Judy Blame: Fashion designer who brought the punk style into the mainstream

“I always live for the revolution – you always hope it’s going to come, don’t you,” said Judy Blame, talking about his iconoclastic career in 2015.

Blame was at the forefront of one of fashion’s greatest revolutions, bringing the punk aesthetic into the mainstream as a stylist for some of the biggest stars of the Eighties and Nineties.

“Can’t really time it,” he said in 2015, speaking to the fashion quarterly 10 Magazine. “The things I went through, like punk, new romantics ... it just happens, I think. It is quite conservative now, but there are always troublemakers.”

Blame the troublemaker was born plain Chris Barnes in Leatherhead, Surrey. He was interested in fashion from an early age, growing up in Devon. “My mother always used to say that I always had something to say about her outfit. From really young. Things like, ‘Oh, not those shoes with that’…”

It was when the family moved to Spain that Blame first recognised how style could make an impact. “A distant cousin of ours came to stay and it was Spain in the 1960s, so it was a bit conservative. And she arrived... in a miniskirt. And that caused a revolution!”

Blame added: “I loved the fact that it caused such a lot of trouble. I’ve always been on that side of it, of causing a reaction with the way that you look. And I never looked back after punk rock.”

As a teenager, Blame was already designing jewellery, creating one-off trinkets from found objects. On leaving school, he moved to Manchester, but was soon drawn to the capital. There he discovered the joy of “mudlarking”, combing the banks of the Thames for bones and buttons to add to safety pins to create what one journalist called his “pearly-punk aesthetic”. “I don’t think that a diamond is better than a safety pin; to me it’s just a thing or a shape. Money isn’t a thing that holds back creative people. In fact, it can spoil it sometimes.”

It was while working in the cloakroom at Heaven, the London gay club, that he was nicknamed “Judy”, in homage to Judy Garland, by Roxy Music couturier Antony Price. His new surname, Blame, came courtesy of Scarlett Cannon, with whom he ran Heaven’s New Romantic night Cha Cha.

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At the same time Blame became part of the stylist Ray Petri’s Buffalo Boys collective, whose subculture style influenced the look of magazines such as The Face and i-D. Blame also co-founded an east London boutique called The House of Beauty and Culture, with designers Christopher Nemeth and John Moore.

Throughout his career, Blame’s work continued to make liberal use of found objects. His friend Paul Flynn recalls how, having blown the budget for Duran Duran’s “The Wild Boys” video, Blame dressed the extras with rubbish he found on the streets of Hoxton. And it worked. Flynn wrote: “Give Blame a safety pin, a button, a needle and thread and he would return it not as an accessory, but as art.”

As a designer, Blame collaborated with Leigh Bowery, Gareth Pugh, Galliano and Louis Vuitton. He designed an accessory line for Commes Des Garçons’ menswear. As a stylist he worked with Boy George, Duran Duran, Björk and Massive Attack. He transformed the image of “girl next-door” Kylie Minogue, dressing her in Azzedine Alaia for edgy photographer Juergen Teller.

But Blame’s career-defining work was probably his collaboration with Eighties’ music legend Neneh Cherry. He created Cherry’s iconic “Buffalo Stance” look and made a cameo appearance in her “Manchild” video.

Blame and Cherry became close friends, sharing a house where an 18-year old Edward Enninful, now editor of British Vogue, would crash when he was kicked out of home. Enninful wrote of that time: “We had so much fun: we’d go to nightclubs and Judy would look after me – he was so generous ... He had an incredible orbit, and that house was the centre of London. That was where I grew up.”

In 2016, Blame’s career was the subject of an Institute of Contemporary Arts retrospective in London. Among the works he chose for the show was a video he styled and art-directed for Neneh Cherry for the Aids charity Red, Hot and Blue. It was a cover of Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”. He told his friend Paul Flynn that it was his favourite work from his 40-year career.

Speaking at the time of the retrospective, Blame shared the secret of his success with a newspaper: “Be yourself. So many people have told me that over the years and it’s always worked a dream.”

Judy Blame, fashion designer, born 13 February 1960, died 18 February 2018