A salute to the Queen of Paisley, Pam Hogg, the ultimate punk and party girl.
Pam Hogg’s name will be familiar to anyone who enjoys reading about other people’s parties. A nightlife personality and a party girl with trademark highlighter-yellow hair, she might be photographed DJing at a store launch or enjoying a passion fruit martini and a joke with Alice Dellal or Nick Grimshaw.
But while she loved a night out, Hogg was principally a fashion designer, and one whose brilliance was never fully realised commercially. By the time she died in November 2025, she had been in fashion for more than four decades. She dressed A-listers and produced shows in London and Paris. But she had no financial backer and mostly made her clothes by hand, working until her fingers literally bled. A collection in 2010 made a thing of this – it featured a wedding dress covered in Hogg’s blood.
So why did a designer of Hogg’s talent not flourish into a global brand, like her friend Vivienne Westwood? Was it through neglect by the wider industry? Or somewhat by design?
Hogg had an address book laden with stars. She was friends with supermodels (Kate Moss), writers (Irvine Welsh), artists (Sarah Lucas, Sue Webster) and musicians (Siouxsie Sioux, Shirley Manson, Bobby Gillespie), but she was famously private, only letting a few people into her life outside of parties, and declining to reveal her age. This continued until her death, when the Royal College of Art posted the degree show catalogue which gave her birth year as 1951. No one outside her immediate circle had known she was in her mid-70s.
Born in Paisley, the daughter of a gardener and telephonist, Hogg studied textiles at the Glasgow School of Art. ‘I was quite envious of her,’ says classmate Liz Munro. ‘Even at that age, you could see her talent.’ Hogg won the Newbery Medal when she graduated in 1976, beating students from all disciplines to win the highest honour.
When she moved to London for her MA, Hogg quickly found her people. At Blitz, the short-lived club night opened by Steve Strange in 1979, she was embraced for her imaginative outfits that she made in order to get in to a club where OTT was the aim and people wore Halloween-level makeup, XXXL frills and style sourced from the dress-up rail of charity shops. Hogg’s ensembles were so admired that she started getting orders from other club-goers. Although Hogg studied textiles at the RCA, she moved into fashion after these clubland experiments and, self-taught and self-funded, launched her label in 1981, at a time when fashion in London was fuelled by club culture. Hogg was part of a scene of other designers with a similar outlook and backstory – John Galliano, BodyMap’s David Holah and Stevie Stewart, Katharine Hamnett, Stephen Jones. Princess Julia, a fellow clubland stalwart, met Hogg around 1980. She remembers Hogg’s focus. ‘Her notoriety went before her, really. Almost the moment she arrived, she became iconic.’
S’Express founder Mark Moore met Hogg around this time too. ‘It was the first New Order gig in London,’ he says. ‘I had a spare ticket, and I thought I’d give it to someone. So I looked around, outside the gig. It was sold out, and people were trying to get in. I just saw this vision, she looked amazing.’ A few days later, he was doing the weekly shop. ‘Suddenly, this girl came bounding up to me, singing Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart. And this time we exchanged numbers. I just realised that was that: our fates were sealed together.’ They were friends until Hogg died.
Since her death, Hogg has been celebrated as the ultimate punk, someone who refused to bend to society’s norms, who spurned the mundane and the conventional. But there were other sides to her that complicated that image.
She was widely beloved by her friends – and, against the tyrannical fashion grain, a nice person. ‘She was fiercely protective,’ says artist and filmmaker Josh Quinton, who became friends with Hogg in the early 2010s. ‘She would always want to know if my boyfriend, or whoever I was with, was nice.’
Memorable meet-cutes like Moore’s abound in Hogg’s world. Martin Deeson, who was Loaded ’s starboy in the 90s, met her when she came into the office to visit a mutual friend one morning. Hogg, who was living in King’s Cross, proceeded to tell all about the previous night, when she got picked up by the police for soliciting. Convincing the officer that she could prove she was, in fact, a fashion designer, she took them to her flat. She was then arrested for possession of a firearm and preventing a lawful and decent burial of a corpse. Deeson asked her how on earth that happened. Hogg replied: ‘Well, on the wall I’ve got an artwork that’s got a handgun in it that I haven’t got a licence for.’ And what about the dead body? ‘Years ago I bought a Catholic saint in a glass coffin.’
