Still dazed after all these years

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10 April 2012

Jefferson Hack calls it his 'OZ moment': the day when Dazed & Confused, the magazine he had started six years previously, as little more than a folded-up poster, with his old college mate John Rankin Waddell, became a provocative part of the global zeitgeist. 'It was May 1997,' says Hack. 'I was walking down the street towards the Dazed office in Soho and I saw TV vans, camera crews, photographers. I thought, "Who's died?" ' But there was no body or police cars. Hack put the key in the door of the office. 'And suddenly there was this rush. Microphones and camera lenses were thrust into my face.'

After reading an article in The New York Times about a grungy, anti-glamour trend, President Bill Clinton had spoken out against 'heroin chic', making reference to Corinne Day's photography in 'England's Dazed & Confused magazine', and how its bleak imagery was helping to corrupt the world's youth. The glorification of heroin 'is not creative, it's destructive,' said Clinton. 'It's not beautiful; it is ugly. And this is not about art; it's about life and death. And glorifying death is not good for any society.'

Now the press wanted a reaction from Dazed & Confused's 25-year-old editor. 'I thought, "Wow!" ' says Hack. 'The president of the most powerful country in the world has made a speech that name-checks our little magazine. It felt like a defining moment.'

Did Clinton have a point? I ask. Was Dazed responsible for glamorising drug-taking? 'It was a sensitive argument, but also a bullshit argument,' Hack says. 'We were doing lots of neo-realism. It was about stripping away artifice and showing how young people were living at that time. The images were very real and I guess that was shocking for people who had a certain idea about how fashion magazines should look.'

We are chatting about the past 20 years of Dazed & Confused in Rankin's office above his huge and mostly white modern studio in Kentish Town. Outside our glass box rows of willowy girls and bearded young men sit Photoshopping on large Mac screens. But the vibe is more Ugly Betty than Nathan Barley's Sugar Ape.

Certainly the Dazed team, which now numbers around 65 (mostly at the magazine group's Old Street offices), has come a long way from the one-room office opposite Pam Hogg's shop in Soho or the 'complete shithole' in Peckham that Hack used to share with Rankin, 'where the kitchen was the darkroom and the bath was the chemical bath for developing the prints'. As Hack reminisces, we leaf through the pages of Making It Up As We Go Along, the fat coffee-table book that celebrates Dazed & Confused's 20-year anniversary. It features a visually intoxicating mix of apparently off-duty Hollywood stars and the cream of East London's jolie laide. That is to say, plenty of bloody, corporeal YBA art and kids in Fred Perry tops doing lots of fag smoking and snarly V-flicking. There's raw and unshaven portraiture by Juergen Teller and edgy fashion photography by Nick Knight, shoots styled by Katie Grand, as well as serious articles about writers and artists and directors. The similarly titled exhibition opens at Somerset House today.

Hack, now 40, guides me through each image in earnest detail. He's serious, studiedly eloquent, softly spoken, prone to mid-Atlanticising his Ts and fearless in his use of such terms as 'transdisciplinary' and 'curatorial'.

During its 'curatorial' role in the publishing industry, he explains, Dazed has polarised opinion. The book includes lively quotes from supporters and detractors alike. REM frontman Michael Stipe calls it 'a lightning-rod force that has helped define every major cultural and political shift of the past two decades'. While an unnamed writer at Time Out said: 'Dazed & Confused is a burgeoning style magazine staffed by youths who are prone to talking absolute shit.' Hack allows himself a rare smirk at this.

We alight on a 1999 spread starring a naked Kate Moss. 'That was the shoot where I first met Kate,' says Hack wistfully. 'I was taken aback by how chatty and uninhibited she was - that unguarded thing was really captivating.' Questions for the Croydon beauty included: 'There's been a lot of different men mentioned in your life recently, but no one permanent relationship. Is there no one out there good enough for you?' His canny coyness worked. Kate and Hack went on to date for four years, before splitting up in 2004. They have a nine-year-old daughter, Lila Grace. 'I saw Lila last night,' says Hack, beaming. 'I see her lots. I have a lovely family and Kate's a great mum.'

But what is it like dating a supermodel? Hack smiles again. 'Invasion of privacy is annoying but still, it was all part of my growing up. You either sink or swim.' He sought tips from his rock-star and actor friends: Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream, Björk, Jude Law, Sadie Frost and Jonny Lee Miller. One of Jefferson's anecdotes starts off with the line 'I was at the Serpentine Gallery and I bumped into Brian Eno who I hadn't seen since Sarajevo when we were at this warehouse party with The Edge' (from U2). You have to admit, he's well connected. 'I got really good advice from them, learned how to deal with things.' After breaking up with Moss, Hack became engaged to the Belgian model Anouck Lepere, but is now single, although he was spotted leaving an after-party at London's W Hotel earlier this month with Scarlett Johansson.

