"We had a lot to prove, so we were really, really hungry," he says. In the early 1990s, the setup was considerably more low-fi. Down the road is advertising operation Mad Agency and the LVMH-funded luxury-film platform Nowness Hack is creative director of both. In the main office, the Dazed media staff puts out the magazines and runs an in-house creative agency. Hack launched luxury fashion and culture biannuals Another and Another Man in 20 respectively. That sentiment is still evident in Dazed today, with people like Amandla Stenberg, Grimes and Anohni on the cover, this generation's cultural protest icons.
It's a real rallying cry to stand up for what you believe in," he says.
Today her slogan, "Declare Independence," is emblazoned across every issue. In 1995, Björk, another Dazed cover star, famously phoned the office out of the blue to say she liked the magazine. The two have a 13-year-old daughter, Lila Grace for the new 25th anniversary edition of the magazine, Lila and her friend Stella Jones interviewed model-of-the-moment Gigi Hadid for a cover story. If you wandered through the building, you'd find covers featuring the old Dazed guard hung on the exposed-brick walls, people like Radiohead's Thom Yorke, as well as Hack's ex, supermodel Kate Moss. It gives confidence to areas in youth culture and fashion, that are purposefully ignored by the mainstream, but are incredibly positive." "Dazed is a place of hope and inspiration. "It wasn't the world of Condé Nast that I aspired to," Hack says, "it was the counterculture." He cites Andy Warhol's Interview magazine, Rolling Stone and Oz as influences. And yet throughout it all, the publisher has held firm to the anti-establishment ideals that founded Dazed & Confused. A book published in May of this year, titled We Can't Do This Alone: Jefferson Hack The System, catalogues his ability to collaborate with culture's most unique (and famous) figures from Douglas Coupland to Tilda Swinton. Hack's journey has taken him from countercultural provocateur to fashion insider. Dazed & Confused just capped off the recent London Fashion Week shows with a fete to celebrate its fall cover collaboration with iconic British brand Burberry. Another's anniversary cover featured a 3D hologram of Lagerfeld, complete with a diamond-encrusted tie pin featuring his cat Choupette. The party at 31 Rue Cambon was in honour of the magazine's 15th birthday guests included Riccardo Tisci, Rick Owens and Kendall Jenner. She's the fashion director at Another, his luxury biannual. "I think Jefferson is the only person to convince Karl Lagerfeld to hold not just one, but two parties at Coco Chanel's apartment," says Katie Shillingford, laughing. Several months ago, Hack threw a party during Paris Fashion Week, and it was clear how much had changed. "We didn't have friends who knew how it all worked, and we didn't come from families who did.
"We were total outsiders," he says of Dazed's early years. Today, a staff of about 100 people, mainly millennials, work in the open-plan workspace. (Full disclosure – I was on the Dazed editorial staff for three years.) With his lanky frame, bomber jacket and heavy silver rings, he looks younger than his 45 years. I meet Hack at the Dazed Media office in east London. Hack and photographer Rankin, had launched the magazine as students at London College of Printing. The magazine had only started four years earlier, as a black-and-white fold-out poster. Hack remembers it as the best interview of his career. The musician regaled Hack, the 24-year-old co-founder, with tales of drinking snake wine with John Lennon and getting tattooed by the Japanese Yakuza mafia. Jefferson Hack is recalling a conversation with the late David Bowie over 20 years ago and it still makes him laugh: "He told me the craziest, filthiest joke that anyone has ever told me in an interview." But when I ask to hear more, Hack demurs, "I can't, it's extremely rude, but very funny." It was 1995 and Bowie was a cover subject for style magazine Dazed & Confused.
0 kommentar(er)
