‘Rebels and radicals: the story behind Buffalo's most enduring images’

In 1985, London was in the grip of an underground creative revolution. Dilapidated squats were occupied by artists, anarchic club nights were being thrown by performers like Leigh Bowery, and designers like Vivienne Westwood and John Galliano were redefining the boundaries of style. Among them all was a disruptive group who, in the pursuit of a new kind of fashion image, ended up pioneering a movement that would forever hold a special place in the story of British culture. They are, of course, Buffalo – a tight-knit collective founded by photographer Jamie Morgan and the late stylist Ray Petri, later joined by names like Nick and Barry Kamen, Mark Lebon, Judy Blame, and Neneh Cherry.

Everything they stood for was in the name. Buffalo adopted the Caribbean phrase to describe the rebel or ‘rude boy’, and as such, they cared little for the shoots in Vogue. Buffalo had its own ideas about what was beautiful. They cast diverse models found on the streets, put men in skirts, and dressed kids as mobsters, shooting them with the wit of the underdog and the poised reverence of Richard Avedon. Largely published in The Face and i-D, their work changed the very fabric of those magazines, which, before Buffalo, mainly mixed music profiles and straight-up street photography. Buffalo put a new face of fashion front and centre – but more than that, it went beyond fashion itself. The swagger of their MA1 bomber-jacketed crew rippled into music and nightlife, inspiring generations of creatives that came after them. Several figures at the forefront of British creativity today – Ibrahim Kamara, Campbell Addy, and Martine Rose, among them – trace their journeys back to its subversive ideas of style. 40 years later, and the spirit of Buffalo still very much lives on.