Epidemic: A Fashion Story – Feature length article by Lou Stoppard for Aperture magazine about King’s influential ‘hooligan fashion story’
Scuffling England fans left to right: Replica England shirt by Umbro, jacket by Harrington, jeans by Lee • Replica England shirt by Umbro, jeans by Chipie • Shirt by Ted Baker, jeans by Duffer of St. George • Victimised fan wears jacket by Chevignon, jumper by John Smedley.
Aperture magazine, 11 June 2019.
Sleazenation ran from 1996 to 2003, during the boom in London-based style magazines. It was witty, often rambling, and wry. For a few years, beginning in late 2000, the artist Scott King served as the magazine’s art director, having arrived there from fellow British title i-D. He didn’t care about fashion. Instead, he saw Sleazenation as a vehicle to pursue his art practice. He wanted to use it, he explained recently, in the way “an artist would use a magazine – to just imagine it as blank pages, and you could do anything you wanted with them.” He was buoyed, he added, by “the arrogance of being young.”
As a student, King had come across Dan Graham’s Figurative (1965), an artwork consisting of a receipt of numbers, which was printed in Harper’s Bazaar in 1968. Incongruously, on the left of it was an ad for Tampax; on the right, one for Warner’s lingerie. “It struck a chord with me, that idea that you could use a mass medium to make art,” King says. With Sleazenation, he saw the opportunity to make great covers. At the time, according to King, everyone who made fashion magazines felt that they had to put the whole contents on the cover, that “to make something commercial, they had to spell it out.” King opted for more esoteric covers: for February 2001, Cher as Che Guevara with the headline ‘Militant Pop’; for March of the same year, a black-and-white map of the U.K. accompanied by the text, ‘Some people should be shot: Our photographers take on Britain.’
Wet England fan wears T-shirt by Daily Star and jeans by Pepe. Missile throwing England fan wears shirt by Burro • Bleeding England fan wears shirt by Aquascutum.
With Sleazenation, there was a need to improvise. The team could never rely on the status or money that came with high-end advertising, and it lacked the kudos of more established titles such as i-D and The Face, so trouble occasionally came when trying to book photographers: some thought it was beneath them. (Still, over the years, the likes of Wolfgang Tillmans, Jonathan de Villiers, and Elaine Constantine would contribute.) But often things weren’t organized properly, and pages needed to be filled quickly, so King was left to dream up something strange.
Epidemic: A Fashion Story, from the June 2001 issue, was one such project. It features generic press images of British football hooligans: men who would congregate at matches to attack rival teams and generally cause havoc. “They were the kind of pictures you would see in newspapers all the time,” King says.
By 2001, football fans had become known for embracing style. Adoption of brands such as Stone Island and Sergio Tacchini resulted in a much-lauded casual subculture that is still referenced by designers today. King laid the pictures out like a fashion story, with carefully positioned spreads and a small line of text with fashion ‘credits’: ‘Missile throwing England fan wears shirt by Burro’; ‘Bleeding England fan wears shirt by Aquascutum’; ‘Victimised fan wears jacket by Chevignon, jumper by John Smedley’.
Chanting England fans left to right: T-shirt by Daily Star, hat by The Sun, trousers by Russell Athletic • Replica England shirt by Umbro, shorts by Sergio Tacchini • Top by Lacoste, shorts by Umbro • Hat by Globe, T-shirt by Lacoste, trousers by Joe Bloggs • Shirt by Lacoste, shorts by Hackett.
“It was all about a shift of context,” King says. “Remodeling it as a fashion story.” The series paid tribute to the Duchampian ideal of the readymade. “It’s not about me doing a lot. Because, of course, in art, the less one can do, the more you can say at the same time.”
Epidemic encapsulates the irony that has always been central to the tone of British style publishing. It exemplifies the knowing wit, the dry humor, and the obsession with the oddities of Britishness, that are anomalous with the global reputation that has evolved around that era of London publishing. Epidemic is pointed on various levels, making multiple digs – though perhaps less at the type of men featured in the pictures, and more at the moral panic around football violence, the visual language of the fashion magazine, and the cultivated edginess of the young men who found themselves in the East End of London working for the style titles of that time. “It was meant to be jarring and awkward and wrong,” King says. “But it was much better than some bad fashion shoot.”
Chair throwing England fan wears replica Accrington Stanley Football Club shirt, shorts by Next.
Today, the story seems to chime with the current meme boom, where social-media users adopt appropriated images in order to convey specific moods or jokes. “Epidemic still resonates,” says Matthew Higgs, director and chief curator of the New York art space White Columns. “It seemed to both mirror and satirize the desire for ‘realism’ or ‘naturalism’ that was increasingly prevalent in fashion photography at the time. The abject ordinariness of the hooliganism on display also undercuts the romanticized image of the football hooligan as terrace dandy that persists to this day in British culture.” It’s a complex interrogation of fashion, culture, identity, and class. “I’m sure you could teach a university class or write a PhD just about Epidemic,” Higgs adds.
“You only ever remember an issue of a fashion magazine for it having a great cover and one great visual story,” King says. Over time, what he felt made a good cover, and what others at Sleazenation imagined, began to diverge. “The covers got people talking, but didn’t result in selling more adverts. I was also probably becoming quite dictatorial,” he notes. “I suppose they thought that if they could get rid of me they could make the magazine they wanted, which was a commercially successfully fashion magazine.” How did he know when it was time to move on? “When they sacked me, of course.”
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