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.
