Secret Thesis - 1980s Division (t'was Blitz to be alive in that dandy dawn)

There's an exhibition at the Design Museum in High Street Kensington dedicated to the New Romantics and the club scene of Blitz and Billy's and Le Beat Route. On a recent visit to London I checked it out. 

I thought it was well done, informative, and fun - worth a visit for sure (it's running until March 2026). 

But, but, overall it did rather confirm my Secret Thesis about glam, which applies equally to all the neo-glam echoes (New Romantics / Futurists, Romo, electroclash). 

Which is that the sonics are more enduring than the sartorials. 

(Okay that doesn't work with Romo but with the others, definitely).

Take the tunes by Visage that you can hear-see in the videoscreen area. 

Not only do "Fade to Grey" and "The Damned Don't Cry" sound better than their videos look, but New Romantic music generally has aged much better than New Romantic style - judging by the clothes displayed on mannequins in this exhibition, or the graphic design of the magazine covers and spreads framed or glass-cased for your discerning eye's delectation.

As for the disparity between how Bowie and his accomplices sound on "Ashes To Ashes" and how he's togged up in the video... 

Bowie and choreographer Toni Basil hanging with his progeny, scouting for talent maybe for the "Ashes to Ashes" promo

Actually, in truth, the Visage promos weren't so bad - "Damned Don't Cry" especially is budget-Visconti stylish. And even "Vienna" by Ultravox, which I hadn't liked at the time, sounds and looks quite grand in its gauche way. 

But overall the gap between the visuals and the aurals reinforced my Undeclared Thesis. With glam and its descendants, the clothing / coiffure / cosmetics, once shocking or startling, very soon becomes: 

a/ dated 

b/ revealed - more often than not -  as garish, over-done, and even surprisingly tatty.

Almost timelessly elegant... almost... 

"I'm so weird"

That's the young Boy George I believe, looking gaunt, snapped for a Blitz Culture feature in ZG, the house journal of St Martin's College.

Now the clothes in the right-hand pic are quite cool in a mid-70s Doctor Who, "royal court of some distant alien civilization"way... 

Okay this is chic - both the sketches and the photo - almost worthy of Jean-Paul Goude

Again, this zany zany spread above reminds me of the "Slave to the Rhythm" video

Whereas - and granted I couldn't design my way out of paper bag -  this is a bit of a mess. I suppose it must have seemed like an energy-burst at the time. 

In contrast, this pair of flyers are just "huh?"

This is how you represent the super-stylists place-to-be-seen?

Again, was this really designed to make people think "this is where I want to be"?

"I'm in with the in-crowd"

This is striking, yes... and I covet the early iDs (and appreciate their 'street fashion' approach, kids caught on camera in the wild, self-fashioned looks rather than boutique-bought) and piningly wonder why no one has scanned all of them and put them out there on the internet commons (you can find the odd early-issue online, some incomplete issues and stray spreads... to buy the intact originals on Ebay or from a vintage magazine seller online would be astronomic) 

"& sweat is best" - I think "sex & sweat is best" was a slogan coined by iD co-founder Perry Haines... maybe adapted from  Sex Sweat and Blood, a 'new danceability' compilation, on which his track "What's Funk" featured

Of all the garments on display, this struck me as perhaps the most chic - I do like that little outline figure of a man near the hem, the diagonal double-lines, the belt, and just the nacreous gleam of the fabric (albeit something of a lobster-y hue). 

This though just seems a bit drab and boxy. 

 

I do like the sort of leafy fabric texture here

Whereas this just looks unflattering. If not for the quasi-military insignia on the collar and the arm, it looks a bit pants-suit executive woman. 

Sort of avant-frumpy

This one is from a spoof by the Not the Nine O' Clock News crew, but actually no worse than many of the things you might have seen in the clubs, or in the real-deal videos

"Nice Video, Shame About the Song"

Lufthansa Terminal, haha

This one is pretty cool as echt-New Wave graphix

Draft for Robert Elms sleeve note to Spandau Ballet's Journeys to Glory.

Now I had assumed the exhibition was in tandem with the Elms book Blitz: The Club That Created the 80s. But it seems the Design Museum have their own book / catalogue they are touting: We Can Be Heroes: The Blitz Club -  Where Style Was Born, co-authored by Blue Rondo man Chris Sullivan and Graham Smith (although there is an intro by Elms, along with no less than three forewords - by Boy George, Gary Kemp and Steve Strange (from beyond the grave??)).   As for the exhibition itself, that was curated by Michelle Thom.

Probably the best thing visually in there was a contemporary work - a simulation of what it would have been like to be amidst the bustling poseurs at Blitz, as the club gradually fills up. Improved mightily by its sort of faded-by-time, mists-of-memory effects.

There's a sort of doubling of retro, or of nostalgias, effect looking at this simulacrum because the original club Blitz was - immediately before being taken over the poseur posse - a 1940s / WW2 themed club, hence the propaganda poster decorations. 

I wonder if the proprietors straight up nicked the idea from the 1976 episode of Rock Follies that features a Forties revival club called The Blitz, with air raid wardens as waiters, rationing-style food (cold spam, potato pie, tripe and no onions), gas masks, etc, and in which the Little Ladies perform as The Victory Girls singing songs about the war effort and how Glenn Miller's plane has gone missing. From about  36.52 mins in.

A virtual Rusty Egan on the wheels of steel 

Unlike a similar diorama I saw of CBGBs in a New York museum that notably failed to reproduce even a scintilla of the squalor of the original venue, with the ersatz Blitz there were ash trays with actual cigarettes in them - well, one cigarette that had been lit but evidently not smoked. Still, points for effort on the historical veracity front. Even the most stylish of clubs were rank places, chokingly thick with cig smoke, drink spillage staining the tables and sticky on the floor....

Talking of simulations...

Blitzblogger!

They have this clever machine that takes your picture and makes you look like a New Romantic

In this rendering, I resemble more a Buggle.

The interloper!

After feeling my bitchery build up inside and form itself into a future blogpost as I walked through the exhibits, I was secretly touched to find myself included among the gift shop offerings, even though there's only one chapter in Rip It Up that touches on the New Romantics

Shock and Awe would have sat better in this context, in truth - despite its Secreted Thesis.