This story originally appeared in i-D’s The Timeless Issue, no. 371, Spring 2023. Order your copy here.
What exactly is Buffalo? For some, it was a pseudo-commercial collective of image-makers. For others, it was a quintessential mid-80s London look: MA-1 bomber, white shirt, Levi’s 501s, heavyweight black boots, pork pie hat. For many, it is the cheeky voice of Neneh Cherry’s 1988 hit, “Buffalo Stance”. Ultimately, however, Buffalo wasn’t really about clothes; it was an attitude. Just as Neneh crooned that it was “looking good, hanging with the wild bunch”, Buffalo is remembered for its community spirit and pin-sharp swagger. You can’t really define it because it was more than just one thing: fashion, imagery, music, nightlife, a city at a particular moment in time. It’s the story of how a London subculture came to influence generations around the world, mapping out a blueprint for where we are now.
The godfather of Buffalo – a loose-knit clique that included photographers Mark Lebon and Jamie Morgan, the late stylists Judy Blame and Barry Kamen, a young Neneh Cherry and Naomi Campbell – was the late stylist Ray Petri. Ray would streetcast models of all races (long before that was a thing) and spritz the set with cologne, even if it did nothing for the picture – see, it’s all about the attitude – making the models feel more confident, stand taller. He dressed the world in flight jackets, and gave young urban men a strong sartorial voice, putting them in high-low mixtures of formal tailoring and athletic sportswear, vintage pieces and underwear. Think Milanese shirts, American jeans and Jamaican music. He even put them in skirts long before that was de rigueur, and his influence could be felt in the look of the 80s and 90s: its advertising, fashion shows, magazine editorials, and dancefloors.
Ray described Buffalo, which took its name from a label Ray found on a bouncer’s jacket in Paris as well as the Bob Marley song, simply as “Tougher Than The Rest”: a tag he first used to describe the attitude and dress code of a bunch of his Parisian friends in the early 80s, before redefining and exporting it back across the Channel and into the pages of the new breed of magazines, such as i-D and The Face.
“It’s the perfect foundation for what we’re doing today,” says i-D’s current Editor-in-Chief Alastair McKimm, who styled this story and first fell in love with Buffalo at the start of his career at this very magazine. “I think something that still resonates with me is this melting pot, a real mix of streetwear, sportswear, and high fashion, with something very slick and clean and graphic. You feel like you’re in a city when you look at Ray’s work, with this crossover of race and class. You can just feel these young people being thrown into one place together.”
Though boys in skirts and mixed-race models may seem like the norm now, it cannot be overstated how radical that was back then. “Buffalo was really a set of social and political priorities expressed through styling and photography,” explains writer and historian Kasia Maciejowska, who notes that styling was in its infancy then, only just beginning to shape much of the imagery seen in culture. In fact, the story of Buffalo is the story of styling itself, because it emerged in the age when fashion editors started to be recognised as the behind- the-scenes architects of fashion imagery. Buffalo, in particular, signalled the end of the Designer Decade: it encouraged kids to wear clothes with an attitude, not just an eye-watering price tag, and to reflect what people were actually wearing, not just what was happening on the catwalk. “It went on to shape fashion, and why we’re still talking about it today, is that it was really what we’d call today intersectional,” Kasia continues. “Although that word wasn’t really around then, but it layered different issues: queer aesthetics, racial aesthetics and London street style.”
In many ways, right now feels like a mirror to back then: economic decline, extreme politics, deprivation, neo-colonial wars, strikes, pandemics, Conservative government, corruption… Sound familiar? If you had any doubt, you need only look to the runways of today’s designers, young and old. Giant shoulders and trailing skirts, throngs of Dietrich feathers and hysteric logomania, all of which are being snapped up by a fast-growing ultra-wealthy consumer, many of whose own bodies are mimicking the extremities of the time: hyper-curved figures with caricatured faces. Is it 1983 or 2023?
So, yeah, Buffalo stills feel fresh. An MA-1 bomber, a pair of loose-fitting Levi’s belted tight at the hip, heavyweight German paratrooper boots, and a Stetson pork pie hat, feel like a welcome riposte from all that jazz and excess. It feels timeless, classic, and considered. And perhaps most importantly, totally relevant to a younger generation who are defining their style on their own terms, by trawling thrift shops (or Depop) to artfully curate their look, just as carefully considered as Ray’s boys in antique military medals and black jackets.
You can see why Ray and his gang loved it back then, and three decades later, it’s stood the test of time. “Buffalo always meant classic,” Neneh Cherry remembered. “None of us were into here-today-gone-tomorrow fashion, which is why we gravitated towards each other.” Indeed: Buffalo is forever.
Credits
Photography Dan Jackson
Fashion Alastair McKimm
Hair Jonathan De Francesco at Streeters
Make-up Emi Kaneko at Bryant Artists using Armani Beauty
Nail technician Mayumi Abuku at Susan Price NYC using Chanel Le Vernis
Digital technician Jonathan Pivovar
Photography assistance Conor Ralph and Jeremy Gould
Fashion assistance Madison Matusich and Jermaine Daley
Hair assistance Miller Brackett
Make-up assistance Amelia Berger
Casting director Samuel Ellis Scheinman for DMCASTING
Models Selena Forrest at Next and Robert E. Forrest III