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Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran – better known as the fearless artistic duo Fecal Matter – join us in this conversation following Earth Day to discuss their story behind their uncompromising style, values, and the power of self-expression.

“Even if there is all this animosity… the identity is so strong. It is so ingrained in what I do as a daily practice of self love and of expression that nothing can get in my way.” Hear this from Hannah and more in today's episode.

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Episode 4 of the i-Dentity podcast, we’re joined by fashion designer and subculture connoisseur Martine Rose, known around the world for her distinctly London vision. 

Martine discusses her extraordinary career, unconventional upbringing in South London, and why subculture and nightlife will always be a focus of her work. “The feeling that I get on the dance floor hasn't changed. It's completely electrifying. I still feel like a 14-year-old standing outside of Strawberry Sundae. It genuinely feels like that.”

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This week, we’re back with none other than James ‘Jeanette’ Main, the former Boombox host and East London nightlife legend. In the mid-2000s, he became the so-called ‘door girl’ for Richard Mortimer’s Sunday evening club night Boombox, known by the moniker of ‘Jeanette’. One of a handful of nights in the East End, it sparked a renaissance in queer London nightlife and marked a shift in the city’s creative centre, playing host to fashion designers, musicians, artists, art students — and indeed the occasional icon — who all had to pass Jeanette to get to the dancefloor.

As he puts it: “Subculture is doing what you can’t help not do, doing what is burning inside you, and finding others who have the same burning desire as you.”

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This week, legendary British artist Cosey Fanni Tutti joins us to discuss her lifelong commitment to counterculture, and five decades of breaking down boundaries through her subversive multidisciplinary art practice.

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i-Dentity podcast is back, and this series we’re dedicating each episode to an artist we feel truly personifies subculture. Kicking it off is seminal photographer and documenter, and long-time contributor to i-D, Liz Johnson Artur.

Listen to the first episode of our new series, where Liz discusses her aversion to being described as a ‘street’ or ‘club’ photographer, her ever-expanding Black Balloon Archive, and why legendary club-night PDA will always be one of her favourite nights in London history.

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We are closing out series two with the defining QTPOC subculture, ballroom.

'Serve’, ‘read’, or ‘throwing shade’ – whether first heard from the lips of queens on RuPaul’s Drag Race, or from sassy teens on TikTok, these terms have become part of English slang. But if you were to ask the lion’s share of people using them where they originally came from, we’d wager that most wouldn’t be able to tell you.

Its roots extend back as far as the late 1960s when, in response to racism they experienced in the white-dominated drag pageant scene, Black trans queens Crystal and Asia LaBeija made the bold decision to found a by-us-for-us space. Initially incubated in community halls and nightclubs across Harlem and Downtown Manhattan, ballroom has gone on to inform contemporary culture across the globe – not just nightlife, but also music, fashion, television and language itself. 

But conversations around appropriation and compensation have reached a flashpoint, with members of the scene calling for acknowledgement, fairer treatment and a deeper understanding of ballroom’s history.

In this week’s episode of i-Dentity, we join i-D’s senior fashion features editor Mahoro Seward, as they speak with Alex Mugler, a legendary voguer and choreographer, on the infrastructure of the ballroom community; Venus X delves into the story behind, GHE20G0TH1K, the club night she co-founded, while also unpacking the the exploitative nature of ballroom’s relationship with the culture mainstream; MikeQ, one of the eminent producers of vogue beats and globally esteemed DJ, explores the development of ballroom music and his experiences at the early GHE20G0TH1K’s parties; and Ricky Tucker, a New York-based writer, academic and ballroom superfan gives us the backstory on ballroom’s history and enduring capacity for liberation. 

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Shaved heads, wrap-around Oakleys, neon tracksuits, Alpha Industries bombers and Nike trainers. This is the story of how hardcore changed contemporary fashion for decades to come.

In this episode, Mahoro Seward, i-D’s Senior Fashion Features Editor, speaks to Ari Versluis, the photographer behind Exactitudes, the emblematic image series that first typified the gabber look and brought it to the world, and a former gabber himself. Lis Rutten, an Amsterdam-based casting director and former model, discusses for the gabber look has influenced fashion’s masculine ideal, while Henrike Naumann, a German artist who has explored gabber culture extensively in their work, unpacks its enduring legacy, both in the arts and on the ground.

