Still kicking and still ahead of any other fashion magazine in my book. Here is an article form www.iht.com
25 subversive, radical years
By Suzy Menkes International Herald Tribune
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2005
LONDON It is nearly 30 years since Terry Jones, as a young art director at British Vogue, tried to get designer Punk from Zandra Rhodes on the glossy cover.
Frustrated at his inability to reflect in a conventional magazine the burgeoning subculture of the raw, politicized young London of the 1970s, Jones left Vogue and started a magazine of his own. He based it on personal identity, free from codes of class and uniformity, called it "i-D" - and created a magazine that gets under fashion's skin.
This year, i-D celebrates 25 years of subversive content and radical design with an exhibition in that same spirit, curated by Jones. Fittingly, the starting point for a celebratory around-the-world tour is the London Fashion and Textile Museum founded by Rhodes. The exhibit is then slated to travel to São Paulo, New York, Beijing and Tokyo.
"i-DENTITY" (until Dec. 3, at 83 Bermondsey Street, London SE1) epitomizes i-D's "controlled chaos." The crammed layout includes a "tree" of 25 television screens reflecting the spirit of i-D; videos commissioned from contributors; and walls filled with the famous "winking" covers, in which one eye of an unknown young Madonna, or her blonde reincarnation in Gwen Stefani, is always closed or covered.
Contributions come too from the fashion people Jones discovered and formed. They include the photographers Nick Knight, Jürgen Teller and Wolfgang Tillmans, as well as the writers Alix Sharkey, formerly with a rock band, and the current GQ editor Dylan Jones.
"i-D was exceptionally courageous and daring and took chances where most publications don't do that," says Gity Monsef of the Textile Museum. "It changed the face of fashion."
Jones, a soft-spoken man, whose fashion trademarks are a square-cut work jacket, blue jeans and Converse sneakers, is modest about his achievement, although i-D is a rare survivor when other underground titles such as The Face have died.
"I think I was a catalyst to make something that didn't exist through the energy of an enormous number of people," says Jones. "There was a fundamental rise against established thought that you could be told what to wear."
Jones, who turned 60 this year, is more than the founding father of the subversive fashion magazine. He both documented and participated in the sociological upheaval that started with "swinging London's" youthquake and became a generational challenge to class and privilege.
"It started in 1976, with the whole Punk revolution that shook everything up," says Jones, referring to the conflict between the labor unions and political power. The new spirit came from music reflecting the social tension and from fashion students "hanging out" at clubs like Blitz and Taboo, while dressing from antique market stalls and costume suppliers.
With his acutely tuned antennae, Jones foresaw and helped to build a new meritocracy based on individuality and anticipating today's multiculturalism. The "Faith" issue, last month, is an example of the magazine examining different aspects of identity.
Jones was in at the birth of youth culture, as an art student in Bristol. With a new generation split into mods and rockers, Jones, with his long hair and artfully paint-splashed jeans, hung out in a beatnik café to observe the urban tribes.
Marriage, in 1968, lead to his wife, Trish, becoming den mother of i-D in their West London house. ("I came back with our two children and found the hall entirely filled with boxes of magazines," she says.) The early i-Ds were put together with Polaroids and a photocopier as a collage of images and text.
Jones's idea was to record in "straight-ups" - images that seemed like identity cards with attitude - the way clothes were being worn on the street. Dressing for clubbing had become a vocation for kids who turned the nihilism of Punk into something celebratory.
This upbeat energy has never left the magazine and is central to Jones's spirit.
"My personal take on fashion is to celebrate people and bring the theater of fashion into every day," says Jones. Yet he is prepared to allow his photographers to explore a darker side, such as the recent Knight images of fashion melancholy.
"When someone has made a contribution - it may be completely contrary to my own view, but I take a chance out of respect," says Jones, although he dropped Jürgen Teller's pictures when they became "a rant against fashion."
The exhibition's images of the 1980s record the enthusiasm and pride of people who became protagonists on the London scene. A 1984 photo by Mark Lebon shows the designs of Body Map, whose graphic and dynamic stretch fabrics ultimately entered the mainstream.