Hanna Hanra, the creative director of Beat magazine, became firm friends with Hogg in the early 2000s, by which time the designer had become a recognisable name. She remembers the date they met: 29 April, 2004. ‘There was a Dazed party in this big house just off Hyde Park Corner,’ she recalls. ‘I went to the toilet with Gareth Pugh and we were singing Pump Up the Jam. Björk popped out of the middle cubicle and did the chorus… I stole a bottle of vodka and I was so, so drunk. I was on the way out and Pam was coming in… I went over to her, and I said, “You’re Pam Hogg.” She went, “I am, my wee baby. Come to my party.”’
During the 80s, Hogg’s star rose swiftly. Her clothes were worn by bands like Deee-Lite, and they were on covers of The Face and i-D. She had a stall at the legendary Hyper Hyper in Kensington and then her own shop on Newburgh Street in Soho. Her clothes were sold in department stores like Bloomingdale’s, Harrods and Harvey Nichols, and they were popular in Japan. Colourful with strong prints and bodycon silhouettes, her designs suited a demographic who wanted clothes to stand out. The catsuit became a signature. Her first fashion show was in 1985, she met Princess Diana in 1989 and she was on Wogan a year later. But then things came to an abrupt stop, just as her fashion reputation was being sealed. She closed her shop in 1991.
Part of this was the era. Like a lot of independent designers, Hogg was stymied by the wider change that came with the post-Big Bang wave of London’s gentrification. For 19 years, she lived and worked in the Stanley Building just next to King’s Cross station, which has now, in a perfect display of symbolism, been redeveloped into luxury apartments. But the end of Hogg’s fashion label wasn’t just a question of rising rents. Her friends, like Mark Moore, sensed that she wanted a change – she wanted to be a musician.
In 1993, she was offered a chance to tour with Blondie – Doll, her band, was formed in three days, and played a Nick Cave-inflected brand of punk rock. She continued with music for more than a decade, also opening for The Raincoats, and competing with Britpop-ers like Gene and Super Furry Animals for gigs at The Monarch in Camden. Images of her on stage that year, with highlighter hair, purple tie and PVC trousers, show her looking the part.
Hogg returned to fashion in 2009, with her London Fashion Week show, Galaxy Warriors, at the Science Museum. Liberty Ross and Daisy Lowe modelled, and the show received a standing ovation. It looked like Hogg was very much back. If, the first time around, Hogg’s designs were bodycon and sexy, Hogg 2.0 was still smoking hot, but she was leaning into her imagination and exploring shape, colour and texture. The shows were an explosion of PVC, chiffon and metallics. References to Bowie, pearly queens and anarchy swirled happily together.
Behind the scenes, however, it wasn’t quite as rosy – without support or a backer, finances were tight, and she couldn’t take her business to the next level, in the way Westwood had when she received investment in the 90s. The artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster helped finance a studio in Shoreditch. ‘There were times when she’d be doing the fashion show, and the deadline was looming, and she’d run out of money,’ says Moore. And of course, there was the usual backstage chaos. Ross – who was walking the show for free – had to stand about naked backstage because Hogg still wasn’t happy with her creation. It was a classic case of Hogg’s creativity among chaos. None of this is unique to Hogg, of course. Fashion design is a pressured business where exploited interns and drug abuse fuel the rumour mill. Neither of these was charged at Hogg, but her all-nighters and obsessive working – practically a norm for catwalk designers in the run-up to a show – were framed in a different way. With her history of music and rock’n’roll friends, it was yet more evidence of Hogg as an outsider, a punk who didn’t follow rules. ‘She had that very punk attitude,’ says Green. ‘You like me for what I do, and if you don’t, fuck off.’
