The story begins in a bathtub. In 1980, Terry Jones and his wife Tricia were sharing their customary tandem bath in their West Hampstead home — "the bathroom was the boardroom," Jones would later say — when Tricia looked at him and said, "That's the one: i-D." Jones had spent three years searching for a name for the street-style magazine he'd been dreaming of since leaving his post as art director of British Vogue in 1977. He'd tried to pitch the concept to Italian publisher Flavio Lucini, who told him there'd be no commercial interest. So Jones funded it himself. In August 1980, with Tricia and Blitz kid Perry Haines as co-editors and photographer James Palmer cruising London in a VW camper van, the first issue of i-D hit the streets — hand-stapled, typed on an IBM golfball typewriter, and sold in King's Road fashion shops and record stores like Rough Trade.
The name worked on every level: Jones's design studio was called Instant Design, the magazine was about the identity beneath the clothes, and the logo — turned sideways — formed a winking smiley face that Jones has always claimed as the first emoticon, three years before anyone else. The magazine's signature cover convention, in which every subject has one eye closed or covered, became one of the most recognizable visual trademarks in publishing.
What i-D did was revolutionary: it documented what people actually wore on the street rather than what designers told them to wear. The "Straight Up" photo series — full-body portraits of punks, new wavers, and club kids against blank walls — essentially invented street-style photography as a genre. Over the decades, the magazine launched the careers of photographers Nick Knight, Wolfgang Tillmans, Juergen Teller, and Ellen von Unwerth, and nurtured young journalists including Edward Enninful and Dylan Jones. Madonna received her first magazine cover from i-D. So did Sade.
In 2012, Vice Media acquired the publication, and i-D expanded its digital presence considerably while maintaining its print edition. The magazine that started as a punk fanzine about self-expression has become one of the most influential fashion and culture publications in the world — proof that Terry Jones was right all along, and Flavio Lucini was wrong.
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