Breaking the Rules

On October 20th, Rizzoli released Dazed & Confused: Making It Up As We Go Along, celebrating the publication’s 20 influential years as an authority on contemporary style, design, and popular culture. Launched in London in 1991 by Mr. Jefferson Hack and photographer Rankin, Dazed & Confused pushed the boundaries of printed publications, coming up with unique mediums and subjects while always discovering new talents. Here, Life+Times has an exclusive look at some of the iconic photographs throughout the magazine’s history, as well as some insight as to why Mr. Hack considered himself both dazed…and confused.

”We were the kids staring down the dawn of the 1990s. We were the post-pop generation with punk and Buffalo fighting for room in our collective psyche, and we were born into an acid house-fueled “Summer of Love” – a long, hot summer shaping a new kind of do-it-yourself revolution in Britain while the digital re-imaging of the communication to come took embryonic shape. In a mass consumer media without an underground counterpoint, without a cultural-resistance movement of note, launching Dazed & Confused was never a commercial proposition. All that we saw out there was an already codified style-culture that we didn’t want to belong to or buy into, we were complete outsiders; we were unknown and untrained; we were insolently anti-everything yet positively pro-everything; we were anti-style and pro-ideas; we were anti-formula and pro- invention… we were dazed, and we were confused.” – Jefferson Hack, Co-Founder and Editor-In-Chief, Dazed & Confused