Stylist and jewellery maker who was at the heart of the UK music scene in the 1980s and 1990s
Born: 1960;
Died: February 20, 2018
JUDY Blame, who has died aged 58, was an accessories designer, art director and fashion stylist who was one of the key figures connecting fashion and music in the 1980s and 1990s.
As a member of the Buffalo collective alongside Ray Petri, Blame helped create fashion shoots for the Face and I-D magazine that proved to be hugely influential, before going on to work with fashion designers Alexander McQueen and Rei Kawakubo and to shape the visual identities of pop stars such as Boy George, Neneh Cherry and Bjork.
“Visuals are a key part of being a pop star,” he told journalist Lucy O’Brien in 1995. “You can spend ages in a dark studio making a record, but when you come out you think: ‘Oh my God, what does that record look like?’”
It was Blame who found the gold suit Martin Fry wore in the video for ABC’s Look of Love single and when Siobhan Fahey’s eye make-up ran on a Shakespear’s Sisters shoot it was Blame who told her to keep it.
Born Chris Barnes in Leatherhead in Surrey, Blame moved to London as a teenager, where he worked in the cloakroom of the nightclub Heaven; it was there that he was rechristened Judy by the designer Antony Price. When Richard Branson bought the club it is said he tried to sack Blame on sight. “God knows what I was wearing,” Blame told Paul Flynn in 2016 when he was the subject of a retrospective at the ICA.
“Punk rock – that was my training,” he once said, and much of his creative work drew on punk’s love of bricolage. Blame first made an impact with jewellery he made out of detritus he found while “mudlarking” on the River Thames.
Famously, he styled the costumes for Duran Duran’s video for their single Wild Boys out of rubbish, wire and plastic he found on the street after reportedly having blown the budget on speed.
Blame suffered recurrent problems with drugs and alcohol over the years, but it never inhibited his creativity for long. In the 1980s he was a member of the Buffalo collective that created fashion shoots for the Face and I-D magazines, a look then adopted by Neneh Cherry when she started a solo career in the late 1980s. Indeed, her debut single was entitled Buffalo Stance.
Blame’s Buffalo colleague Petri, originally from Dundee, never lived to see how widely the Buffalo influence would spread. He died from Aids in 1989, by which time Blame was a key figure in the crossover between fashion, art and music.
He put Kylie Minogue in a latex corset for the cover of i-D and then introduced her to the photographer Juergen Teller, was a key visual influence on Massive Attack and was the first to put the model Jourdan Dunn on the cover of i-D.
On hearing of his death, GQ editor Dylan Jones described Blame as “a Gatsby-like character who retreated when the glare got too bright. And yet Blame’s creative fingerprints can be found all over fashion and music in the last decades of the 20th century."
Indeed, in 2006, the fashion designer Roland Mouret suggested that Blame was such an icon in the industry “that he should be on a postcard with the Queen or on those souvenir mugs for all those tourists as the representation of the shape of British fashion.”
TEDDY JAMIESON
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