1982 ➤ Never a week without a fashion show

Posted on 21 Apr 2009 | Leave a comment

Eye-candy: PX swimwear opens the show. Picture © by Shapersofthe80s

In April 1982, Steve Strange orchestrated the first serious sortie by a wave of young London designers to the Mecca of the established fashion world, Paris. An act of folly – or a marker for international success? Either way, this show sounded the last rites for the New Romantics…

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➢ Video of the Paris show and its and rehearsals provided footage for the videos promoting Visage’s tracks The Dancer and The Steps from their eponymous UK Top Ten album of 1980. Sadly, these videos have recently been removed from YouTube, but the opening seconds of the Fade to Grey video show Strange arriving at Le Palace for the show:

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Posted in Clubbing, Europe, Fashion, London, Media

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1983 ➤ Who’s who in the New London Weekend

Posted on 15 Apr 2009 | Leave a comment

By the summer of ’83, a new pop establishment ruled the mainstream music charts while a new executive ruled London’s burgeoning clubbing scene after dark. Meet the jacks and jokers who fronted the capital’s hottest nightclubs

➢➢ Click here to read Who’s who

Wag club, White Trash, Mud Club, Tasty Tim, Dirtbox,The Face magazine, Swinging 80s,Camden Palace,Batcave

First published under the monthly Nightlife tag in The Face, July 1983

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Posted in Clubbing, London, Pop music, Social trends, Youth culture

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1983 ➤ 69 Dean Street and the making of UK club culture

Posted on 13 Apr 2009 | Leave a comment

69 Dean Street, Soho, nightlife,one-nighters,club culture, Bowie Night, Batcave, Gargoyle club, Gossip's club,The Face magazine, Billy's club, David Tennant, Gaz Mayall,

FACE-clubcult69 Dean Street is an address implanted somewhere in the folk memory of every Face reader. During the four years when the launchpad for musical experiment shifted from traditional rock gigs to the dancefloor, one Soho building became a factory farm that has fattened each passing cult en route to today’s richly flavoured mainstream…

➢➢ Click here to read The making of club culture, published in The Face, February 1983

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Posted in Chronology, Clubbing, Culture, London, Media, Pop music, Social trends, Youth culture

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1983 ➤ Hockney discovers a truer way of seeing, with help from Proust

Posted on 5 Apr 2009 | Leave a comment
David Hockney, 1983, photo joiners, cubism, Proust, interview, Picture © by Shapersofthe80s

Hockney at his London studio, Jul 3,1983: after a pause of two years, new canvases indicate the urgency with which has resumed painting. Picture © by Shapersofthe80s

“Have you been to the cubism exhibition at the Tate?” David Hockney enthuses during a trip to London. “I’ve been seven times!” An impromptu tutorial ensues in which the painter tests his new ideas

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1983 ➤ Showdown for Worlds End, Vivienne and Malcolm

Posted on 3 Apr 2009 | Leave a comment

The creator of this website, Shapers of the 80s, was photographing the runway in Paris on the day the King and Queen of Outrage realised the end was nigh. His backstage interviews provided scoops for the London Evening Standard and subsequently for The Face magazine, “style bible” of the 80s. Again and again, the emerging stars of the new decade observed that he was “always there”…

First published in the Evening Standard, Nov 4, 1983

First published in the Evening Standard, Nov 4, 1983

An Evening Standard exclusive breaks the news of an acrimonious power struggle that threatens to split the infamous couple who unleashed the punk revolution. Malcolm McLaren, manager of the pioneering punk-rock group the Sex Pistols, and Vivienne Westwood, the eccentric designer who clothed them, became King and Queen of Outrage overnight in 1976. Today they are daggers-drawn in a battle royal for control of their company, Worlds End, which has become the hottest name in avant-garde style.
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