend School of Art (1975-78) who yearned to make a statement in every street or room he graced.
Arriving at St Martin’s School of Art in London (1978-81), Linard pushed the boundaries of excess. Annually, second-year students organised an Alternative Fashion Show but in May 1980 the college’s resoundingly prim middle-class students were out-gunned when Linard sent out his sensational Neon Gothic collection – a stark collision of Space 1999 meets liturgical Gothic meets the masonic livery which was displayed in shops serving the Freemasons’ Hall just along the street from the Blitz Club, the capital’s coolest nightspot.
The audience erupted in cheers. Strutting the runway to the Human League came the then-unknown George O’Dowd sporting a soaraway post-punk mullet atop sharp grosgrain suit with dog collar, Michele Clapton and Myra Falconer wearing risen-from-the-dead pallor beneath shaven heads, along with Fiona Dealey and Julia Fodor (today a Princess). Their vestments were accessorised with religious motifs while emanating a curiously spare chic. Finally, all in white as a “space-age pope”, came gifted Lee Sheldrick, modelling a white silk grosgrain suit with his head shaved bald to become the embodiment of Nosferatu the Vampyre. Resonances abounded for the show’s title to be adopted by the nascent Goth movement.
A stark collision of Space 1999 meets liturgical Gothic: Two robes from Stephen Linard’s sensational Neon Gothic collection in his second year at St Martin’s
One year later Linard was determined to submit menswear for his degree collection, despite the efforts of the head of the fashion department to insist on women’s wear. She actually threatened to eject Linard from the college until strong internal protests backing Linard’s pursuit of menswear ultimately prevailed. Modelled by six of his hunky clubland pals, his collection titled Reluctant Emigrés featured swishy draped cashmere greatcoats, patched pinstripe trousers and city shirts that all evinced an Edwardian air of immaculate tailoring punctuated with edgy details.
Linard’s street-savvy lads made a gasp-out-loud impact, as Fleet Street’s Suzy Menkes noted in print. Historians Alan J. Flux and Daryl F. Mallett have also written: “The clothes were instantly covetable, thoroughly masculine in an entirely new way, and electrifying as only the truly innovative can be.” Linard won his first-class Honours degree.
The fashion press feted him upon graduation. His outrageous fashion details flagged direction for the two dozen sharpest Blitz Kids who shaped the New Romantics silhouette from the Blitz onwards. Most significantly, Linard changed his own appearance daily from his foppish Fauntleroy dandy, to the Endangered Species outfit made from animal skins, to the cowboy gilded from hat to toe. Linard has admitted: “The competition pushed you on, especially Lee Sheldrick. At the Warren Street squat [where they lived] you might change what you were going to wear eight times on a Tuesday to try to outdo everyone else at the Blitz.”
Inspiration was all around. In 2020 Linard said: “The Blitz was an art students’ club. The place was choc-a-bloc with artists: Brian Clarke, Zandra Rhodes, Molly Parkin, Antony Price, Duggie Fields, Kevin Whitney and us because it was halfway between Central School and St Martin’s. People who said ‘Oh you Blitz Kids don’t DO anything’ were talking rubbish, because WE all did. We were the ones with our work in the glossy magazines long before the rest.”
Smiles from the press at Linard’s degree show: The Reluctant Emigrés wore pinstripe trousers in Savile Row fabrics and city shirts in feminine couture fabrics evoking Edwardiana. (Photo by Shapersofthe80s)
Linard’s styles had always been sought after by pop-star contemporaries from Spandau Ballet, Boy George, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Haysi Fantayzee and The Slits, to U2, the Bee Gees, Womack & Womack, even Cliff Richard and Johnny Mathis, and ultimately to the great god David Bowie himself.
In 1982 the Railway Children collection of stripey Edwardian coats and frocks for school-girls became the first of Linard’s two womenswear collections. He was one of six budding British designers taken to Paris by Blitz Club host Steve Strange to help launch his Anvil album, but also to show that the English could be as stylish as the French – staged at Europe’s coolest nightclub, Le Palace.
Meanwhile Linard’s reputation went on growing among the international fashion set. 1983 brought his collection Angels with Dirty Faces, inspired by the Bogart-Cagney gangster movie set in the Thirties depression. It was both pretty and poignant and it sold worldwide. That year, the snappiest magazine of the day, New York, headlined a special fashion section “The British Are Here”, and selected as the UK’s five leading lights Jean Muir, Zandra Rhodes, Katharine Hamnett, Vivienne Westwood — and Stephen Linard, “one of the most creative of the young designers”.
