Why Boy George Was The First Modern We Ever Met: The Incredible Story Of The Blitz Club | Fashion | S Fashion EL PAÍS

There was a time, in the England of discontent that was deepening in the eighties, when night culture became a revulsion, an assault weapon, a playful gesture of protest against the heavy hand of Margaret Thatcher. The birth of clubbing, as we know it today, takes place in those days when punk nihilism gave way to a much more showy and colorful subversion. The ashes of glam, the reaction to the American disco movement and the futurism of David Bowie laid the foundations for a small London club, The Blitz, which would serve as a late-night refuge for students against the norm of the art and fashion academies and working-class Dadaists who had stormed their mothers boudoir. It barely lasted 18 months, between 1979 and 1980, but it marked kilometer zero for a philosophy of life that continues to this day, with those fluid gender creatures dressed in clothes rescued from who knows what closet that continue to populate the night.

He remembers the documentary blitzed!, that can be enjoyed on Netflix, with testimonials from some of its most distinguished living protagonists, from the singer Boy George to the Spandau Ballet guitarist, Gary Kemp, or the acclaimed costume designer of Game of Thrones Michele Clapton. There they threw their teeth Chrissie Hynde (The Pretenders), Adam Ant, Billy Idol, Siobhan Fahey (Bananarama), Sade or John Galliano.

And, above all, the very mannered Steve Strange, who would end up being number one in half of Europe with the song fade to gray by Visage. Together with the one who would end up being the drummer of that group, the heterisimo Rusty Egan, assaulted a bistro in the depressed area of ​​Covent Garden where he emulated the atmosphere of the decadent clubs of Germany in the thirties.

In front of the New York Studio 54, where everything was sex, cocaine and celebrity; The Blitz flaunted androgyny, amphetamines and an underground vocation. While Egan was inventing new forms of dance from Bowie, Roxy Music and Kraftwerk in the booth; Strange guarded the door. His mantra when someone didn’t measure up with the look: “Come home, make an effort.” “Here the men have to dress up as much as the women, it doesn’t matter if they cultivate an Edwardian style, a Dickensian style or whatever”, he liked to proclaim. The day Mick Jagger wanted to enter, seduced by the siren songs of the new subculture, he blurted out: “I’m sorry, you’re not dressed up enough.” “Nobody kicks the biggest rock star in the world out of anywhere. It was a huge publicity stunt. Steve was great at that kind of thing,” recalls Boy George in the documentary about his late frenemywith whom he spent the nights vying for prominence.

In the past tense of Culture Club, George worked in a fashion store (called, precisely, Boy) and was a well-known kleptomaniac who took an extra pilfering from the pockets of The Blitz wardrobe, where he worked. Today’s costume designer Michele Clapton remembers it as something extremely competitive: “It wasn’t worth saying ‘I’m not making the effort today’, because you knew that later you would be at the expense of the sharpness of others at the expense of your look. As much as you didn’t have money, you had to sharpen your creativity”.

Boy George shared a squat on Warren Street with Stephen Jones. A student at St. Martins, Jones found his role as the mad hatter who would end up crowning the Queen of England herself. “If at school it occurred to you to propose anything related to street culture, you would earn a zero. Logically, the opposite effect was produced: we rebelled against academicism and took to the streets”, he tells us. And he summarizes the ritual like this: “The nights began two days before. You planned your look, you kicked the Oxfam used clothing stores, you reinvented the clothes on the fly, you exasperatedly rummaged through your closet. After no less than two hours of dressing up, you would get on the subway, hoping that no one would beat you up on the way. Back at the club, we were mercilessly judging each other’s outfits, trying to figure out what the hell we were trying to say with them. You asked for the cheapest drink, you tried to make it last as long as possible and you didn’t let go of it in case you got it. And from then on, everything was based on posing for hours and dancing like robots. Although the real action was in the bathrooms. The sex, the drugs, the drama… The explosion of the trend press was based on riding that wave, ”he sums up with a laugh.

Possibly the decline of The Blitz began with the visit of the hero who had inspired it: Bowie stood there one night looking for protagonists for his music video for ashes to ashes and copied their gothic Pierrot look. The media arrived. The movement was baptized: Blitz Kids, new dandies, the Nameless Cult… Richard James Burgess, the first producer of Spandau Ballet, gave them the headline: the new romantics. The iconic band was the first to perform at The Blitz. His guitarist, Gary Kemp, remembers him: “There nobody wanted to see a band play, what they wanted was to look at each other; they were ordinary kids wanting to be the most important thing in the room. But we knew that every youth movement in pop culture has always had its representative band. And, although it sounds presumptuous, we said to ourselves: this is our chance”. There was Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records. He booked them that same night. Within six months, Spandau Ballet were performing on Top of the Pops with their space buccaneer pints.

The fashion industry jumped on the bandwagon. TopShop copied the essence new romantic in their collections. The alternative scene ceased to be. As Gary Kemp recalls: “Suddenly those clothes were everywhere. Lady Di wore ruffled-neck tops and baggy pants: the same thing she wore that weird people when The Blitz opened, it was now run by the royal family. That is part of your success and your failure; because it ceases to be special and loses its mystique but, on the other hand, it is what we were looking for, to transcend”.

Stephen Jones credits “the collision between fashion and the advent of video clips” for the worldwide spread (and decline) of the phenomenon. It was precisely in the Do you really want to hurt me, from Culture Club, where Jean Paul Gaultier first saw the hatter, crowned with an exquisite Turkish fez. He called him immediately and from then on he became one of his essential collaborators. Just like Vivienne Westwood, Thierry Mugler or Claude Montana. Another superstar from St. Martins and the tail of the Blitz baths, John Galliano, asked Jones to join him on the adventure of raising the bar for extravagance when he was signed to Dior in 1996. But that is already another story far removed from the underground.