Host: Mahoro Seward

Scripting: Mahoro Seward, Amelia Phillips

Research: Eleanor Gribbin

Research Assistance: Alexia Marmara

Art Direction: Calum Glenday and Aleksandra Talacha

Producer: Amelia Phillips

Audio Producer: Robin Leeburn

Production: Podmasters

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What is alté, you ask? Well, let’s start by saying this: it’s probably easier to describe it in terms of what it isn’t than what it is. In the years since the West African subcultural movement has come to global prominence – say, over the past five years or so – it’s often been erroneously tagged as a music genre, pioneered by the likes of Cruel Santino, Odunsi The Engine, Lady Donli and Grammy Award winner Tems. The thing is, though, there are as many interpretations of the alté sound as there are artists associated with it, with the influences you’ll pick up on in tracks by any of the above spanning R&B, hip-hop, synthpop, house… and then some. Indeed, alté is so much more than a sound, it’s a fully-fledged lifestyle – a way of being that’s expressed as much through style and art as through music, and that has come to define what Nigerian youth culture looks, sounds and feels like today. As Ashley Okoli says, it's "literally just vibes."

Increasingly, alté artists are ascending to global stages – see Tems' collaboration with Rihanna, performed at the 95th Academy Awards no less. Alté is no longer a traditional subculture, but a globally influential style and identity that everyone wants a piece of. In this episode, Mahoro Seward, i-D’s Senior Fashion Features Editor, speaks to Odunsi the Engine, a music producer who’s been at the forefront of the alté scene since its earliest days; Ashley Okoli, a stylist and creative director who’s collaborated with the likes of Mowalola and Victoria’s Secret, unpacks the central importance of fashion in the alté lifestyle, while Teezee, a musician, record label head and founder of rhizomatic cultural platform Native, discusses the ethos at alté’s heart and how it’s going global.

Host: Mahoro Seward

Scripting: Mahoro Seward, Amelia Phillips

Research: Niloufar Haidari

Research Assistance: Alexia Marmara

Art Direction: Calum Glenday and Aleksandra Talacha

Producer: Amelia Phillips

Audio Producer: Robin Leeburn

Production: Podmasters

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Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo: these are some of the biggest names in fashion today. Even for the novice fashionista, the very mention of their names conjures a vision of pushing fashion to its absolute limits. Their highly conceptual, avant-garde approach to design, combining the histories of Eastern and Western dress, emerged within Japan’s postwar counterculture. Almost half a century on from their first collections, their work has infiltrated all aspects of the fashion industry – from shop design, to publishing, exhibition-making and, of course, fashion design itself. 

This week Osman Ahmed speaks to esteemed fashion historian (and Director and Curator of The Fashion Institute of Technology) Valerie Steele, about the moment that Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo and Yohjo Yamamoto merged Japanese dress with Western fashion, and the ideas that would influence their early work; Fashion consultant and CEO of PR Consulting Paris Nathalie Ours, who started working for Yohji Yamamoto in the late 1980s, remembers what it was like seeing his work for the first time; and Tiffany Godoy, Head of Editorial Content at Vogue Japan takes us through these designers’ countercultural origins and their contributions to the industry at large.

Host: Osman Ahmed

Scripting: Osman Ahmed, Amelia Phillips

Research: Alexia Marmara

Art Direction: Calum Glenday and Aleksandra Talacha

Producer: Amelia Phillips

Audio Producer: Robin Leeburn

Production: Podmasters

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Skinny jeans, holey cardigans and eyes sticky with kohl that many vowed never to tout again after the financial crash of 2008 have all made it back to the forefront of fashion through the guise of its next iteration, ‘indie sleaze’. But do you really know Indie? Cast your mind back to the early 2000s — perhaps you’re too young to remember it the first time, which is why in this week’s episode of the second series of our i-Dentity podcast, we’re doing it for you. Join us as we delve back into the early days of Indie at the cusp of the new millennium, the death of Britpop, the free-wheelin’ hedonism of gig venues in student campus cities and their charity shop-clad crowds, and the inevitable transition of indie from an in-the-know sect of music and nightlife into a cultural phenomenon that birthed generation of new media, fashion, lifestyle, pop music and the dreaded ‘Hipster’ apocalypse.

In this episode, Osman Ahmed, Fashion Features Director of i-D, speaks to Alex Kapranos, the lead singer of Franz Ferdinand, one of the biggest bands of the noughties, and a veteran of the indie scene. Karley Sciortino, writer and filmmaker who landed in London’s indie scene in the early 2000s discusses what life in a London squat was really like — especially for young women at the time – and Erol Alkan, the man behind the legendary Monday night party Trash, at which Amy Winehouse, Kings of Leon and Peaches were regulars, discusses the rise and fall of indie in the noughties.