As recently as 2018, Laird Borrelli-Persson was writing in Vogue online: “Stephen Linard deserves credit for many innovations in fashion and its presentation that we take for granted… One of the Blitz Kids whose dandyish ways had an outsize impact on 1980s style, his early work was distinguished not only by irreverence, but also by a strong sense of narrative… Linard insists his aim was not to cause outrage. ‘I was into doing couture stuff and I was ‘just making clothes,’ really, as Sonia Rykiel used to say’.”
PS: Since you ask, Total Fashion Victim was the name of the one-nighter Linard hosted at the Wag Club during the Eighties.
St Martin’s Alternative Fashion Show 1980: Linard’s Neon Gothic collection modelled by his most stylish Blitz Kid friends – from the left, Michele Clapton, George O’Dowd, Lee Sheldrick in white as a space-age pope, and Myra Falconer
Stephen Linard seen in i-D magazine’s fifth birthday issue, No 30 in 1985, as one of their gallery of creative protagonists they titled 99 People of the 80s, all photographed by Nick Knight.
Posted in art for sale, Blitz Kids, degree shows, exhibitions, fashion illustrations, Goth rock, History, New Romantics, nightlife, Swinging 80s, Youth culture
Tagged Graham Smith, Nick Knight, Rogue Gallery, Rosetta Brooks, St Leonards on Sea, St Martin’s School of Art, Stephen Linard, Total Fashion Victim
Duran Duran: Who’s who in this debut line-up on 16 July 1980 onstage at the Rum Runner in Birmingham? (More to the point, who actually took this photo?)
❚ NEVER SEEN BEFORE! Or so I thought a few days ago! This superb colour photo of Duran Duran’s debut gig introducing Simon Le Bon on vocals and Andy Taylor on guitar has just been published on Facebook. The band are captured live on 16 July 1980 at Birmingham’s stylish nightspot the Rum Runner and fans have been amazed at a certain blondness and general skinniness of the performers, but after all their average age is only 20. From the left: Yes Simon is blond, yes “Tigger” John Taylor looks truly gangly on bass, yes Andy is in leopard-print pants, and yes Nick Rhodes is playing the Crumar synth at rear. (Drummer Roger Taylor is sadly not visible.)
This sensational picture arrived on the Durantastic World page at Facebook on the 43rd anniversary of the gig and I was one among many fans who had never seen it before. Yet the DW Admin couldn’t say who took it. One follower, Emma Leigh, attributed the image to a photographer who goes only by his Twitter handle @Birmingham_81 (currently unused) and otherwise remains anonymous! Baffled and amazed by suddenly discovering that any photo of Duran’s live debut existed, I embarked on a prolonged Google search.
As the day went on I actually unearthed FOUR photos of that 1980 gig – now published here on this page – which were buried perhaps unsurprisingly in one official Duran website dating from 2015, and another encyclopedic online history of the band in 2018, so all the more puzzling that they haven’t spread widely across social media circles. The best pic, shown here at the top, has sat in DD’s album page at Facebook since 2015, unforgivably dated wrongly to 12 March 1980, months before Le Bon joined the band.
A second pic was also posted by DD at Facebook in 2018 on the correct anniversary of the debut. This is the frontal view in which we can just see Roger on drums, though really too small to enlarge very successfully. Further googling led us through Not Your Mother’s Playlist, a blog by Christina, a 25-year-old pop culture addict from San Francisco who pictured the key photo without comment in 2019, and on to Duran Compilations which uniquely revealed two further pix from DD’s debut in 2018 while showing all four on one page – see below – again without special comment or hint of a source! This website detailing the band’s unofficial history was “compiled and developed by Ansgar Thomann in dedication to the 40th anniversary of Duran Duran’s birth”. He based the anniversary on 1978, when the idea of DD was born!
All four images make a fascinating testament to DD’s sense of style, especially Le Bon. Sad that nobody seems sure who took these landmark photos.
IMAGES SCARCELY SEEN BEFORE – CLICK TO ENLARGE
Core band members had been employed for a year or more around the Rum Runner by its owners, the brothers Michael and Paul Berrow, as bouncers, deejays and glass collectors, while a series of new musicians were tried out and let go.
Cristina’s NYMPL reports: “In 1978, cool kids Nicholas Bates and Nigel Taylor (who would then become Nick Rhodes and John Taylor) handed the Berrows a demo tape for their fledgling band Duran Duran and the rest is history; they held auditions until D-Squared became a full-fledged band with a guitarist and everything, and the Berrows became their managers.”
