Pam Hogg, the maverick post-punk Scottish designer whose exquisite, otherworldly clothes almost defied description — shimmering catsuits that recalled David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust era and concoctions made from tulle, tartan, vinyl, velvet, satin, latex, leather, mesh and rough canvas, embellished with feathers, rivets, rosettes, sewing needles and, once, her own blood — died on Nov. 26 in London. She was 74.
Her death, at a hospice facility in East London, was from pancreatic cancer, her sister Angela Hogg said.
Ms. Hogg was an art school graduate living in London when she began making her own clothes in the early 1980s, using her body as a canvas and devising ever more elaborate outfits to get into Blitz, a club tucked away on a Covent Garden side street and that launched a generation of artists, performers and designers. Blitz kids, they were called. Boy George worked in the cloakroom dressed as Boudicca, the ancient queen of the Britons.
The door policy was strict: If you weren’t a peacock, and the right sort of peacock, you weren’t getting in. Among Blitz lore is the story about the night that David Bowie and Mick Jagger showed up, and Mr. Jagger was denied entry. (It had something to do with his shoes.)
“Blitz was the fashion riot police,” Ms. Hogg told The New York Times in 1999. “Everyone was so full on and severely checking you out. I think it must have been the weekly frenzy of finding new clothes to wear that planted the seeds of my fashion career.”
It was the era of what Caryn Franklin, the former fashion editor of i-D magazine, called the promenade.
“Everyone was promenading, on King’s Road, in the clubs,” she said in an interview. “There was this explosion of counterculture presentation. The way to market yourself was to wear your art, your commentary, your politics, your music. Fashion played a huge part. It was all very post-punk, very D.I.Y., very Day-Glo and studs, very tactile clothing. It wasn’t about looking stylish. Nobody aspired to success; they aspired to authenticity.”
In those years before social media, i-D magazine showcased London’s euphoric street style, and Ms. Hogg was among its stars. She was everywhere, singing in small bands, working as a D.J. and, later, as a filmmaker. And, always, she was a startling-looking presence, with Kabuki-white skin, candy-colored hair, blood-red lipstick and space-age sunglasses. She appeared on i-D’s cover in August 1989, in a photograph by Kevin Davies, sporting a leather crown.
As a designer, she was self-taught and worked improvisationally, fiercely and without sponsorship, slicing and stitching clothing on her own body, in a unheated studio in an industrial building. The cold, she said, helped her focus, though she developed pneumonia once from sleeping on the icy studio floor.
She was independent by choice, firm in her decision not to be steered by a “market” or to alter her idiosyncratic vision. “I’m giving them what they don’t know they want,” she told the BBC.
For a long time, she worked without assistants and made every garment by hand. In later years, student volunteers would pitch in. Buyers, and eventually celebrity stylists, struggled to understand why she couldn’t offer multiples of her work. Beyoncé’s team, Ms. Hogg said, once requested a selection of 25 outfits, and she had to turn them down.
She sold her work first at Hyper Hyper, an indoor fashion market on Kensington High Street that provided booths to young designers like her and Leigh Bowery, the Australian performance artist. For a while, Ms. Hogg had her own boutique on Newburgh Street. By the late 1980s, even Harrods and Bloomingdale’s sold her designs.
The singers Lady Gaga, Debbie Harry, Kylie Minogue and Björk all wore Ms. Hogg’s extravagant garments at one time or another, but it was Siouxsie Sioux, the punk rocker, who may have been her most devoted client; for decades, she performed in Ms. Hogg’s catsuits, looking like an extraterrestrial goth.
Sarah Mower, the London-based fashion critic at Vogue.com, described Ms. Hogg as “a unique Venn diagram of her Scottish anarchy crossed with U.K. fashion, music, club scenes, feminism and protest.”
When Ms. Hogg began doing her own fashion shows, the clothes were often finished — or half finished — at the 11th hour. At one show, she was unable to fit the pieces of an orange ensemble — shaped, gloriously, like a Dior New Look gown, but with rivets — into her sewing machine, so she pinned the bits together and sent the model out with a sign taped to her backside reading, “Collection Under Construction.”
On the morning before another show, in 2009, Ms. Hogg realized that she hadn’t finished the outfit for the finale, so she bundled up the pieces — flower buds made from mesh and silk ribbons — along with a roll of mesh she had scissored into panels and as many needles as she could find, and tossed all of it in a box.
“It was still in my imagination,” she recalled in 2016, in a TEDx talk in Scotland. With 20 minutes to go before the show, she said, she had marshaled her student volunteers to sew the pieces directly onto the model and, as the model moved toward the runway, Ms. Hogg saw that the needles they had used were hanging from the garment.
“I saw them glint and glimmer in the light,” she said, “and I thought, ‘Wow, this is the best part!’”
Ms. Hogg’s work was provocative, and often political. In 2009, she concluded a show with an ethereal-looking wedding dress made from satin and chiffon, its train smeared with her own blood and painted with the words “War Bride.” (She hadn’t sliced herself on purpose, but her frenzied work methods often resulted in injuries.)
Her 2014 collection CouRage was a homage to Pussy Riot, the Russian punk feminist band whose members were arrested in 2012. Models wore catsuits in a patchwork of rainbow colors, a nod to the band’s L.G.B.T.Q. activism, and carried placards that read, “This collection is not for sale.”
“After every show, I’m so broken I feel I can’t go though this again,” she said in her TEDx talk. “It’s through disarray, disruption and disorder that my work finds life.”
Pamela Elizabeth Hogg was born on Jan. 4, 1951, in Paisley, a town west of Glasgow. She was the third of four children of Mary (McLachlan) Hogg, a switchboard operator, and Andrew Hogg, a ship’s draftsman who changed careers to gardener after a bout of ill health.
The family was not well-off and, from age 6, Pam customized the donated clothes the Hoggs received from neighbors. She said that her father’s creativity had inspired her own.
“For birthdays and Christmas, he’d reveal something that he’d been making secretly for months in his shed,” she recalled at the TEDx talk. “And he’d say” — she lowered her voice to a whisper — “‘Nobody else has got one of these.’”
She was dyslexic and once told she was stupid by a teacher when she was young; it took her years to shake off the label, she said, but it reinforced her extreme work ethic. She went on to study fine art and textiles at the Glasgow School of Art and won a scholarship to London’s Royal College of Art, where she received a master’s degree in textiles in 1976.
In addition to her sister Angela, Ms. Hogg is survived by another sister, Valerie Williams, and a brother, David Hogg.
Ms. Hogg spent most of the 1990s making music, opening for Blondie during one U.K. tour after hastily putting together a band she named called Doll. Chris Stein, Blondie’s co-founder, compared her husky singing voice to that of a “weird Nico,” referring to the German-born singer who performed with the Velvet Underground. Ms. Hogg subsequently introduced Blondie to Hugh Reed and The Velvet Underpants, a Glasgow band.
After Ms. Hogg’s death, the Scottish-born singer Shirley Manson of the rock band Garbage left a comment on Ms. Hogg’s Instagram account. “That’s you away then hen,” she wrote. “Our dear, most distinguished doctor. Our revered Scottish fashion queen.”
Penelope Green is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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