This year marks the 20th anniversary of the revolutionary publication Dazed & Confused. To celebrate their milestone birthday Dazed has released Making It Up As We Go Along, published by Rizzoli, which takes a look back at the magazine’s past two
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the revolutionary publication Dazed & Confused. To celebrate their milestone birthday Dazed has released Making It Up As We Go Along, published by Rizzoli, which takes a look back at the magazine’s past two decades that have helped define popular style and culture since its founding in 1991, by a then 20-year-old Jefferson Hack and 25-year-old Rankin.
Spread over nearly 350 full-colour pages, Making It Up As We Go Along revisits legendary photoshoots and creative collaborations that have seen everyone from Kate Moss to Damien Hirst featured in the magazine as well as cover stars Björk, Chloë Sevigny, Harmony Korine and Thom Yorke.
With original art projects and iconic fashion shoots, Dazed & Confused has become renowned for breaking boundaries and setting the barometer, leaving other publications to follow. In 1998’s September issue, Alexander McQueen, Nick Knight and Katy England produced a shoot which represented disability in a frank and beautiful way – something no other magazine had done before – and featured a model with amputated legs from knee-down on the cover of its Fashion-able? issue.
Continuously questioning, challenging and causing controversy, the strength of Dazed & Confused is testament to the fact that it is still inspiring, innovating and breaking journalism ground 20 years on. As we wish our sister publication a very happy birthday, below we include an extract from the book in which Jefferson and Rankin recall the first time they met and where it all began.
Rankin: We haven’t done an interview together for ages, have we?
Jefferson: It’s been about 14 years, probably.
R: ... Wow.
J: Can you remember when we first met in the canteen at the London College of Printing? You had already done three years of photography and were recruiting for the student magazine.
R: (Laughs) Yeah. I actually remember the first day I walked into college – which was a little bit before you – and being given a magazine at the front door. I was like: ‘This is amazing!’ They’d produced it in college – I just couldn’t believe you could do that.
J: I remember you coming into one of the journalism lessons and saying, ‘If any of you guys are interested in joining the student magazine, come to the canteen on Wednesday afternoon.’ I came and it was just you and me there – you said to me: ‘Do you know much about journalism?’ I was like, ‘Not really, no...’ Then you said: ‘Well, you’re interviewing Gilbert & George, and I’m taking the pictures.’
R: There was another guy who was sort of the editor wasn’t there, a political activist guy... but we kind of took it over.
J: Well, I did all the interviews and you did all the photos, so that was sort of it. Then I commissioned a few things... we were really cutting our teeth in journalism and portraiture. I think the fourth issue won a Guardian Media Award for photography and design, and it was like, ‘Wow, we can do this...’
R: I think our crossover point was that we both really loved Interview magazine, and we figured, ‘Well, if they can do that, then why can’t we do this?’ That was despite the fact we were working a on a hulking great Apple Mac and had to scroll down to look at the different elements on a page! It was very funny.
J: It was pre-desktop publishing. You could never get a full page...
R: Yeah, you couldn’t see it.
J: We were still working on one of those when we left college, weren’t we? I think the first seven issues of Dazed were put together on a black-and-white screen. (Laughs) I can still distinctly remember you saying to me, ‘Do you want to stay at college and like, finish your course, or do you want to be the editor of a national magazine at the age of 19?’ I was like, ‘Woah...’ That really got me thinking. I think there was about a year between issue one and issue two coming out though. We had made this fold-out poster magazine as the first one, and once it went out there we were like, ‘Okaaay, now what do we do?How do we make the next issue?’
R: We were hungry to keep on publishing but had no real idea how to do it – how to get the money and so on.
J: Yeah, the first issue came about through me ringing every single marketing director that I could get the number of and asking them if they would sponsor the project. When we actually got some interest, we drove up to see them in your Ford Fiesta, with the wheel falling off!...
Dazed & Confused: Making It Up As We Go Along, edited by Jefferson Hack and by Jo-Ann Furniss, foreword by Ingrid Sischy and published by Rizzoli is out now.
Suggested Reading: Susannah Frankel speaks about working with Alexander McQueen on Dazed & Confused Fashion-able? issue here.
Text by Lucia Davies
