Music, fashion and style have always been closely linked. The ability of clubs and discos to create trends has never faded even if we are living in more boring times lately.
For example, we are addicted to vinyl, to the sound it gives off and to the gestures that a DJ makes while playing them. Also because that period recalls a certain way of dressing and that acid house that echoed in the clubs.
In the 1940s and 1950s, vinyl became the dominant format, transforming the way people interacted with music. Its popularity exploded with innovations such as Columbia Records’ 1948 introduction of the 33 rpm Long Playing (LP) format, which could hold up to 22 minutes of music per side.
Vinyl records were much more than just audio media: they represented a complete sensory experience. Album covers, veritable canvases of generous dimensions (30×30 cm), became an art form in themselves. World-famous artists such as Andy Warhol, Salvador Dalí and Roger Dean created some of the most iconic covers in the history of music, transforming collectors' shelves into veritable art galleries.
For example, the cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Sticky Fingers” album, designed by Andy Warhol in 1971, featured a real working zipper on the jeans depicted, becoming one of the most daring and memorable designs in rock history. 
With these bases it was easy to get overwhelmed by House Music especially by the Acid genre. Acid house was the biggest youth revolution to hit Britain since the 1960s, and it left a radically changed cultural landscape for posterity. A quarter of a century after its birth, its impact on fashion, cinema and design seems enormous. It changed a lot, from the perception of the phrase “lads, we’re going out tonight” to the laws in force.
Many people remember how quickly acid house took hold, but also how quickly such a disruptive phenomenon began to be exploited commercially. It all started in late 1987, when the phenomenon went global and “warehouse parties” reached twenty thousand ravers by the summer of 1988. For a time, the weak became heroes, and love permeated the air.
Every generation has felt the need to identify with something, to feel a sense of belonging to something that their parents couldn't understand, but was it really inevitable that it would be sucked so brutally into the mainstream? 
Before all this, clubs were places to get drunk and nights ended in fights or sex. The music was less than secondary. But the devastating acid house-ecstasy combo reinvigorated the scene, setting the dance floors alight again. Ecstasy changed the way people looked, for fuck’s sake.
It’s quite funny but nobody knew how to dress at parties back then. People were thinking ‘what shoes should I wear? Should I wear a T-shirt?’. At the beginning of 1988, some people were going, for example to the Hacienda, still in suits with shoulder pads, then suddenly everyone was in tracksuits. Crazy stuff.
Initially, acid house was the result of the perfect combination of a new drug, a new sound and new technology; the collision of these three elements created a scene far more egalitarian than any other. Black and white, straight and gay, hooligans and doctors, students and street people: the background did not matter, we were all one big family under this new banner. An astonishing result.
The experience was not only radically different for those on the dance floor, but also for the DJs. When you were on the decks you usually had a crowd waiting to be entertained and it was the DJ’s job to unleash them, but with the advent of acid house it was all incredible: the DJ was face to face with two thousand people in euphoria, who felt like their heads were about to explode. The job was almost to keep them at bay, to tame these wild horses.
It was funny to see DJs becoming gods so quickly. Seriously, people started worshipping them just because they played records. Back then, there were very few who were really capable. In London, pioneering DJs like Maurice and Noel Watson at Delirium, Colin Faver and Eddie Evil Richards at Camden Palace, Jay Strongman and Mark Moore at Heaven and Dave Dorrell at RAW were the first to play house music, but it wasn’t until the arrival of ecstasy in late ’87 and early ’88 that things really started to get serious. A new generation of clubs like Danny Rampling’s Shoom, Nicky Holloway’s The Trip and Paul Oakenfold’s Spectrum formed the backbone of the capital’s scene, alongside Manchester’s Hacienda and Sheffield’s Jive Turkey, but for now it still felt like a well-kept secret.
It was so new and different from anything you'd ever experienced that you wanted to tell your friends, to take them down the rabbit hole, but nothing more... it was beautiful and you wanted to keep it secret and special.
How the fuck do you go from dark and smoky clubs to places where Boy George, Patrick Cox and all the others try to get in in a few weeks? Not even if you had all the money in the world you could build a brand like that these days.
The speed with which acid house exploded in the summer of ’88 surprised everyone. Initially it was word of mouth: those who experienced these parties in London, Manchester and Sheffield came away changed and felt a desperate need to evangelise their enlightening experience, causing the numbers to soar week after week. Devotees were now recognisable outside the clubs, on buses and in the streets, clearly betrayed by their way of dressing, their hair and, above all, by the sparkle in their eyes. Groups of friends now divided into those who had already had their mystical vision and those who had not yet converted, but the former quickly began to outnumber the latter.
There was no internet back then, and few people had access to cell phones, but organizers still managed to put on events of ten thousand or more people in fields and warehouses, all under the noses of the police. For many, the countercultural atmosphere of these raves was the real draw, rather than the drugs or the music.
All this brought with it a cargo of styles and clothes never seen before. Bold combinations and color combinations, sometimes, guided by hallucinogenic visions. Loose-fitting shirts, regular-fit jeans, Kangol bucket hats worn like crowns, brightly colored vests.
Oversized T-shirts with seemingly meaningless writing, a people who seemed orderly but who went wild as soon as the needle touched the vinyl.
Every now and then, with difficulty, at Blog don’t Lie we try to relive those moments. With a dress, a piece of music or a feeling.
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