Stephen Linard, the Blitz Kid fashion designer who made clothes for David Bowie, Boy George and Spandau Ballet, died on March 10, aged 64, after enduring painful cancer during recent months. David Johnson remembers the life and career of the man he knew:
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, who ticked all the above boxes – a flamboyant Canvey Island boy, born March 26 1959, who attended the Southend School of Art (1975-78) and 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, Princess Julia). 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.
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.”
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”.
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 in Savile Row.
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’.”
From September to October 2023, a solo exhibition presented his archive of drawings, photographs and garments titled “Total Fashion Victim” in St Leonard’s-on-Sea, where he had lived since 2020 along with many other former Blitz Kids.It was fitting — Total Fashion Victim was the name of the one-nighter Linard hosted at the Wag Club during the Eighties.