Hack was named after the 19th-century US President Thomas Jefferson. His middle name is Winston, after Churchill. The son of a tobacco salesman and a Swiss-born teacher, he was born in Montevideo, Uruguay (his father and mother met in Arosa in the Swiss Alps, where she was working as a ski instructor and he was on holiday from Argentina, where he was area manager for Rothmans). As a child, Jefferson lived in South America, Singapore and Belgium, before settling in Kent. 'I felt very dislocated because of all the moving around,' he says. 'So magazines - Interview, National Geographic - were a way of having a window on to a world that I didn't have access to.'

At Chatham House Grammar School - whose alumni include the Tory Prime Minister Sir Edward Heath and, rather thrillingly for Hack, Nik Turner, founder of the rock band Hawkwind - the young Jesus and Mary Chain and Cure fan discovered the Print Society, a place where he could smoke, hang out and make fanzines.

By now, young Jefferson was being chased around town by the local casuals and getting beaten up for being pretentious. 'There weren't many kids in my area who were into second-hand books and Icelandic music.' It was during a journalism course at the London College of Printing that Hack got his break. He met Rankin, who was on a sabbatical from a photography degree. 'Rankin came back to take control of the student magazine and went round recruiting.' A group interview was arranged but only Jefferson showed up. 'He was gawky and awkward but stylishly dressed. Really into the blues and carrying a harmonica,' Rankin says. 'I liked that. Everyone else at the college seemed to have their futures all mapped out. Jefferson didn't.' Together they produced issues of the student magazine at the weekends on the college Mac. Jefferson pulled regular all-nighters. His lecturers took him aside: 'We know you've got a drug problem and if you want to stay on this course we think you should clean up.' 'I am not on drugs,' he explained. 'I'm spending all weekend on caffeine, actually experiencing what it's like to make a magazine rather than talking about it.' He soon quit.

Their student magazine, Untitled, went on to win three Guardian Student Media Awards. 'More than a magazine, Dazed started off as a collective of people who were expressing themselves through a poster fanzine and through the events we did,' Hack says of their earliest attempts at publishing. Working to a Warholesque template, he explains how they made the magazine 'a hang-out space, a clubhouse, a social scene, a network environment a conceptual thing for young creatives'. 'It didn't follow any publishing rule book because we didn't know anything about publishing.'

For the first five years, they survived by running club nights parallel to the ethos of the magazine, with names such as 'Blow Up' and 'Been There Seen It Done It'. 'This was the early 1990s. London was totally happening at that time. Our location [by now in Old Street] was crucial.' The Dazed partners didn't have media contacts or know how to approach celebrities, so business was done in East End pubs; sponsorship deals were brokered in clubs. The photographer Nick Knight introduced them to a young Lee (Alexander) McQueen. They sought advice from Malcolm McLaren, and Ingrid Sischy at Interview. Björk phoned up and said she was a fan and wanted to be in the magazine. Rankin's various girlfriends - the actress Kate Hardie and stylist Katie Grand - brought in more actors and stylists. Established photographers, writers and rookies alike didn't mind working for free because Dazed gave them freedom of expression.

'The people that we were really connecting with were of a similar age and similar lack of experience. There was a spirit of DIY,' says Hack. 'It was in the throes of Ecstasy culture. It was very optimistic. It was media as art project. It was about self-expression, creativity and looking at the margins of culture.' It makes money, he tells me, not just via its circulation (global monthly circulation figures were recently reported at an average of 90,529) and advertising revenue but through myriad sponsorship deals, attaching the banner name of the magazine to other hipster-hungry brands. Even its very first edition was subtly sponsored by Black Bush Irish Whiskey.

Twenty years on and Hack is still very much in the thick of those deals but laments that he is now 'too old to live the Dazed life'. And way too busy. He reels off his schedule for the next few days: two trips to Paris, a day in New York, various meetings to discuss consultancies and exhibitions in Amsterdam, the magazine he edits for Chanel, the secret website he's in charge of, the shoe line he's developing, the Dazed 20th celebrations... Not to mention the endless social and cultural events - hanging out with Grayson Perry, Gerhard Richter and Scarlett Johansson.

London's best-connected man says he's going to keep on working in publishing 'until I am as old as Hugh Hefner'. These days he lives a long way from his old Peckham dump, in a Georgian house in North London full of art and photo-graphy gifted to him by friends and work associates. He likes to buy old typewriters and art books but doesn't collect magazines. 'I don't even have a full set of Dazeds.' He refuses to tweet or use Facebook. 'The magazines and the websites are enough,' he says. 'I like having the tools but I don't want to become the tool.' ES

The book, Dazed & Confused: Making It Up As We Go Along, is on sale now (Rizzoli, £35). The exhibition, 20 Years of Dazed & Confused magazine, opens today at Somerset House

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