But Hogg wasn’t just an ‘outsider rebel’, in fact that label might have frustrated her. She told Moore that the time when she had the shop was one she remembered fondly because she was able to get taxis and not worry about the expense. ‘She definitely wanted success – it wasn’t like she was so punk that she didn’t,’ says Moore.
Hogg’s shows became a fixture in the years following her comeback, but she didn’t quite fit into the new landscape of London Fashion Week, which was becoming increasingly corporate. Designers like Roksanda Ilinčić, Erdem and Jonathan Saunders – who went on to dress politicians – jarred against Hogg’s club-influenced creativity. Collections featured studs, PVC and see-through catsuits with strategically placed panels.
She was partly blocked from growing her brand because she didn’t fit into the boxes that brought investment. As someone who had already had a career, she wasn’t eligible for the support being offered to young designers (like ‘New Gen’), but she also didn’t have the backing that an established brand might enjoy. It was a case of falling between two stalls. This lack of support perhaps fed a degree of ire towards the British Fashion Council, the body that runs fashion week. ‘She would often bump into members of the BFC, and they’d be like, “Oh, Pam, you’re such a legend. You’re so amazing.” And then she’d be like “Well, why don’t you help me then?”’ says Moore. It might have been that an establishment organisation like the BFC (one partially funded by the government) distanced itself because working with Hogg wasn’t always easy.
It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that in 2011 she moved her show to Paris, when On|Off, an organisation that helps independent brands, offered the help she felt she was being denied. ‘Since my return to fashion three years ago [On|Off] have been giving me amazing support – allowing me to present my collection each season with the aim of helping me build a successful business in fashion again,’ Hogg told Vogue at the time. ‘Hopefully one day I’ll be recognised and supported by the British Fashion Council, and will come back to London.’
Hogg’s shows continued in the noughties, and there were triumphs and controversies. But, beyond the financial stresses, the experience each season took it out of Hogg, who sewed every item by hand, often working until the small hours. ‘She would knock herself out after every show,’ says Moore. ‘She would collapse, literally collapse.’ Hogg would go to bed for weeks after a show, ill from the stress.
Quinton modelled in Hogg’s shows from Courage onwards. He says the regular models bonded over their experience. ‘Pam’s world definitely had its own etiquette and attitude,’ he explains. ‘The main rule was to stay out of Pam’s way pre-show. She was often running on empty and stressed, having gone five or six days without sleep to finish the collection. She’d be in no mood to suffer fools.’ Part of this was the fact that Hogg worked solo, ‘so if something wasn’t right, she could get pretty passionate backstage.’ It was a temporary state. ‘Afterwards, we’d all go out for Champagne, she’d be fine.’
She continued to do shows until 2020. Will There Be A Morning / Will There Be A Mourning, her SS20 show, focused on climate change. It included a model holding a sign reading ‘There are no human rights on a dead planet’ and a finale with coffins. After this, she still produced work, but moved towards art and also activism. Hogg’s last collection, Of Gods and Monsters, in 2024, was inspired by imbalances in power and used only upcycled fabrics. ‘It’s an unfair and imbalanced world,’ she told Keyi magazine. ‘There is no time like the present to correct this… please use your voice.’
Amid these tales, personas and counterpersonas, the real Hogg will perhaps always remain elusive, slipping off somewhere behind the exhalation of a basement party’s smoke machine. If there was one event that got close to capturing her fully in the public eye, perhaps it was the commission she accepted to design Lady Mary Charteris’ wedding dress in 2012. Pam the rebel was certainly in evidence. The final design was far from staid, but Charteris remembers the initial one ‘basically just had panels covering the nipples.’ Hogg had initially told Charteris that it would take six weeks to make; it ended up taking six months.
Despite this, Hogg was still a woman who strived for success. A dress design for a high-society wedding was not her most punk statement, but the paparazzi photos of the day capture Hogg the perfectionist. Even as Charteris was being walked to the church by her father, Hogg hovered behind her, cradling the dress’s train and still, still, making alterations.