Host: Osman Ahmed

Scripting: Osman Ahmed, Amelia Phillips

Research: Niloufar Haidari, Bertie Brandes

Research Assistance: Alexia Marmara

Art Direction: Calum Glenday and Aleksandra Talacha

Producer: Amelia Phillips

Audio Producer: Robin Leeburn

Production: Podmasters

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i-Dentity is back. Welcome to Series Two.

In Series One, we covered the genesis of hip-hop style. But what about the bling? From the streets of hip-hop’s major cities to the lyrics and covers of its greatest albums, we trace the story of the genre’s love affair with jewellery. But Cuban chains and diamond grills didn’t just add to the look of hip-hop, its movers and shakers actively crafted the look and feel of jewels we see today. As we’ve seen in hip-hop fashion, the jewellery worn by rappers past and present is oft-criticised for its OTT opulence, but, like the story of the music itself, hip-hop’s drip tells its own tale of identity, social mobility and representation, filtered through its diamonds, platinum and gold.

Osman Ahmed, Fashion Features Director of i-D speaks to Vikki Tobak, author of Ice Cold. A Hip-Hop Jewelry History, about hip-hop jewellery’s roots and cultural influence, as well as its rise to the top from the streets of America’s hip-hop hotbeds. Lyle Lindgren, filmmaker and co-author of the book Mouth Full of Golds recounts the origins of the ultimate hip-hop statement piece – grills – while Gabby Pinhasov and his son Elan, grill-craftsmen to the likes of Pharrell, Marc Jacobs, A$AP Rocky and Kim Kardashian, take us back to the early 90s in New York City, where Gabby first began his trade.

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Host: Osman Ahmed

Scripting: Osman Ahmed, Eilidh Duffy, Amelia Phillips

Research: Niloufar Haidari

Research Assistance: Alexia Marmara

Art Direction: Calum Glenday and Aleksandra Talacha

Producer: Amelia Phillips

Audio Producer: Robin Leeburn

Production: Podmasters

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Once a hedonist’s hidden secret, Ibiza found itself in the spotlight in the late 80s when its unique Balearic sounds intersected with British club and drug culture in a moment of pure euphoria. This week, we’re exploring the roots of acid house and the ever-evolving nature of this small island with fashion consultant Lulu Kennedy, Manumission royalty Dawn Hindle, artistic director of Pacha, Francisco Ferrer and artist Jamie Holman.

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On the 9th of November 1989 the Berlin wall, which had split the German city in two for almost three long decades, was pulled down. Within a matter of hours the area that had once been the outer edges of both East and West Berlin was now the centre of a united city, complete with a set of abandoned buildings ready to be taken over by Berlin’s youth. A new sound was incubated in these spaces, influenced by techno records imported from Detroit, ushering in a new type of club culture within the city. And so Berlin’s now-legendary techno scene was born.

In this episode Osman Ahmed and Mahoro Seward speak to techno pioneer Marcel Dettmann on the nascent scene in the 1990s, and the duo behind GmbH, Benjamin Huseby and Serhat Işık, about how the times have changed, as well as Berlin’s infamous look. Photographer Spyros Rennt shares why he moved to the city while DJs LSDXOXO and SPFDJ explain how the scene is changing today.

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Aries, Stüssy, Palace and Supreme. These are just a few of the biggest brands in fashion right now and they all have their roots in the countercultural sport of skateboarding. Skating and the culture around it has never been bigger, officially hitting the mainstream when it became an Olympic sport at the 2021 Tokyo Games, but how has it kept its edge, the authenticity which is so important to its place within the cultural lexicon of today?

In this episode, Osman Ahmed, Fashion Features Director at i-D speaks to Tyshawn Jones, pro-skater and two-time Thrasher skateboarder of the year as well known for his death-defying feats on the board as his lucrative modelling career. Sofia Prantera, founder of Aries, remembers the early days of the London skate scene and making it up as they went along and William Strobeck, legendary skate filmmaker reflects on the sport’s roots. Cultural commentator Naomi Accardi explains the history of the sport and the turning point in the early 2010s. Dede Lovelace, star of ‘Skate Kitchen’ and HBO series ‘Betty’ shares her views on the importance of community in skateboarding, while Guillaume ‘Gee’ Schmidt, co-founder of Patta, reflects on the importance of authenticity and community in streetwear.

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