When wondering what was the English fashion scene like in the 1980s, we easily imagine a scenario in which the territories of style, music and art overlapped so to shape the iconic definition of popular culture.

Being one of the new wave of designers who emerged at the beginning of the 1980s in London, fashion designer Pam Hogg was one of the heroines of this picture.

Hogg was born in Scotland, where she graduated in Fine Art and Printed Textiles at the Glasgow School of Art. While in Scotland, she won the Newbury Medal of Distinction, the Frank Warner Memorial Medal, the Leverhulme Scholarship and the Royal Society of Arts Bursary, thanks to which she moved to London and enrolled at Royal College of Art.

Hogg launched her first fashion collection in 1981. After selling her designs at Hyper Hyper in Kensington she opened her own shop in Newburgh Street, where her collections – named Psychedelic Jungle, Warrior Queen, Best Dressed Chicken in Town, And God Created Woman and Wild Wild Women of the West, just to name a few – were presented and sold to the ebullient British youth.

Since the very beginning of her career, her interests went way beyond fashion; she declared: ‘Music, rather than fashion, is my first love. I’m totally self-taught in both fields and weave in and out of them constantly, but fashion has turned out to be the most prolific medium that allows me a voice.’ Already at the end of the 1970s she first joined the band ‘Rubbish’ and stayed in the music business either as performer and designer. The link with music ended up in collaborations with many bands and personalities, as Debbie Harry, Paula Yates, Marie Helvin, Siouxsie Sioux and Marie Helvin, who used to regularly wear Hogg’s creations both on and off stage. Hogg also experimented as visual artist producing promos that were shown alongside Yoko Ono, Leigh Bowery, Warhol and Kraftwerk.

Hers is the design of the beautiful and very controversial dress British model Lady Mary Charteris wore for her wedding in 2012, which was then exposed in the exhibition ‘Wedding Dresses’ at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2014.

A renewed intrest in Hogg’s work happened in recent years, since many celebrities used her clothes in music videos and to attend public events, especially her well known catsuits. In 2016, she was invited to design the trophies for the Brit Awards.