COOL BRITANNIA Vanity Fair 1996

On 1 December 1996 Hedingham Castle in Essex was the setting for an extraordinary photoshoot.

Lee Mcqueen and Isabella blow posed in the foreground for the American photographer David LaChapelle. Lee dressed in a black corset, long leather gloves and a generous ochre coloured skirt, and holding a flaming torch, opens his mouth to shout. Isabella, wearing a beautiful, funnel-necked, pale pink tip of Mcqueen’s gown as she kicks her left leg up in the air. On the far right-hand side of the grass, a human skull both suggests the atrocities that have been committed in the past and also serves as an Omen for the tragedies of the future.

The shoot had been commissioned by Vanity Fair for its twenty-five special report, ‘London swings Again’. The Magazine which featured an image of Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit lying on a Union Jack bed on its cover, investigated the Phenomenon what it called “Cool Britannia”, a heavy general cultural excitement and over-hyped media invention. As it was in the mid-sixties, the British Capital is a cultural trail Blazer teeming with new and youthful icons of art, pop music, fashion, food, and film’ it said. In addition To Mcqueen and Isabella Blow, the magazine photographed and interviewed Damien Hirst, Jodie Kidd, Terence Conran, The Spice Girls, restaurateur Oliver Peyton, the head of Creation Records Alan McGee, Noel and Liam Gallagher of Oasis, loaded editor James Brown, Damon Albarn from Blur, Nick Hornby and Tony Blair (whose New Labour party would win the general election in May 1997).

TheVanity Fair issue was a response to an influential cover feature in Newsweek , published at the beginning of November1996 and written by Striker Mcguire. The opening of that article traced the birth of London as ‘the coolest city on the Planet’ to the moment `two weeks ago , when the grand Paris Fashion houses Givenchy and Dior decided to install two young designer as their top couturiers`

From 1996 London changed drastically the banking was booming and money flowed between London and New York. The art scene was Thriving and some London art dealers and collectors , such as Jay Jopling and Charles Saacthi, were more famous than their artists; architecture was experiencing something of a golden age ( the week before the Newsweek piece ran plans were announced for the building of a glorious Ferris wheel on the Thames now the London Eyes.) Eurostar, which entered service in 1994, brought the continent right into the hearth of London; and club such as Ministry of Sound were pulling people from Europe and beyond.