Thursday 10 November 2011

20 Years of Dazed & Confused Making It Up As We Go Along!

The Terrace Rooms at Somerset House. Now until 29th January 2012


One of the first key things to mention about this exhibition is something that can be discovered before even stepping foot inside Somerset House: the name. “Making It Up As We Go Along.” It’s so refreshingly honest and so unpretentiously ‘cool’… It’s so ‘Dazed and Confused!’

Situated within the building’s extensive Terrace Rooms, the exhibition is divided into three sections. The very first, quite appropriately represents the first decade of the magazine’s existence, taking you back to where it all began in the early 1990s. Founded by the now prominent publisher & editor Jefferson Hack and renowned fashion photographer Rankin, the early days of Dazed & Confused was a time of creative experimentation for the pair along with friends and contributors including Katie Grand, Katy England and Nick Knight. Throughout the nineties the magazine’s reputation and influence within the style press quickly developed putting it on a par with more established rival publications such as The Face and i-D.

“We were so arrogant”

- Katie Grand on the early days of Dazed & Confused -


The edgy, controversial and original fashion editorials (one of the major factors behind the magazine’s early success) are displayed side by side, similar to a film strip, along various angular structures which seem to almost zig-zag across the floor and walls guiding eager eyes towards the exhibition’s next section…

…Onto the next room and we’re ontothe next decade. The wall space here is used mostly as a dedication to the portraiture of famous faces that graced the pages of Dazed & Confused during this period (Blondie, Katie Moss and Pharrell Williams to name a few,) whilst interactive TV screens enable visitors to create their own photomontages by selecting and combining various fashion imagery and portraits.


“Dazed & Confused never had a united aesthetic for portraiture: it had a code of liberation.”

- Jefferson Hack -


For me, it is the third room of the magazine’s ‘timeline’ to date, which I find to be the most interesting and intriguing for it focuses on the current and possible future format of Dazed and the new generation of talent that it has either produced or showcased. A further 2 rooms are dedicated to the work created for Dazed & Confused by the late Alexander McQueen; an example of true talent which the magazine embraced and I’m sure will continue to do so.

“We were the generation that tore out the pages of the original Dazed and stuck them on our walls.”

- Karen Langley, current Fashion Director -



One of my favourite Dazed &Confused fashion stories from this year is “It Came From The Sky” styled by Robbie Spencer and photographed by Richard Burbridge. Displayed are the final printed pages exactly as were seen in the June 2011 issue along with a set of the original embroidered art work (pictured above) by artist Maurizio Anzeri, accentuating just how much work, individuality, creativity and passion goes into creating each page for each issue.

When looking back across at all three rooms it’s quite astonishing to see how much Dazed & Confused has evolved and progressed through the years: highlighting this further is a corridor of illuminated covers from the past twenty years which step-by-step, cover-by-cover, gradually guides visitors to the exhibition’s end, leaving them only to ponder and picture the next twenty years of Dazed & Confused…