Long before street style was packaged as cool, i-D captured, in its collages and visually challenging text, ideas that have found their way into revered publications and advertising campaigns.
In 1984, the Jones couple decided to sell a 51 percent stake to Tony Elliott of Time Out, in order to grow i-D from a scissors-and-paste magazine at home to the 68,000-a-month publication it is today. This could have spelled the end of independence, if it had not been for the unerring eye of Jones for the next big subcultural thing.
The 1990s images show the emerging stars, such as the young waif Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell, a black model given her first magazine cover.
At the start of the exhibition are the early issues, where Madonna, with hair extensions and a tortured wink, makes her cover debut. After an eye-popping introduction to Jones's chaotic text lettering, a room resonates with a babel of interview sound bites from Madonna through Vivienne Westwood and Dior's Hedi Slimane.
Other sensory experiences are the art house videos and the fragrances offered on paper fans. Stylist Caryn Franklyn says that "for me the early '80s are summed up by the heady smell of hairspray," while Jeremy Scott rhapsodizes over "men's gym locker rooms and Vaseline mixed with sweat."
The idea that people on the street were inventing their own fashion was once a radical concept in itself. In more recent times, i-D has taken on radical subjects, such as the Iraq war. "Not in My Name" was one of the titles proposed by Trish Jones, along with a "Make Poverty History" issue.
At the same time as taking a political stance, Terry Jones has steered the magazine back to fashion, junking a lot of cultural baggage that was in a 1990s groove. i-D was therefore a unique fashion magazine with an edge at a moment when "cool" was the essence of branding.
Earlier this year, the Joneses bought back their stake from Time Out for an undisclosed sum. It required them to remortgage the house that had been home to the magazine and to their kids, Matt and Kate, both photographers.
Supported now by glossy ads for Dior, Prada and Sony Walkman, i-D is a far cry from the early years. Yet no one could accuse Jones of selling out. He is still passionate about the magazine, involved in every detail and just as prepared to change layout or concept while the deadline clock is ticking.
"It is that schooling of magazines and publishing," he says. "If I take a look - it is ingrained in me: It can always be that bit better.
25 subversive, radical years
By Suzy Menkes International Herald Tribune
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2005
LONDON It is nearly 30 years since Terry Jones, as a young art director at British Vogue, tried to get designer Punk from Zandra Rhodes on the glossy cover.
Frustrated at his inability to reflect in a conventional magazine the burgeoning subculture of the raw, politicized young London of the 1970s, Jones left Vogue and started a magazine of his own. He based it on personal identity, free from codes of class and uniformity, called it "i-D" - and created a magazine that gets under fashion's skin.
This year, i-D celebrates 25 years of subversive content and radical design with an exhibition in that same spirit, curated by Jones. Fittingly, the starting point for a celebratory around-the-world tour is the London Fashion and Textile Museum founded by Rhodes. The exhibit is then slated to travel to São Paulo, New York, Beijing and Tokyo.
"i-DENTITY" (until Dec. 3, at 83 Bermondsey Street, London SE1) epitomizes i-D's "controlled chaos." The crammed layout includes a "tree" of 25 television screens reflecting the spirit of i-D; videos commissioned from contributors; and walls filled with the famous "winking" covers, in which one eye of an unknown young Madonna, or her blonde reincarnation in Gwen Stefani, is always closed or covered.
Contributions come too from the fashion people Jones discovered and formed. They include the photographers Nick Knight, Jürgen Teller and Wolfgang Tillmans, as well as the writers Alix Sharkey, formerly with a rock band, and the current GQ editor Dylan Jones.
"i-D was exceptionally courageous and daring and took chances where most publications don't do that," says Gity Monsef of the Textile Museum. "It changed the face of fashion."
Jones, a soft-spoken man, whose fashion trademarks are a square-cut work jacket, blue jeans and Converse sneakers, is modest about his achievement, although i-D is a rare survivor when other underground titles such as The Face have died.
"I think I was a catalyst to make something that didn't exist through the energy of an enormous number of people," says Jones. "There was a fundamental rise against established thought that you could be told what to wear."
