” Dazed & Confused is the largest independent, and it still does what it did all that time ago. And it hasn't become a pastiche of itself, and it hasn't become a sellout.”
The September 1998 cover.
BuzzFeed Fashion takes a look at how the iconic image makers of our time made it in fashion in this weekly feature. Today, Dazed & Confused founder Jefferson Hack tells us how he went from editing a student publication with Rankin to growing Dazed into a network of print magazines that thrives even in the internet age.
Can I be emerging? It makes me sound younger and more relevant: emerging, precocious young talent Jefferson Hack? (Ed note: Yes, OK.)
I think the British have always been amazingly creative because we've always had to use our imaginations to make a lot out of nothing because there's never been a big fashion industry in the U.K. the way there has been in other countries.
I met Rankin in college when I was a student at the London College of Printing. He was just going around the London College of the Arts, which is the combined school with St. Martins — they had a magazine they wanted to launch, and he was recruiting. He came to my class and gave a speech and asked if any journalism students would want to contribute to the student publication. I signed up at the appointed time in the school canteen and looked around expecting there to be, like, a bugging scene of young students wanting to get together to make a magazine, and I couldn't see anyone — and he popped up and then I got the job. It was really inventively titled Untitled. And we started making this magazine Untitled together and I did all the words, he did the pictures.
Inside the "Fashion-able?" issue.
The first time I met Rankin, he said, "OK, tomorrow we're doing the first interview for the inaugural issue of the student publication." He said, "Do you know who Gilbert and George are?" And I said, "No, I have no idea who they are. And he said, "Great, well, you're interviewing them, and I'll take the pictures." I was a young innocent, and Gilbert and George treated me very gently, so that was a great start. And Rankin did some brilliant portraits, and the magazine went on to win a bunch of awards. We had these annual student magazine awards — we won Best Magazine of the Year, Best Graphic Design; all of the awards we could win, we won.
We were always kind of outsiders as a kind of independent fanzine that Dazed and Confused was. When Rankin and I started publishing Dazed — after a few issues of Untitled — I was 19. I think that really my understanding of fashion came about through working closely with Katie Grand and then Katie England, who were my first fashion editors at the magazine, and the designers that they would be bringing into that environment. I mean, it was pretty shambolic and organic in the sense that it was a tiny office, and a lot of what we did was sort of social in terms of how we connected. So I would meet with Alexander McQueen or Hussein Chalayan or with different kinds of graduates all at the same level, all straight out of college. So that was really my first contact with the fashion world, really through young creatives and being a young creative myself, and learning through their eyes and their talent, and understanding what they did and how they did it — the challenges that they had to get recognized and find their own style, find their own point of view in an environment where there was very little support financially.
Alexander McQueen is very special to the magazine because he contributed regularly to a number of special projects over the years. He held a master position as a fashion editor — I can't remember what the right title is, but he had a masthead title and he contributed these incredible products where he would do something that was editorial and free and experimental. He would speak to us and he would work very closely with Katie, who was fashion director at the magazine and was sort of his creative right hand, so there would be this dialogue between him and the magazine through her, and we would get together and develop what those ideas were.
One of the ideas that got a lot of media attention was when we did a series with Nick Knight with people with different disabilities. So the cover was this amazing image of Aimee Mullins, this girl who was a paralympic athlete with mechanical sprinters' legs, and a whole series inside including an image where Philip Treacy made a headpiece for a blind girl. This story kind of was the moment when Dazed went from being a niche mag in the U.K. to being much bigger. We tripled our circulation overnight because we had everyone talking about this amazingly creative way of bringing fashion and disability together. So those kinds of things would become a national debate afterward because newspapers would write about it and it would be on TV and it would be an issue of debate about identity and beauty.
