I first started visiting the notorious Blitz Club as a student at Central St. Martins. This shabby, World War II themed Covent Garden bar with its wooden tables and tiny dance floor became the stuff of style legend with its fascinating array of peacocks and pin-up girls.

Founded by maverick Steve Strange it was frequented by fashion freaks from milliner Stephen Jones, DJ Princess Julia, to designers Pam Hogg and Bodymap plus Boy George, Fiona Dealey, Marilyn, film-maker John Maybury, Chris Sullivan and Grayson Perry. We were collectively dubbed the “Blitz Kids,” and our common aim, whatever our diverse backgrounds, was simply to overthrow the established order. We lived for Tuesday nights.

At the Blitz, the audience was the show. To a soundtrack by David Bowie, Kraftwerk, Spandau Ballet and The Normal, we did a weird robotic jive. The Blitz crowd loved theatricality. Looks were eclectic, celebrating diversity and subverting iconic imagery, so that could mean dressing as a punk, a priest or a Leather Queen. We did not want to label ourselves with our clothes so at the Blitz you would find a Pierrot sharing a drink with a beatnik, a butch rocker dancing with a nun or a geisha (both looks worn by Boy George!). I always wore a headband inspired by Robert de Niro in The Deerhunter, with tuxedo jackets and bondage trousers. We were cultured clubbers who wanted to challenge the status quo and explore ideals of glamour, sexuality and taste. We had nothing, so we had nothing to lose.

This mood spilled over onto the pages of the new style magazines BLITZ, The Face and i-D, so when I became fashion editor of BLITZ magazine, my friends starred on the pages. As model Amanda Cazalet recalls, BLITZ magazine was a home for ‘misfits and vagabonds’. We lived on the outskirts of society and offered an alternative way of living and looking at fashion. This eclectic spirit mixed the hard-edged and hopelessly romantic, the slick alongside the unraveling and undone. The DIY legacy of punk provided a template for something delightfully organic and hand-made while the flamboyant dreams of the Blitz kids defined a new aesthetic that found beauty in the unexpected. And the spirit still lives on.