On a rainy Tuesday, as guests recovered from the antics of a British bank holiday, the great and good of the Nineties fashion congregated at 180 the Strand for the opening night of a new exhibition, ‘Back in the Dazed’ by Rankin. It pays tribute to the decade-long relationship between Rankin, the esteemed photographer, and Dazed magazine, which he co-founded with Jefferson Hack in 1992.
The show traces how Rankin’s work for Dazed helped shape fashion and culture between 1991 and 2001, highlights including Robbie Williams’ face printed on a pair of knickers and Kate Moss rocking crop tops. Rankin told The Standard the favourite decade of his photography is “mainly the Nineties. The reason I love it so much is because it symbolises me growing up, and in this show you can see a photographer at the beginning of his career and by the end of the decade I was sort of becoming quite good at it.”
A host of his muses and co-creators showed their support by attending the opening, including Hack, Hack’s daughter with Kate Moss, Lila, model Jodie Kidd and Perfect Magazine founder and former Dazed fashion editor Katie Grand. When asked to pick a favourite shot, Grand recoiled as if picking a favourite child. She settled on a picture of Moss, a paint-sprayed vest, which is the hero image for the exhibition’s promotion. “It was such an easy shoot, I just bought a bunch of white things to destroy and we just spray painted everything. It was fun — and I still have the vest!” she said.
The works help to show how Rankin’s lens captured the spirit of a generation. Ellen Stone, the lead curator, said the archive was vast. “For 30 years Rankin was doing eight to 10 shoots per week”. They decided on laying it out chronologically “because we were thinking about how there is a resurgence of cool Britannia, you can literally see Blur in Wembley! At the same time, we are in an interesting moment in the UK discourse right now and all the things that early Dazed was talking about are things we are still talking about — from Euroscepticism to grunge fashion”.
Rankin, Hack and Grand… they were onto something.
Inside the ‘Back in the Dazed’ by Rankin opening event:
