Making It Up As We Went Along…

20 years! 20 years since Dazed & Confuzed was launched as a black and white fanzine and morphed from left-field counterpoint into the industry of cool epicentral position it now holds.

20 years of iconic shoots and covers and parties where the best and the beautiful have preened, pouted and completely known they where were everyone dreamed of being.  One party several years ago in New York was so utterly bacchanalian that, put it this way I thought I was going home to Harlem and woke up in Williamsburg…

20 years is maturity, it’s adulthood, the year before the golden key of graduation and the party to celebrate Dazed’s 20th anniversary was fittingly elegantly mature. Hosted at Somerset House, downstairs corridors were lit with lightbox strips of back issue covers, while rooms were curated into installations of editorial artistry by former Dazed photographic director, Emma Reeves: some were jagged angular shapes, some more traditional hangings, but I think my favourite was what I called the dark room where one solitary image was blown up to cover the room in it’s entirety with a walkway between.  The image was so evocative of something wondrous that Alexander McQueen would create that somehow it felt absolutely like an homage to Dazeds past: to the time of Katy England netherworld lyricism, of their work together where shows funded on a shoestring would captivate us with hints of lone wolfs, snow trapped ice queens and toy box captives.

Here I absolutely understood that the print world of magazines, with it’s visceral pleasure in turning the page is not the same as the visual enjoyment I get from reading online, that there is a different stimulus and reaction to the two; and while digital is our future this exhibition was somehow an amazing epitaph and celebration of all things print.

2DM stylist Tamara Cincik attended the London bash celebrating Dazed’s 20th anniversary last week. We dug into our archives in Milan to find some of our favourite covers from the mid-nineties. Vintage Dazed!