When London Fashion Week set up shop in 1984 in Kensington’s Commonwealth Institute car park, Katharine Hamnett was intrigued. The designer, who founded her namesake brand in 1979 and launched her first logo T-shirt in 1981, had never been to a fashion show for fear of being influenced by other designers, but was fascinated by what a show could be. For the Saint Martin’s School of Art alumni, it was very much about performance. “Why do you buy clothes?” she asks now. “You think they are going to make you happy, so it’s about making moments of happiness.”
London Fashion Week’s debut marked a big year for Hamnett personally. Her father wanted to live until 1984 to see if it would be like the George Orwell novel. He didn’t. “I have always been a lazy person, happy to keep my nose above water, but this year, I really went for it,” she shares of signing up to the show circuit with vigour. Katharine’s rambunctious presentation centred around a James Bond theme, but the smoke machine primed for the big finale popped off accidentally at the start. With photographers fuming about the smog ruining “the shot”, but a party atmosphere in the air regardless, models danced around the stage to the sound of the Rolling Stones and Aretha Franklin. Harvey Weinstein – the now disgraced mogul who was a burgeoning producer at the time – told Hamnett afterwards, “We could take that show on the road!” But for the woman of the hour, there was a huge feeling of relief that, quite simply, nothing had fucked up. “We were complete amateurs!”
A formal British Fashion Council-backed schedule seemed like a good idea, because the industry had been suffering from the lack of a governing body, like Paris’s Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture. Previously, Hamnett had shown her work at French trade fairs because many fashion buyers didn’t – and still don’t – come to the UK. But, in fact, her 007 spectacular garnered more publicity than Katharine could have ever imagined because of a certain Downing Street publicity moment.
Hamnett and her peers were invited by the British government to attend a special LFW reception at the home of the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Katharine wasn’t going to attend – “why should we share a warm glass of white wine with that murderess?” said her friend Jasper Conran – but she rationalized it in her mind as an amazing photo opportunity that was simply too good to miss. She spent the afternoon knocking up a silk tee printed with the message “58% Don’t Want Pershing” (a reference to the unpopular proliferation of Pershing nuclear missiles across Europe) in the office. “It looked good in photos, but it was hideous in the flesh,” she explains of laying out the slogan in Letraset and then exposing it onto photosensitive linen – “There were no Snappy Snaps in those days.”
Wary of letting the cat out of the bag too early and being barred from the reception, Hamnett fended off eager cloak room attendees with murmurs of “I’m chilly”, and kept her coat firmly on until she reached the reception line. “Oh at last, a true original!” exclaimed Thatcher to Hamnett, who had mini-cabbed her way West in her ink-splattered work clothes. “Politics is about first-rate charm,” reflects Katharine. “I almost felt sorry for her while revealing the T-shirt.” After enthusiastic noises at first and then a head tilt to enable closer inspection, Thatcher “squawked like a chicken”. Hamnett spent the remainder of the party trailing the PM, hoping to speak to her about acid rain, but being ghosted until she was the last attendee in the room. Thatcher’s parting words? “I am a scientist and I don’t know what causes acid rain.”
Hamnett subsequently bowled off to a party at Conran’s new digs – “It was beautifully romantic, with white tablecloths, silver chandeliers and candles” – where everyone cheered her arrival because they had just witnessed their friend’s encounter with a world leader on TV. “It was lovely to be together before the phone started ringing with people from all over the world,” she recalls of the comradeship at the heart of that early fashion scene.
Headlines have suggested Hamnett’s “Pershing” moment was the most used photograph in ’84. It was also a stroke of genius from the creative who knew her T-shirts would be copied, and get people talking about immensely pressing matters of the time. The downside? “Almost everything is still relevant today,” muses this fierce campaigner, who is currently zeroing in on the importance of voting in her work. “We thought T-shirts were going to change things, but T-shirts, marches and demonstrations only create fellowship with man. We have to put pressure on elected representatives, we’re watching them lose control of our democracy.”
While Hamnett calls those legendary tees a “double-edged sword” – “Yes, they were great, but perhaps they gave the impression that something had been done when it hadn’t” – in hindsight, their true impact lay, if not in politics, then in their illustration of the power of clothes. Katharine’s latest T-shirt announces that its wearer is disgusted to be British, but from the industry’s point of view Hamnett, with her staunch beliefs and eco-conscious practices, is an example of what British fashion can be. London Fashion Week could still use a little more of her no-holds-barred processes – and certainly that government recognition.