She adds: “Guitarist Andy Taylor recounts many interesting things in his book Wild Boy (a fantastic read). He talks about the wild behaviour of the club-goers – how flamboyantly they dressed, how behaviour norms didn’t apply and how sex, drugs, and glam rock were paramount. He also talks about the aptly named ‘Sex Offender’s Room’ (‘People weren’t politically correct, then,’ he writes), where the Durans and the Berrows dragged in a nice fluffy bed in a vacant corner, and then would purposefully walk in on one another when they were enjoying the, uh, intimate company of their guests.”
Simon Le Bon told Quietus in 2011: “I had some pretty amazing sex-and-drugs combined occasions. Which, ultimately, were very rock’n’roll. Just thinking back to the Rum Runner, what a place that was for five guys. . . it was probably illegal. In fact, a lot of it was definitely illegal.”
DuranCompilations pulls out the plums, 2018: two more new images to make four DD debut pix scarcely ever seen
Once the 1980 line-up was finalised, it then took DD another six months as the club’s house band before landing a contract with EMI. During this time London’s New Romantic heroes Spandau Ballet notched their first chart single before year’s end. In February 1981 DD’s first single Planet Earth charted at number 12 with the phrase “New Romantic” unsubtly woven into the lyrics, while cool London bands refused to subscribe to the term.
Both Spandau and DD followed the image-conscious practice of pioneering stylish music videos with savvy directors such as Russell Mulcahy and Godley & Creme, which fuelled the British invasion of the US by British bands just as MTV was launched in August 1981. The first person we see in Duran’s first video, Planet Earth, is Roger Taylor who also told Quietus: “I think [director] Russell Mulcahy had a bit of a crush on me: ‘OK, get your shirt off, you’re the first one, lie back’.”
Perry Haines, ex-Blitz Kid, producer and first editor of i-D, told me in 1982: “Duran Duran were destined to be mass market. I styled their first photo session in Milton Keynes in frilly Axiom shirts with bolero jackets and silk Antony Price suits. It was a street-level look with the cut and style of Antony.”
Rolling Stone magazine recorded the brothers’ ambition: “They said, We want a good-looking poser band. . . somewhere between Chic and the Sex Pistols.”
Bill Rosich: The 16 July set list was: 1, I Feel Love; 2, Girls on Film; 3, Amy a-Go-Go (later Rio); 4, Night Boat; 5, Tel Aviv; 6, Late Bar; 7, Secret Success.
James Barr: It’s funny, but they’re basically in the exact same stage arrangement that they remain in to this day: Simon out front with John on his right and Andy (or the guitar player) on Simon’s left. Nick is then back and to the left and Roger back and to the right.
Lance Lowe: Was there. I played bongos for 5 minutes. It was a jazz dance night. Paul Berrow asked me to stand behind the bongos with the rest of the band for press shots at the Rum Runner. I just wanted to dance to music by Lonnie Liston Smith.
➢ Durantastic World page at Facebook
➢ Previously at Shapersofthe80s: 1981, Birth of Duran’s Planet Earth
A broody looking Duran Duran en route to stardom: the band pose outside the glam entrance to the Rum Runner nightspot
➢ Previously at Shapersofthe80s: 2023 ➤ Celebrating Kahn and Bell’s role at the centre of Brummie fashion
➢ 1981, Inside the Rum Runner nightclub – by the people who were there
✱ Deejay legend Robbie Vincent has returned to JazzFM on Sundays 1-3pm… Catch Robbie’s JazzFM August Bank Holiday 2020 session thanks to AhhhhhSoul with four hours of “nothing but essential rhythms of soul, jazz and funk”.
◆ Who was who in Spandau’s break-out year of 1980? The Invisible Hand of Shapersofthe80s draws a selective timeline for The unprecedented rise and rise of Spandau Ballet –– Turn to our inside page
✱ If you thought there was no more to know about the birth of Blitz culture in 1980 then get your hands on a sensational book by an obsessive music fan called David Barrat. It is gripping, original and epic – a spooky tale of coincidence and parallel lives as mind-tingling as a Sherlock Holmes yarn. Titled both New Romantics Who Never Were and The Untold Story of Spandau Ballet! Sample this initial taster here at Shapers of the 80s
✱ Jawing at Soho Radio on the 80s clubland revolution (from 32 mins) and on art (@55 mins) is probably the most influential shaper of the 80s, former Wag-club director Chris Sullivan (pictured) with editor of this website David Johnson
➢ Search for all on Bowie here
at Shapers of the 80s
✱ “I’m not a rock star” Bowie often said – No, David, you were a messiah – Obituaries and key videos on the godlike one
✱ Prince Rogers Nelson RIP: ‘A funny cat’ and ‘sole authentic genius’ of the 1980s
➢➢ Shapers of the 80s ➣➣ 