They say if you can remember the 60s you weren’t there. David Bailey very much was there, though, and it’s through his lens that the very swingingest of London has long been remembered: the city itself, its scene, its celebrities. Jagger wrapped in that furry hood, Caine in those signature glasses, the Krays exuding menace.
It’s why you’ll rarely see mention of Bailey’s name without the term ‘era-defining’ following shortly thereafter.
But a new book, Eighties Bailey, shifts its focus down the timeline. Two decades on from David Bailey the upstart we arrive at David Bailey the established documentarian in an era of bold colours and big hair.
‘The eighties turned out to be magic…[which] came as a surprise,’ surmises Bailey in his puckish intro. ‘And possibly turned into the most amazing time in London. [It] was getting a second chance in fashion, art, theatre and cinema.’
Grace Coddington and Marie Helvin photographed in 1980
Grace Coddington, on foreword duty, describes Bailey’s Primrose Hill studio as ‘ground zero for the dynamic spirit of the time’ and plenty of fashion and music’s finest were more than happy to head to London to shoot with him.
Jerry Hall and Marie Helvin crop up a lot in the book (spectacularly permed in a couple of instances), Tina Turner reclines in red, and a young Anna Wintour twice peers out from beneath her bob.
‘I was never a big fan of fashion in the eighties,’ Coddington concedes, ‘but the photographs here…have such a strong point of view I am beginning to come around.’ And sure enough, alongside those trademark monochrome portraits — of Grace Jones and Dolph Lundgren, of Anita Pallenberg, of his wife in Alaïa on the cover — there are some riotously colourful spreads and surrealist leanings that are strikingly timeless compared to so much from the decade in question.
Of course, Bailey adds some serious cultural heft for magazines wanting to channel a certain Englishness in shoots, and there’s plenty of that too: raincoats, terriers, the seaside, pearls, fur, lace, stilettos, an impeccably coiffed Diana, Princess of Wales, in an off-the-shoulder number, a none-more-goth Susie Cave (then Bick), and Christy Turlington in tweed.
The east-end lad with a camera remained suitably prosaic whenever pressed about his craft, saying: ‘The pictures are not about me. I spend more time talking to the person than I do taking pictures.’ But here is an abiding testament to a time — often overlooked for the fetishised high-fashion 70s and the en vogue again 90s — when London was beginning to establish itself as a modern cultural powerhouse.
Bailey might think of it as chatting and snapping, but there will be plenty who prefer to call it era-defining all over again.
‘Eighties Bailey’, published by Taschen, is on sale now for £100.
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