It started, naturally enough, with a wink, which is often the way with relationships, particularly ones that last. A wink, a smile and the promise of a great new tomorrow.
The original idea was a simple one, something i-D's majordomo Terry Jones hatched while still Art Director of British Vogue. Terry was at Vogue from 1972 to 1977, only leaving when it became evident that his colleagues didn't share his enthusiasm for the fresh and exciting new direction in street style that exploded in tandem with punk. So he left the magazine, eventually starting i-D in the summer of 1980. Initially looking like little but a punk fanzine, id was essentially an exercise in social documentation; a catalogue of photographs of 'real' people wearing 'real' clothes, what Terry liked to call 'straight-ups'. People on the street. In bars. In nightclubs. At home. And all of them on parade. And although in the 20 years since, the magazine has developed into an internationally renowned style magazine, full of fancy photographers and the very fanciest models, this 'straight-up' element has never been lost. Above all else, id has always been about people.
When it launched, i-D didn't look like any other magazine on the shelves, and in many respects still doesn't. Turned on its side, the id logo resembles a wink and a smile, and every cover since the first issue has featured a winking, smiling face; a theme that has given the magazine an iconic identity as strong as that developed by Playboy in the 1950s (which always included a bunny silhouette somewhere on its cover). I can still remember where I was when I saw the first issue, in September 1980. I saw it on a friend's desk in the first floor second year graphics department of St Martins School of Art in Covent Garden, where I was a student. Having long been an avid reader of domestic style magazines (New Style, Viz, Midnight, Boulevard), as well as their American counterparts (Interview, Punk etc.) - all of which focused on tightly-knit groups of micro-celebrities - it was refreshing to find something which plugged right into British subculture, a heat-seeking style-sheet which found room for every fledgling youth cult in the country - from punks, soul boys and new romantics to psychobillies, rockers and penny-ante trustafarians. Along with The Face, which had launched just a few months previously, i-D was suddenly the voice of a generation: a generation with no name.
Terry Jones felt that the best way to reflect the creativity he admired in street style was through 'immediacy', through visual imagery rather than just straight text, and so the magazine used typewriter-face print, ticker tape headlines and wild, often perverse graphics. And although this was a style born of necessity as much as any ideology, it gave the magazine an identity which preserves it to this day.
The magazine has always been A4 in size (slightly thinner than most glossies), though in the early days it was landscape as opposed to portrait and opened - somewhat annoyingly - longways. The first issue was just 40 pages, stuck together with three rickety staples, and cost 50p. A bargain. Fashion magazine No.1' it said on the cover, and that was all you really needed to know. Inside were several dozen 'straight-ups'. of various upwardly and downwardly mobile exhibitionists: Cerith Wyn Evans, a St Martins student, some fairly dodgy looking Blitz kids, a rockabilly or two, a goth and some teddy boys from Brighton. A girl called Pennie, interviewed about what she was wearing, had this to say about her jumper: 'I got it from some shop in Oxford Street. I can't remember the name. I get so mesmerised when I shop along Oxford Street I never notice the names.' (For the first few issues Terry only allowed photographers to shoot two frames per person, so the contact sheets became works of art in themselves, a sort of sartorial police file.) There were also a few fashion ads from Fiorucci, Robot and Swanky Modes. It even had a manifesto of sorts: i-D is a Fashion/Style Magazine. Style isn't what but how you wear clothes. Fashion is the way you walk, talk, dance and prance. Through i-D ideas travel fast and free of the mainstream - so join us on the run!. To print the magazine, Terry turned to Better Badges, a London-based company largely responsible for producing most of the fanzines in the capital. He told them he wanted to produce the world's first fashion fanzine, and they agreed to print 2,000 copies on the condition that Terry himself bought the entire print run. The launch was rather troubled as newsagents complained about the staples: people were piercing their fingers and getting blood over other magazines on the stands. This proved to be such a problem that there were only two newsagents who agreed to stock the second and third issues. Then Virgin stepped in, guaranteeing nationwide distribution, enabling the magazine to increase its print run exponentially. 'It just grew from there,' says Terry.
Terry was keen to reflect the fact that street style was a democratic, amorphous process. And id isn't, if truth be told, anything like a barometer of style. Even though the magazine originally branded itself "the Worldwide Manual of Style', it was never - has rarely been - prescriptive. Sensibly, Terry has always believed that it's important to like the bad stuff too. “I wanted to get the concept over that we don't lay down the rules about what you wear, the idea of "in-out" fashion,” he said at the time. He's never been particularly keen on drive-by journalism, not interested in ring-fencing people in arbitrary social groups. For the quintessential style magazine this is ironic, seeing that the 'style' magazines and newspaper lifestyle sections that came in its wake seemed devoted to the reductive. Id has been many things - irritating, infuriating, willfully obscure, over-extravagant and often impossible to read - but it has rarely been without substance.