Jones, who turned 60 this year, is more than the founding father of the subversive fashion magazine. He both documented and participated in the sociological upheaval that started with "swinging London's" youthquake and became a generational challenge to class and privilege.
"It started in 1976, with the whole Punk revolution that shook everything up," says Jones, referring to the conflict between the labor unions and political power. The new spirit came from music reflecting the social tension and from fashion students "hanging out" at clubs like Blitz and Taboo, while dressing from antique market stalls and costume suppliers.
With his acutely tuned antennae, Jones foresaw and helped to build a new meritocracy based on individuality and anticipating today's multiculturalism. The "Faith" issue, last month, is an example of the magazine examining different aspects of identity.
Jones was in at the birth of youth culture, as an art student in Bristol. With a new generation split into mods and rockers, Jones, with his long hair and artfully paint-splashed jeans, hung out in a beatnik café to observe the urban tribes.
Marriage, in 1968, lead to his wife, Trish, becoming den mother of i-D in their West London house. ("I came back with our two children and found the hall entirely filled with boxes of magazines," she says.) The early i-Ds were put together with Polaroids and a photocopier as a collage of images and text.
Jones's idea was to record in "straight-ups" - images that seemed like identity cards with attitude - the way clothes were being worn on the street. Dressing for clubbing had become a vocation for kids who turned the nihilism of Punk into something celebratory.
This upbeat energy has never left the magazine and is central to Jones's spirit.
"My personal take on fashion is to celebrate people and bring the theater of fashion into every day," says Jones. Yet he is prepared to allow his photographers to explore a darker side, such as the recent Knight images of fashion melancholy.
"When someone has made a contribution - it may be completely contrary to my own view, but I take a chance out of respect," says Jones, although he dropped Jürgen Teller's pictures when they became "a rant against fashion."
The exhibition's images of the 1980s record the enthusiasm and pride of people who became protagonists on the London scene. A 1984 photo by Mark Lebon shows the designs of Body Map, whose graphic and dynamic stretch fabrics ultimately entered the mainstream.
Long before street style was packaged as cool, i-D captured, in its collages and visually challenging text, ideas that have found their way into revered publications and advertising campaigns.
In 1984, the Jones couple decided to sell a 51 percent stake to Tony Elliott of Time Out, in order to grow i-D from a scissors-and-paste magazine at home to the 68,000-a-month publication it is today. This could have spelled the end of independence, if it had not been for the unerring eye of Jones for the next big subcultural thing.
The 1990s images show the emerging stars, such as the young waif Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell, a black model given her first magazine cover.
At the start of the exhibition are the early issues, where Madonna, with hair extensions and a tortured wink, makes her cover debut. After an eye-popping introduction to Jones's chaotic text lettering, a room resonates with a babel of interview sound bites from Madonna through Vivienne Westwood and Dior's Hedi Slimane.
Other sensory experiences are the art house videos and the fragrances offered on paper fans. Stylist Caryn Franklyn says that "for me the early '80s are summed up by the heady smell of hairspray," while Jeremy Scott rhapsodizes over "men's gym locker rooms and Vaseline mixed with sweat."
The idea that people on the street were inventing their own fashion was once a radical concept in itself. In more recent times, i-D has taken on radical subjects, such as the Iraq war. "Not in My Name" was one of the titles proposed by Trish Jones, along with a "Make Poverty History" issue.
At the same time as taking a political stance, Terry Jones has steered the magazine back to fashion, junking a lot of cultural baggage that was in a 1990s groove. i-D was therefore a unique fashion magazine with an edge at a moment when "cool" was the essence of branding.
Earlier this year, the Joneses bought back their stake from Time Out for an undisclosed sum. It required them to remortgage the house that had been home to the magazine and to their kids, Matt and Kate, both photographers.
Supported now by glossy ads for Dior, Prada and Sony Walkman, i-D is a far cry from the early years. Yet no one could accuse Jones of selling out. He is still passionate about the magazine, involved in every detail and just as prepared to change layout or concept while the deadline clock is ticking.
"It is that schooling of magazines and publishing," he says. "If I take a look - it is ingrained in me: It can always be that bit better.
