The story began with a phone call. In 1991, a photographer called Rankin Waddell, then 23, rang a journalism student called Jefferson Hack, then 18, about working on the student magazine at London College of Printing. The first issue they produced together was called Untitled. They won the Guardian Media Awards for Best Student Magazine. Then they decided to do something larger. They had no money, no contacts, no advertisers, and no experience. They shared Rankin's flat in Peckham, where the kitchen served as a darkroom and every surface was an instrument for developing film. It was, Hack has said, really difficult to wash and eat, but they got a lot of work done.
What they made was Dazed & Confused — launched in 1991 as a single A2 fold-out newsprint poster, promoted at London club nights that the founders ran to fund the operation. The early currency was not money but innovation. Whether you were a photographer, an artist, a band, or a stylist, you wanted your work to appear groundbreaking. In those first years, the team included stylist Katie Grand — then a Central Saint Martins student whom Rankin met at a club — graphic designer Ian Taylor, and a rotating cast of collaborators recruited almost entirely from nightlife. Hack met practically everyone he worked with in nightclubs. And he means everyone.
By the mid-1990s, Dazed was at the beating heart of the era the media would dub Britart and Britpop, capturing the zeitgeist in a way no other publication did. The magazine championed raw, analogue photography by David Sims, Corinne Day, Glen Luchford, and Jürgen Teller. It ran legendary interviews with David Bowie, Björk, Harmony Korine, and David Lynch. President Bill Clinton name-checked the magazine as being responsible for heroin chic — which the team regarded as confirmation they were doing something right. Katy England, who would go on to work closely with Alexander McQueen, joined around 1994 after Rankin asked her to work the door at a club night in a Leicester Square basement called Maximus. Nicola Formichetti, who later became creative director of the magazine and would go on to dress Lady Gaga, moved to London specifically because of Dazed.
In 2001, Hack launched Another Magazine, a luxury biannual. In 2005 came Another Man. In 2010, Nowness, an independent luxury video channel originally partnered with LVMH. The student zine had become Dazed Media, an independent media group. In 2014, the magazine dropped "& Confused" from its name and went bimonthly before settling into its current quarterly rhythm. In 2021, Rizzoli published Dazed: 30 Years Confused: The Covers, a 288-page hardcover compiling 200 iconic covers. In 2022, the British Fashion Council gave Hack the Special Recognition Award for empowering emerging talent and shaping youth culture. In 2024, Dazed MENA launched — the first youth-focused fashion and culture magazine for the Middle East and North Africa.
When Hack called the magazine Dazed and Confused, he was describing how mass media made people feel. Three decades later, the name has become aspirational rather than critical — a state of creative openness, of not knowing what comes next and being thrilled by the uncertainty. The manifesto from the first issue still holds: when you have a voice, you have a responsibility. Dazed has been exercising both ever since.
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