In a world now awash with style magazines aimed at every different type of demographic, it is easy to forget that 20 years ago magazines like id just didn't exist. Id was the first street fashion magazine, a pick'n'mix grab-bag of punk fashion and DIY style, a pop-cultural sponge soaking up everything around it with inelegant haste. During a decade when the safety net of society was gradually folded away, i-D catalogued a culture of self-sufficiency, even if that culture was at times only sartorial. Sure, the Eighties was the decade when 'designer' became not just a prefix but also an adjective, but it was also the decade of unreconstructed, and often rabid individualism.
The Eighties had a lot to live up to. If the Sixties had been a decade of confrontational happiness, and the post-punk Seventies full of agents of social change, the Eighties were crowded with a generation devoted to self-empowerment and self-improvement. It was a decade which couldn't wait to get ahead of itself. Reinvention became almost a prerequisite for success as soap stars became pop stars, pop stars became politicians and politicians became indistinguishable from their Spitting Image puppets. Everyone was a party catalyst, everyone a star. When Andy Warhol said that in the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes, he wasn't talking about New York in 1973; he was unwittingly describing London in 1985. A vortex of entrepreneurial hedonism, London hadn't swung so much since 1966. And i-D got jiggy before anyone else, being the first magazine to hold a mirror up to what it saw, exploiting the boom in youth culture and London's burgeoning reputation as a crucible of transient young talent. In a way the magazine made a genuine - if not always coherent - attempt to return control of the fashion world to those who actually inhabited it.
Enjoying the freedom of a magazine that was bound by no constraints, Terry could often be perverse in his art direction and design. Contrary. Bloody-minded. If a picture suggested that it be used full frame, full bleed, then Terry's inclination would be to crop it in half and print it upside down with a 30% cyan tint running through it. The best picture from a session would be used small while the worst one would be used across a spread. When asked why he did it, he'd cut back with, 'Why do it like everyone else?” And usually he was right. Video grabs and TV stills were used to provide a sense of speed and the unexpected. Body copy and headlines were unflinchingly distorted while computer type became one of the magazine's defining characteristics a decade before it arrived in publications such as Wired and Dazed & Confused. Terry likes to describe his graphic discipline as 'instant design', a saturated 'mash' of photography and graphics, of colour and type. But although the result often looks as though it were arrived at randomly, this belies the rigour of its execution. “I don't like the concept of perfection,” Terry once said, 'because it implies finality. I like the end product to look easy and that takes a lot of effort. Instant design is [actually] a lie: it is never instant. '
If you left anything lying around the office for long enough, it would probably end up in the magazine. Passports, address books, taxi receipts, Terry would find a use for them all. I once made the mistake of showing Terry some old family snapshots, only to come back from holiday and find they were in the magazine. Heigh ho. If you couldn't get an original copy of a particular photograph then why not just photocopy the book you found it in? It was unlikely anyone was ever going to notice. It was a very democratic place to work, too, where a receptionist could be fired one day and hired the next as a features writer. That particular receptionist is now the television critic of The Observer. Which is just as well because she was a lousy receptionist.
Because i-D was a vehicle for art direction as much as journalism, the magazine found itself being haphazard, irrational and wildly pretentious. The readers understood this and somehow went along with it. Some of them, anyway. In the fifth anniversary issue - which also contained Nick Knight's unforgettable studies of 100 of the most influential personalities ever to appear in id (a bizarre enough group including household names like Patsy Kensit, Morrissey and John Peel as well as some of the least tightly-wrapped people you could ever meet) - various readers were asked how they'd sum up the magazine. 'You discover all the secret talents and mad scientists,” wrote Michael Odimitrakis from Kostas, while J Dominic from Deptford compared the magazine to Marks & Spencer's Continental Biscuit Assortment (a rare accolade indeed). My favourite comment, and one that I'd forgotten until I looked through the issue recently, was sent anonymously and is nothing if not succinct: You are a stupid lot of wanking ignorant trendies.' Charmed, I'm sure.
For a journalist, Terry's often total disregard for the printed word was, on occasions, supremely painful. I remember the first time I was victim to his vagaries. As a cub reporter on the magazine, I had just returned from an assignment - no doubt interviewing some equally artless fashion designer, club runner or nascent pop star - to find Terry laying out the next issue. As I glanced at the layout of one of my articles, I saw Terry cutting the bottom three inches off the galley, so my piece ended inelegantly, slap-bang in the middle of a sentence. Sensing my apprehension, he turned to me and smiled: 'Well, it won't fit!
