Most people know of Judy Blame, who died on Monday, aged 58, for his era-defining work styling and art-directing his closest friend and creative ally, Neneh Cherry.

Back then, in 1989 Neneh was Britain’s brightest, freshest riposte to the knock-off, b-boy culture of 80s Canal Street New York. With Blame she appeared fully formed, a swaggering cross between Jean-Michel Basquiat and Roxanne Shanté. Leaf through your record collection - Björk’s Debut, Cherry’s Raw Like Sushi - and you will probably find you already own a piece of Blame’s wonderful art world.

Judy Blame at Somerset House in London in 2014. Photograph: David M Benett/Getty Images

Judy Blame was born as Chris Barnes in Leatherhead, Surrey, but moved to London as a teenager. While he went on to find success both in the mainstream and the underground as an art director, stylist, designer and visual iconoclast, Blame started out as a designer and kid about town. Chris was rechristened Judy, after Garland, by Roxy Music’s favourite couturier Antony Price, while working the cloakroom at Heaven in London in the early 80s. Blame proudly told the tale of Richard Branson tried to sack him when he took over ownership of the club for one particularly outrageous choice of workwear. No chance.

Blame was central to pop’s compelling habit for reinvention. He introduced Björk to the Belgian designer Martin Margiela, and Kylie Minogue to the photographer Juergen Teller and designer Azzedine Alaïa. He spent a year developing ideas with Massive Attack to help visualise a new outfit for the 90s to extend their reach beyond Bristol’s sound-system culture. When her eye makeup ran down her face on a Shakespeare’s Sister shoot, Blame told the singer Siobhan Fahey to keep it – it made her look a little more Baby Jane. He remodelled Boy George as fashion’s disappearing, ghostly pearly king. In other words, you know Judy Blame’s work even if you don’t know Judy Blame.

Yet, despite his commercial success, he stayed faithful to the central tenets of punk. He upended culture, took a scalpel to it, then refashioned it as something new. It was Blame who was responsible for readers graduating from the innocent world of Smash Hits to the countercultures documented in i-D and the Face. He used his work as a stylist to document the world around him, shaping full editorials riven with social conscience. His work was not about the glib fabulousness of fashion. Instead he used it as a tool to talk about issues that concerned him. He would arrive on shoots and create the pieces that models would wear from scratch. For Blame, styling was never about simply taking items from a rail of clothes and seeing how they worked together.

Björk’s album, Debut. Photograph: PR Company Handout

But he wasn’t just an outstanding stylist, art director and designer. He was funny, too: a scabrous acid wit and fabulous gossip. He was rarely without a cigarette. Not long after I first met him, Blame took great delight in telling me he had spotted my boyfriend and me eating our tea in the Tottenham Court Road branch of McDonald’s before a particularly elite fashion party. He loved pricking pomposity and delusion – and made light work of it. “I was hiding in there, too, dear,” he said. He was the very opposite of the fashion deity sequestered behind velvet ropes in an ivory tower.

Neneh Cherry, who worked closely with Blame, in 1989. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives

My favourite Blame story, though, was his blowing the budget for dressing the extras in Duran Duran’s Wild Boys video, then spending the night before filming scavenging the Hoxton streets for rubbish to stitch together. It set the template for what was to come – everything he achieved in his stuffed bank of work. Blame’s vaults run deep. Pictures, moving images, trinketry, clothing, his breathtaking assemblage of everyday items as high-class jewellery. A small portion of it was collated at the ICA for a retrospective of his work in 2016, but the exhibition barely scratched the surface. Give Blame a safety pin, a button, a needle and thread and he would return it not as an accessory, but as art.

In so many ways, Blame wasn’t really a fashion person at all. He was an inventor, an ideologue, a craftsperson. His tools were sometimes the work of the designers he loved – he was the first to shoot Helmut Lang, then the first to shoot Alexander McQueen. More often than not, he preferred to work the rubbish you step over in the street (indeed, he made jewellery using a process called mudlarking, which involved looking for treasure on the beach).

Judy was touched by a deep, throbbing misanthropy which conflicted directly against his need for people and love. He was spiky as hell and didn’t suffer fools gladly. But you weren’t scared because you knew it was all in honour of a better purpose, one he wore with humility, gentlemanliness and wit.



Blame with Pam Hogg in 2016. Photograph: David M Benett/Getty Images

My generation learned about fashion from Blame and his old friend Ray Petri, the two people most responsible for the gallant watermark drawn in British street fashion that was the Buffalo movement. When Buffalo Stance became a hit for Neneh Cherry, they lifted its cerebral ethos from the pages of niche, independent fashion magazines to MTV and then the world. Petri didn’t live to see his influence live on everywhere. But Blame did. He worked with Marc Jacobs, Kim Jones and Christopher Shannon, all acolytes and apostles of the celestial Blame way. Most recently, his handiwork made it to Moschino under the tutelage of another of the reams of his disciples, Jeremy Scott. Fashion editors adored him.

Blame’s favourite work, he decided when collating materials for the ICA show, was the video he art-directed and styled for Neneh Cherry’s cover of the Cole Porter classic I’ve Got You Under My Skin, for the Aids charity, Red, Hot and Blue. They had a budget of peanuts, but fashioned something lavish and provocative with it. Cherry wore Leigh Bowery. Their longtime collaborator Jean-Baptiste Mondino directed. Petri was wheeled in from London to the shoot in Paris, during the crippling last days of his Aids diagnosis. So much purpose; so much talent.

The thing about punk is that death is part of the deal. It is the noble rot to its philosophical pulse. On Sunday night, among the mawkish tributary RIPs collated to a cello quartet at the Baftas, keen fashion eyes will have spotted the face of another of Blame’s great friends, the industriously gifted film designer Alan MacDonald. Blame, MacDonald and the late designer Christopher Nemeth, were the instigators of the House of Beauty and Culture in the 80s, a makeshift ideas factory running out of Kingsland Road on the way up to Dalston in east London. The rent was never paid, the kettle always on, the air thick with the beautiful fog of dedicated smokers. By Tuesday, Blame had joined his old chums again.

The House of Beauty and Culture – the 80s boutique, studio, and crafts collective in London – lived their creative lives without fear. They were punk to the touch. Their inspiration will continue to endure for generations. If they could read this now, they would probably say: “Oh, do fuck off.” As for Blame, he was a towering collusion of the British pop riot at its most provocative, metropolitan, countercultural and, yes, often its most beautiful.