IT ISN’T hard to work out why all those tremendously stylish and intimidating underground glossy magazines of the early Eighties toppled off their perches. You have only to look at the pages of this very organ to note the extent, in the intervening two decades, to which fashion has gone mainstream and underground has popped into Topshop.
The mystery, then, is not why The Face, Blitz, et al are no more, but why ID, born in the same period, is celebrating its 25th anniversary.
It is a mystery, however, that is quickly dispelled on meeting its founders, Terry and Tricia Jones. They look perfectly fashiony, in that indefinable — to normal people — fashiony way, Terry in the jeans he always wears with one of the black cotton worker’s jackets that he gets in Antwerp (he could have one or 1,000, I doubt if anyone knows, himself included, since they look identical) and Tricia with her white shirts, jeans and white Superga plimsolls). But uniforms apart, they are astonishingly normal: proud grandparents (he is 60, she is an implausible 58) who, far from spending their spare moments in an area of East London so edgy that it makes Hoxton look like Esher, prefer to hang out at their cottage in the Brecon Beacons.
From the start, while The Face was deliberately exclusive, ID was conceived as an all-inclusive embrace. It was the first publication to put “the punters” on its pages in its monthly street-fashion vox pops. “We always wanted to go beyond the façade of fashion,” says Terry, who at 27 was Vogue’s youngest art director. He left not long after its then editor, Bea Miller, refused to let him document the punk movement. “She thought it was too violent and not very Vogue,” says Terry in his habitually philosophical tones.
“To us fashion was always the key to any world you wanted,” adds Tricia. “You could document the business itself, celebrity, politics. We never thought that not having money was a barrier to enjoying it.”
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Easy to say in the early Eighties, when everyone was busy making their own clothes from bits of ripped curtain lining. It was Tricia, on a visit to her husband in the Vogue art department, who introduced the rest of the Vogue team to Laurence Corner, the well-known army surplus store in Camden. “She wore it with wellies,” her husband recalls fondly. “It was a very distinctive look.”
Nowadays the lust for status items is so endemic that even 12-year-olds have no need to make their own clothes — they’d rather buy designer versions in Primark for £9.99. In surviving, there is no doubt that ID has had to court big-brand advertisers and pay attention to the catwalk shows as much if not more than the street. “There is a different energy,” Terry concedes, “but I’d argue that while we document high fashion, we’re still about customising it. There’s an egalitarian, rebellious spirit that lives on.”
The magazine now has a full-time staff — as opposed to the procession of moonlighters who used to work out of the Joneses’ West Hampstead house after they had finished their day jobs while Tricia cooked pasta for everyone, having put in her own eight hours as a primary school teacher. It’s no longer sold from the back of a van, either (the first issue managed 50 copies outside the Virgin Megastore; it now sells 67,000). But it still maintains the air of an impassioned enthusiast rather than a jaded professional. Internationally admired, it punches way above its weight — Kate Moss, Karen Elson, Gisele Bündchen and Christy Turlington are some of the models who have winked for its covers. The closed eye, the nose and the mouth are, by the way, the physiognomy’s representation of the letters I and D — maybe you have to be an art director to appreciate that.
As it goes, ID has launched a few art directors’ careers, including that of Robin Derrick, the creative director of Vogue, and provided an early platform for photographers as diverse as Mario Testino, Wolfgang Tillmans, Craig McDean and Terry Richardson. Even in a period such as this, when street fashion no longer exists in the way it did, ID retains an aura of cool, if not of youthfulness, which is just the way its founders and (still) owners like it.
“The magazine isn’t just about youth or even style,” says Terry. “It’s for anyone who is interested in the creative view.”