It was to be the first of many such arguments, most of which Terry won. I was there from the end of 1983 to the end of 1987, four years in which we tried - relentlessly, religiously and, I must say, with a modicum of success - to reinvent our own particular wheel. Using guerrilla graphics, cutting-edge fashion photography and tongue-in-cheek text ('Why did God make homosexuals?” asked one gay fashion editor in a particularly flippant editorial. 'To take fat girls to discos), Terry Jones's id quickly gained a reputation as the complete Situationist tip sheet and street fashion bible. Terry not only gave me a career, he gave careers to hundreds of other teenage and twentysomething wannabes. From Nick Knight and Juergen Teller to Caryn Franklin and Alix Sharkey, from Corinne Day and Robin Derrick to Simon Foxton and Ray Petri, from Judy Blame and Mark Lebon to Richard Burbridge and Donald Christie, from Craig McDean and Edward Enninful to Kathryn Flett, Beth Summers and Georgina Goodman. To name only the few.
The real stars of the magazine weren't the contributors, they were the subjects, whether it be Leigh Bowery cavorting about in the depths of Taboo, a Japanese cycle boy in an Eisenhower jacket or some UK garage DJ whose name no-one can ever remember. Or Sade, Madonna, Björk, Kate Moss or L'il Kim, all winking as though their careers depended on it (often they did). Any fashion designer, photographer, stylist, hairdresser, filmmaker, actor, model, style journalist, make-up artist, club-runner, DJ or pop star who has contributed anything to what is laughingly called the zeitgeist in the last 20 years has, at some time or another, appeared in id 'How much do I spend on clothes?” said Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Paul Rutherford in id in 1984. 'Is Jean Paul Gaultier a rich man? Does Yohji Yamamoto fly first class?” The id story is the story of pop culture in the last 20 years of the 20th Century; a roll-call of the great, the good and the unseemly, a litany of bad behaviour and unhealthy diets. While The Face could claim to be no less influential, no magazine has produced such a rogue's gallery of achievement as id
I have dozens of favourite i-D covers - Kirsten Owen by Paolo Roversi from May 1998, Leigh Bowery by Johnny Rozsa from May 1987, Kate Moss by David Sims from February 1996 and Scary Spice by Terry Richardson from November 1997 for starters - though ironically, the two I like best bookend my time at the magazine. The first is Nick Knight's photograph of Sade, which was produced at the tail end of 1983, not just because it was the first issue I worked on, but also because in one small wink it said more about the Eighties than a thousand editorials ever could. Striking a defiant pose and offering an immaculate statement of intent, Sade looked as though she was about to conquer the world. (And 18 months later she did.) The other cover I love is the last one I worked on, the 'smiley' cover from December 1987, which incorporated the id wink as well as heralding the advent of acid house. It's one of the best magazine covers of the Eighties.
Since that issue, Terry Jones has produced over 150 editions of i-D, and his passion for the magazine is still all-consuming. Terry has always had an unerring sense of what constitutes good 'content' and is not often swayed by the faux or the flighty. He doesn't. suffer fools gladly and has become adept at giving people the fisheye. When you say something a little too expected or maybe even a bit dumb (as people sometimes do when in the presence of one of the best art directors in the world), he can cock his head slightly and look at you out of the corner of his eye. If you're lucky, he'll break into a smile; if you're not, he'll just nod slowly and probably never speak to you again.
Two decades since its launch, there should be little doubt that id is one of the most influential magazines in the world. Of course it always claimed to be (the arrogance of youth!), but now it is surely irrefutable.
Terry couldn't have done it alone, and apart from the people I've already entioned, there are others - Terry's lovely long-suffering wife Tricia, their daughter Kayt and son Matt, Tony Elliott (co-owner of the magazine since 1984), Perry Haines, Al McDowell, Steve Dixon, Steve Johnson, Mark Lebon, Moira Bogue, Nick Knight, Edward Enninful, Avril Mair, John Godfrey, Matthew Collin, David Swindells, Craig McDean, Jane How, Pat McGrath, Stephen Male, Karl Plewka, Eugene Souleiman, Kevin Ellis, Suzanne Doyle, Rick Waterlow - who I know have all played enormous roles in the magazine's continued success.
In a way, these people have all helped institutionalise i-D The last 20 years have seen the fashion industry become as powerful, as all-consuming and as ubiquitous as any branch of celebrity culture, yet through it all id has managed to somehow stay one spotlight away from the main stage. While it now looks more like a cat-killing phone directory than a fashion fanzine, it still sits resolutely on the cutting edge; still a bastion of individuality and a champion of the avant-garde, the ridiculous and the outrageous. From Steve Strange to Craig David, what a long strange trip it's been.
My advice is to keep on winking. You never know where it might get you.
Dylan Jones is the editor of GQ magazine.