Blitz: The Club that Shaped the 80s ★★★★

Cramped, chaotic and brimming with eyeliner sharper than the politics of the day, the Blitz Club became a catwalk, an art school, a laboratory for outrageous self-creation, and a place where viperish tongues could be honed. Out went punk’s angry nihilism. In came glamour, drama and clothes so sculptural they deserved planning permission.

All of this might have remained niche had the music itself not been so damn good.

With Steve Strange policing the door with an iron fist in a sequinned glove and Rusty Egan shaping the soundtrack, the Covent Garden night became a hub for restless imagination. It birthed the New Romantics, launched Boy George and Spandau Ballet, inspired Sade, and proved that sometimes all it takes to spark a movement is a dance floor, a dressing-up box and absolute conviction. (Strange and Egan even went on to form Visage, who even bothered the charts once or twice.)

The Design Museum’s Blitz exhibition offers a dive into the nightclub that helped define early-80s British pop culture. Not merely a forum for misty-eyed nostalgia, it presents the club as a stage for self-invention. Fashion students, artists and soon-to-be pop stars swapped punk’s scruff for spectacle, gender play and unabashed theatricality. As captured here, even Siouxsie Sioux and Debbie Harry graced the club on occasion.

More than 250 objects — from Stephen Jones millinery to fanzines, flyers and club-night photographs — tell the story, and it’s in these garments and images that the exhibition truly emerges from the dry ice. Period soundscapes and graphic flourishes add atmosphere without overwhelming the detail.

A particularly thrilling installation allows visitors to imagine themselves inside the club, complete with a playlist curated by Egan and footage from Spandau Ballet’s first ever gig.

Aficionados of the era will be tickled by the imagined scenarios evoked — talons at dawn when Strange is chosen for Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes video while Boy George contemplates his acrylic dreadlocks — while other elements register as more bittersweet. The looks were spectacular; the hostility many faced en route to their sanctuary was not.

If the wider context — queerness, politics, the slick march from underground scene to mainstream aesthetic — is only lightly sketched, the exhibition still succeeds as a vivid, affectionate snapshot of creative rebellion. It reminds us that sometimes all you need to spark a cultural earthquake is imagination, attitude, a willingness to turn getting dressed into an art form … and an ear for a bloody good tune.