The House of Beauty and Culture (HOBAC) was an avant-garde boutique, design studio, and crafts collective in late 1980s London, with key figures likeJudy Blame, John Moore, Cindy Palmano, and duoFric and Frack. Until recently, HOBAC’s influence was widely felt, yet barely documented, part of a subculture rooted in artistic practice, post-punk rebellion, and resistance to mainstream culture and overproduction. Against a dire socio-political and economic backdrop, they were among the first to upcycle found materials and champion androgynous urban style. Through diligent research, interviews, and countless images, Kasia Maciejowska honours the group’s legacy. Thanks to Roma Publications (Amsterdam).
154 pages, 23 x 31 cm, paperback, Roma Publications (Amsterdam).
Today we consider it brave to express yourself in the street – to convey your identity and story with what you wear. We know it takes guts to look different, owning who you are in the face of conformity. Imagine doing it in the '80s, in Hackney, before Dalston was busy, with Thatcher in power, and the AIDS crisis tearing through your friends. That’s what the House of Beauty and Culture (HOBAC) did. The collective used the act of handmaking as a political statement against mass production, more relevant now than ever.
Ostracised by the mainstream, they found each through club culture, and built their own tribe through creativity, craft, and collaboration. Whether taking the night bus to Soho, roaming the decrepit Docklands, or decorating the earliest raves in disused warehouses, the HOBAC designers represented individuality in everything they made. They came together in their studio/shop off Kingsland Road: guerilla before guerilla stores existed. They drew on Vivienne Westwood’s punk, David Bowie’s shape-shifting, John Waters’s absurdity, and a neo-pagan mood not unlike Jeremy Deller’s new exhibition at 180 The Strand with Aries and David Sims - but pre-digital.
Their design approach was hugely avant-garde, reusing discarded materials before climate change was an accepted phenomenon. Rumour has it a visit to HOBAC turned Martin Margiela onto deconstruction. Founder John Moore is a cult reference in shoe design for reworking a very traditional craft. Their outsider aesthetics shaped the style of Britain and beyond via the pages of The Face, i-D and other magazines they worked for. Judy Blame – magpie, stylist, compulsive creative, accessories inventor, friend of British Vogue’s editor-in-chief Edward Enninful – was central and helped set up shop in 1986.
When it came to creating fashion, Blame’s great collaborators at HOBAC were Scarlett Cannon, Christopher Nemeth, and Dave Baby. Cannon and Blame ran club nights together. She played shop girl at HOBAC and modelled. She and Blame recreated themselves with extreme looks mixing punk with surrealism. Nemeth made voluminous, deconstructed suits out of post sacks and painting canvases. Blame would adorn them, along with Baby, his best friend until the end, who drew onto jackets and T-shirts. Photographer Mark Lebon documented all this, working deconstruction into images to show how they were made. Meanwhile photographer Cindy Palmano collaborated closely with Moore and Macdonald to create a romantic world in her pictures, including for HOBAC’s surrealist advertising. Both photographers shot on film and made movies on Super8.
Jones is a big HOBAC collector. He told me in his office at Louis Vuitton, before he moved to Dior: “I’ve been a massive fan all my life. As a teenager I thought it was really amazing and it got me into the idea of making stuff”. In 2015 he designed a HOBAC tribute collection in collaboration with Blame, Lebon and Nemeth’s family. Jones reveres Nemeth especially: “People with a highly developed sense of fashion love his work. Kate Moss loves Nemeth, Naomi Campbell was a Nemeth girl”. Androgyny played a central role in HOBAC’s creation of a street look that was a prescient mix of urban with camp. “John Moore shoes were big on women in Japan and Richard Torry’s knitwear was great on women too”, said Jones. Ditto Nemeth, who was big in Japan and whose clothes weren’t gender specific.
Clubs provided community for the designers at a time before digital kept everyone connected. Taboo was Leigh Bowery’s notorious Soho club night where Jeffrey Hinton was the DJ. Shaped by his meetings with William Burroughs in New York, Hinton cut audio and video together in a perfect mirror of the collage and remix the HOBAC designers were performing with their reworking of found materials.
Today near HOBAC, in the basement of shop Vogue Fabrics in Dalston, queer club VFD serves as a safe space for free expression. Founder Lyall Hakaraia finds HOBAC inspiring, “as a forerunner for DIY queer countercultural spaces in which artistic and creative practices become activism and protest”. The space HOBAC created – its shop, studio, style and symbolism – was fleeting yet pre-empted so many currents we find now in London. Before the Internet, let alone Instagram, the group were true influencers on fashion, culture and design, and their collaborative vision is now just starting to be recognised.
Richard Torry