Pigeons & Peacocks

In September 2010 Noughtie Nightlife launched with a bang to great acclaim at London’s East End cultural hub Rich Mix. Showcasing the images which captured the fashion, faces and attitudes of some of London’s most pioneering and cult club nights, including Kash Point, Trash, Anti-Social, Durrr, All You Can Eat, Nuke Them All, Smash & Grab, Boombox, Circus and secretsundaze, Noughtie Nightlife provided a platform for a mere fraction of the images which documented London’s unique party scene. With sounds and visuals provided on the night by Anomalous Visuals (AV Live set) and club legend Jim Warboy, London’s various party scenes clashed with a vehemence that echoed the dawn of a new decade.

Curator Antony Price, himself a photographer, DJ and London College of Fashion research lecturer, trawled through thousands of images to encapsulate the feelings and creativity of the Noughties London club scene, a scene that remains the world’s premier example of cutting-edge fashion, music and street-style crossover. In documenting nightlife styles, taking-in characters dressed to impress and those who were simply expressing themselves, the exhibition served as an extensive image library of the capital’s mixture of youth movements and influences, providing rich material for analysis and critique for the realms of styling, photographic, cultural and sociological research.

Through a range of photographs taken by prominent club and trend photographers Billa Baldwin, Matthew Brindle/Thom Will, Christopher James, Rory DCS, Ellis Scott, James Unsworth, Daniel Lismore, Antony Price, Rai Royal, Alex Warren, Wade Fletcher, Nicole Trevillian and PYMCA‘s David Swindells, Mr Hartnett & Suzy del Campo, the story of the Noughties was unravelled and put back together again. By providing both a recent retrospective and a contemporary archive of 21st century youth culture and style, the exhibition focused on the influence of music and clubbing on fashion and vice versa.

Noughtie Nightlife began life as an LCF research funded project, highlighting the power and importance of nightlife club photography as a medium in itself. As well as mounting this hugely successful exhibition Price’s ultimate goal for the project was to create an invaluable archive at London College of Fashion for future generations of students studying across the six constituent colleges that make up University of the Arts London.

As the digital revolution enabled anyone and everyone to easily capture images and video to cut & paste straight onto social networking sites such as MySpace, You Tube and Facebook, nightlife images were often ephemeral, appearing only briefly as profile picture before being just as quickly removed and updated. With such a multitude of images circulating the Net Noughtie Nightlife acted as a conduit to collect and gather the best of Noughties youth culture visuals into a single form. The ongoing archive at London College of Fashion will act as a way of preserving, recording and cataloguing the vast array of images that live only within the digital ether of transient websites and blogs.

Noughtie Nightlife caused a bit of a stir in the press. See links below:

• Urban Junkies
• View London
• TimeOut.com
• The Playground
• YSH London (blog)
• Eve without Adam (blog)
• Fashion156.com
• Itchy London Guide
• Spoonfed
• Fred Butler Style.com (blog)
• Demode (blog)
• Pulse Radio Website
• Don’t Panic Online
• The Handbook (blog)
• Whereandnow.com
• Arts Thread (blog)

For further information about the archive and Noughtie Nightlife please contact: a.price@fashion.arts.ac.uk.

Noughtie Nightlife

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A guide to the Noughtie Nightlife exhibition at RichMix gallery, September 2010, conceived and curated by Antony Price for the London College of Fashion. Featuring bio’s and interviews with the contributing photographers who covered London’s Fashion ‘Club Kids’ of the Noughties.