On Friday 4th October 2024, the Fashion & Textile Museum in Bermondsey launches their new exhibition ‘Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80’s London’. Derek Ridgers image of Leigh Bowery photographed in his home in 1987 is selected as the poster image and will be available as a limited edition print. The exhibition runs until March 2025.
Read MoreDerek Ridgers was invited to the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol to be interviewed for Martin’s ‘Sofa Sessions’ series. They discuss Derek’s photographic career and his extensive youth culture archive.
Read MoreBetween 1978 and 1987, renowned British photographer Derek Ridgers captured London youth culture in all its glory. With skinheads, punks, and new romantics, in clubs and on the street, his images have come to define a seminal decade of British subculture.
Derek's latest book 'The London Youth Portraits' published by ACC Art Books, celebrates his finest portraiture from this period, including unpublished portraits.
'I only visited Ku once and that was in 1984. It was the night Divine played. It was a bit like Camden Place transposed to the Med. The building itself was like no other club I’ve been to before or since, insofar as it was more like a James Bond film set than a club. Half of it was in the open air, there was a swimming pool and a water slide in the shape of the neck of a dragon.'
Read MoreHighSnobiety licensed Derek Ridgers snogging couple image taken at the club Gossips 1978 for their editorial feature ‘Pearls, Pins & Provocateurs’ on how the punk aesthetic continues to influence fashion and challenge social norms.
Read MoreDerek Ridgers 80's club portraits exhibiting in Everything at Once: Postmodernity, 1967 - 1992, Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn. The great age of subcultures, disco, punk and techno-pop and shoulder pads! Exhibition runs until 24th January 2024.
Read MoreDerek Ridgers relives his nights at the Blitz Club and delved into archive, featuring pictures of the era-defining New Romantic club night for a 12 page Art Portfolio article in issue 70 of 10 Magazine.
Read More‘Young Limbs Rise Again’ is a limited edition vinyl and cd box set and book that celebrate the subculture of Goth from the music played and bands that performed at the legendary Batcave, a weekly club night hosted at the heart of Soho’s Dean Street in the early 1980s.
Read MoreUnravel Productions consulted on the film ‘Tramps’ by director Kevin Hegge licensing Blitz Club era imagery from the archives of renowned subculture photographer Derek Ridgers and photographer and anthropologist Ted Polhemus.
TRAMPS! is a feature-length documentary that looks at how, in London in the 1980s, an onslaught of art students arriving in the city resulted in a unique cross-fertilization of British art, fashion, music and film which created a flourish of creative output, culminating in a group known as "The New Romantics"
Read MoreDave Swindells and Derek Ridgers archives feature in the final commemorative print issue of Time Out magazine. Dave was the Time Out Club Editor between 1986 - 2009 and his recent book ‘Acid House As It Happened’ is featured, along with some of Derek’s London street style portraiture .
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